new humminbird tech - on water

[chocolatemoose]

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Howdy all!
Thought id just give some feedback from what i took away yesterday at the Humminbird/Minnkota on water demo day at Lake Malwala in Nsw.

Cracking day firstly weather was amazing!

This event was put on by the lads at BLA to showcase the new Helix G3 and Solix G2 units that both feature the new Mega imaging plus and dual spectrum CHIRP low Q transducer . a few other software tweeks and new hardware.
and it also allowed for some fun with not new, but still cool. minnkota range, Ultrex in perticular.

Humminbird have been class leasders in high frequency sonar since its inception. thats an easy one. so where they could go with mega imaging was going to be interesting to see. what they delivered however feels like they have just reinvented it again.
So!
Range.. the new Mega plus can happily pump out to 200ft either side of the boat, in as little as 2 feet of water. it also does this without any dead zone beneith the boat and insane quality. in lower frequency "800 or 455 chirped" it will double that range "at the loss of quality however"

The richness of the image was impressive too with no distortion from noisy transducers.
One nice little thing that can be done is turn off the side imaging sonar pulses when looking at down imaging, this increases the ping rate and ups the quality

Big to me however was 2d improvements.
Humminbird has played 2nd fiddle to Garmin, raymarine, simrad furuno and lowrance when it came to 2d sonar, that has changed a lot "some way to go" but in the shallow water market its looking very good.
Running a low q "thats a whole other story" full chirp spectrum transducer (now called dual spectrum) its able to produce some very very very crisp images in 3 preset frequency ranges and beam angles.


Some other positive changes come in hardware

the 7 " helix G3 now features mega imaging "not plus... but at least mega.. and its price point is healthy"
a new helix 8g3 "with mega plus.. for only a few dollars more than the 7 whilst also padding out the screen size"
a new Helix 9 g3 with a smaller physical body. so better screen to body ratio. also price pointed neatly

Solix systems now feature wifi "for future use"

a new website and app are also coming shortly

here are some photos and screenshots from the day

- Moose

[tunaticer]

I'm not overly impressed with the 11 to 15 foot images......the deeper water images are quite good though.

[ranmar850]

So the position of the zoom panel is given by the cursor location, as visible at bottom (or top?) of screen? Pretty impressive. Being able to see out clearly to 100ft each side in only 11 ft of water is more than impressive. My Axiom will only look out to whatever range you have selected? Still playing with that aspect of it.

[chocolatemoose]

Here is a shallow water shot.
Attachment 119034