Film at 11:00

Borrowing Mr. Well's time machine, I roar on back to the year 2003. These were heady times. The Installer put in all of the gear you see below into a new Pursuit. It included the new Raymarine HDFI sounder module which won the "Best in Show" NMEA award that year. The RL80  state of the art chart plotter and radar, and a shiny new autopilot. It has all been working very well ever since for lo all of these years, which I think is an excellent testimonial for any piece of marine gear that lives in a salt water environment. The boat is used all of the time, and the original motors were worn out. They have been recently replaced with new twin Yamaha 225hp 4 stroke engines which have a Command Link interface making NMEA 2000 data collection possible.

So as good as the gear has been, it's time for new toys, and on the list is a broadband chirping sounder system. At this point in time, there are only two available options, and the owner already has some Garmin gear, and is familiar with it. So out goes the old, and in with the new consisting of a Garmin 7215 touch screen based system with a GMR 24 radar, the new GSD 26 sounder module, and an Airmar M265LH broadband transducer. Since this is a story too big to be told at one time on the small screen, I'm going to bust it into four parts over the next week or so.

We are going to follow the gutting of the old, the installation of the new, the tribulations encountered along the way, and there are some.

And yes, we are all going to learn about the new GSD 26. The first thing I noticed is it's much larger than the pictures lead me to believe, as you can see in the photo below next to the GSD 22. That's my less than dainty hand model Aaron Gallaway from West Marine holding the unit up. By the way, it's actually resting on the installed GPS below it. The weight of the unit is also significant. I'm not grumping about these two observations, they are what they are. I know there is some very serious number crunching going on inside of this box. We're going to explore how this gear really works to find fish, and how to select the right chirping transducer for your boat. Getting tangible info has been tough to get, but I am slowly building a real world picture for you, and myself. Pester, pester, pester is my modus operandi. 

I'm going to do a segment on how to do a console overlay panel, and I will for the very first time disclose my top secret technique to make the template. Pssst, it's rust, don't tell anyone.

And lastly we will spend a day on the water playing with the gear in several locations to see how well it all works. I will get some real world screen shots to look at. I'm burning the keyboard up, so there won't be long gaps between my late night verbal soirees.