Upgrade transducer or buy new sonar?

[ghayward]

Hi Guys, looking for some direction on my sonar setup.

I have a Garmin 740s that came with a $80 tranducer. I have seen screen shots from many peoples fishfinders that clearly mark the fish, mine does not. So the question is should I upgrade the transducer at a cost of $900? The Garmin unit will power a 1kw transducer. Or, should I buy a stand alone fishfinder that has CHIRP. I would keep the Garmin for radar and chartplotting.

Thanks for any advice

[onwhiskeycreek]

We went through the same dilemma last year, when we needed to add NEMA 2000 capability to our boats. When we purchased our boat it was in the middle of a refit and had a new Garmin 3210 with radar, and GSD 22. So when we wanted to add fuel flow sensors we purchased a 547XS thinking it would be a good fit with the existing electronics. The good part was a improvement in mapping with the new Vision Card, with bath lines, and an update rate ten times faster for the GPS. Then came the disaster with the new sonar. It came with the cheap transducer that had very disappointing results. We also purchased a chirp transducer with even worse results. We swap the 547 between our two boats one on each side of the Island. The Jet boat has a Hummingbird unit in it with a Navionics card and just a plain Jane transducer which has a pretty good return considering the price. So we are comparing the new sonar against the old GSD 22 and the Hummingbird Unit. The new Garmin Sonar was a total waste of money we wish we would have just added a Lowarance unit. Had a chance the summer to get a trip on one of the boats in Robbo's fleet that was running Lowarance electronics and was impressed with the sonar. The only thing worse than the new Garmin Sonar is the customer support. Thinking that I just need to dial it in I gave support a call. When we related how our screen shots looked and were totally dismal compared to the other units and there advertisement screen shots. They had no explanation of how to try and dial it in. We knew there were fish as they were marked on the other units and not on the 547. The Garmin tech asked about the depth of the bottom and the fish we told him that we were in 125' and had fish from 80' down. They then told us that was the problem the screen shot they advertise were for less than 40 feet, the only thing I could think of was you got to be kidding me. So if we did it again we would definitely switch to Lowarence, they both use the same transducers but with different results.

Gary