Side imaging??

Unless youre making a living at fishing or you have money to burn, I would spend my money on something else. SI is great, but my opinion is that you have to use it and tinker with it for a while before you really know how to use it. Again, just my opinion!

I will echo what Sproguy said. I just got mine and have taken it out to Lake Maumelle three times now. I will confess that I read the entire book (yes all 150+ pages) while I waited on my new boat. The SI works like a charm and it isnt that hard to use. I found that all you have to do is turn it on and cruise around. The key to me is the ability to move the cursor over onto the feature you want to keep track of and mark it on your GPS. The other thing to remember is that the black line in the middle is the depth, so if you watch the thickness of the line, you can watch for depth changes right under the boat and then watch for changes out from the boat. I have been really impressed with the ability of the unit to define humps in deep water and even pick up the marker buoy and anchor line. The other benefit that I didnt expect is the units ability to pick up weedbeds and the contours in shallow water.Well, that is my two cents worth. I am planning to take it out to Dardanelle this weekend to take a look at some of the drops that have been productive in the past. John

Ok, I agree and disagree. I have a Cougar with a teleflex sonar and Humminbird 595 at the driver stastion, a matrix (through hul) and the SI on the troll motor. I use all of them. I fish mainly shallow (20 feet or less) lakes. The SI works best in deeper water. Really doesnt do any good in 5 feet.. BUT!!!!!!!!!! whil I am fishig the bank, the SI shows up stuff to the deep side. one warning, the 595 is usless for fish finding an sonar in shallow water. A 20 deg beam is to narrow. I use the 595 to navigate, the teleflex to watch the depth, the SI for SI, and the matrix dual beam to watch the bottom. And yes I fish while all this is happening. MKG

I have used one for 2 years now and I love it. As far as learning to use it, it does take a little practice to understand what you are looking at. The best trick I can tell you is to zoom in from its default setting of (I think) 120ft to each side down to where it is only showing maybe 70ft on each side. This makes the objects appear much larger so you can actually tell what you are looking at. Otherwise a large stump looks like a tiny dot on the screen and you wont pay any attention to it. If you fish mostly shallow, say 6ft or less, it wont help you a whole lot. If you fish on some deeper structure if definitely helps out. One of the best uses I found for it was following a creek channel. With a normal sonar its hard to follow one since when the bottom starts rising on your screen you dont know which way the creek turned. If you guess wrong you get way off of the creek channel and lose your place. With the side imager you can just drive along the edge of the channel and see a complete picture of it and when it turns you can see exactly where its going and easily follow it and see it the whole time. If theres any sunken brush piles anywhere along the way you can move the cursor over to them on the screen, mark a waypoint on them, and go back and fish them later after youve surveyed a large area. Another cool thing is when the fish are feeding on schooling shad. You can just idle through an area and spot schools of bait way out to the side of your boat. Its quick to determine if there is bait in the area. You cant do that with normal sonar, at least not in relatively shallow water.