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.
