Ouch. So you stuck it in a pc and went caput? Rats. I really wanted to back it
up.

After using it -- I was rather impressed with the "guide me" feature. The "fish
eye" view was "fun" but caused me more grief than help (tried to use it in a
shallow area to stay in the deeper parts) -- while it looks like a forward
looking sonar, it's not -- so it's just "neat" -- perhaps I was a fisherman; it
would be helpful.
The boat - eye view was neat too; but just didn't see hte help in that.

The picture overlay was nice especially at night to "see" what was on land, but
it really slowed down the updates.

We had 3 issues with it --
1) It shut off on us twice for seemingly no reason
2) sonar would get "stuck" power cycling the unit 'fixed it' -- as did going
into sonar setup and changing from auto-select to one or another (50/200) and
back to auto
3) the auto-guidance seemed to 'fail' when there was clearly a route to the
destination -- I suspect it's only good for short distances, not a hundred
miles.

all in all -- the 545s performed well -- I miss a few features from my 498
("find a resturant that's close") the sonar seems to respond faster than the
498 did.

The maiden voyage for the radar is another story -- one I'll contact furuno
about 1st....

-josh



On Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:37:33 GMT, Short Wave Sportfishing
wrote:

On Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:48:25 -0700, Josh Assing
wrote:

I'm wondering how true that is?

Very true - ask me how I know? :)

Does anyone know if I can make an image (sector
for sector) of the SD card to back it up "just in case" or if putting in a pc
will screw it up?

I wouldn't try it - I'm not a Garmin guy, but I know some who have
your system and have - crash/wipe/burn and Garmin was entirely in
their rights to refuse a new update or card - it's in the users
agreement.

Navionics has the same deal, although it will allow route/waypoint
write. As I understand it, Garmin feels that allowing the write point
will compromise the software and allow for hacking. Then I heard that
the real reason is that the card is so packed full of information,
that there isn't any room for additional data which, as in most
computer things, means that something is overwritten or lost.

Both sound equally plausiable to me.

By the way, did you ever find the solution to your RCM/ZDA problem?
I'd really like to know what it was.