Lowrance Free "Enhanced Lake Maps" - How do you use them?

[Mr.T]

Assuming one owns a compatible Lowrance or Eagle unit, how do you go about installing the free enhanced lake maps that Lowrance offers?

I suspect there's more to it than just copying the download file to a memory card and inserting it into the unit. Do you have to buy additional software?

[catfishcentral]

Marty,

I just recently bought a Lowance gps unit and I have downloaded all those free lowance free maps for my area. I'll tell you there are very nice and accurate. I thought about buying their hotspots map card for 100.00 but most of my lakes that I fish are the free maps that you can download off the internet. What you do need in order to download the free maps is a SD card and a card reader. You plug in the sd card into the card reader then plug the card reader into the computer. Then you just download your preferred maps onto the sd card and your good to go. The card reader you can find at best buy for around 25 dollars and the SD cards depends on how much memory you want. I think a 128mb card is only like 20 dollars so between the two you spend about 45 to 50 bucks. My gps unit is portable and will be using it in the car and hunting also. I just ended up buying the MapCreate 6.0 software for 99.00. It has a sd card a sd card reader and a six CD set of all the US. It's really nice and very simple to use. You can custom make maps for just your own area and you need so not to use a ton of memory on your sd card. The free enchanced lakes maps work very nice and have been very accurate. There's a creek channel in my lake that's less that twenty feet wide in a bunch of submerged timber and that gps units with those maps keeps me right in the channel. Anyway if you don't want the map create software your looking at 45 to 50 dollars for a card and card reader, or just buy the mapcreate software for a 100 and get all the maps you need. It probably wouldn't do that much good to buy the mapcreate if your gps unit is just on your boat where it couldn't be used anywhere else

[Mr.T]

Thanks for the reply, Chris -- guess I should have followed up my own post a while ago, as I figured out that indeed, all you need is a memory card and the free map. Used the unit one time so far on Truman lake here in Missouri and it's pretty handy. The unit just figures out that you have the enhanced data loaded on the memory card and you're off and running.

[SeaArk1]

I have the new Humminbird 3D fishfinder. I bought the HotMap for the midwest area ( I think they call it the S map, for South). It works excellent and it very accurate. I would recommend it to anyone.

[SeaArk1]

Opps - all I had to do was insert the chip into the fishfinder and it did all the work itself.