[blackwaterkatz]

For those of you who use HB on inland rivers; is the built in mapping software acceptable to you? I have problems with many inland rivers as the built in map program often doesn't even show the river I'm on. Navionics Hotmaps Premium is no help in most cases either. Just wondering if there may be something else available that I'm not aware of.
My lowrance does a much better job, and the Mapcreate program allows me to at least make a topo map to use, but apparently Humminbird has no such options. Same for my Garmin handheld units.

 

[smhmc6]

Yeah that is a little frustrating. Most of the rivers I fish aren't even shown as water on my charts. I got hotmaps premium for lakes I fish but was hoping that it would at least show rivers as water but it didn't. The first time I fish a river I try to run it as far as I can while I scout it out and I'll save that track so at least it will show what direction the river is going to go if I'm navigating in the dark.

 

[Longjohn119]

Now you guys understand the reason I use a small laptop and make my own maps. I took it a step further this year and converted a cheap netbook into a touchscreen Tablet PC. I have about $400 in it, $500 it you count the Ram mount and 'PC Shade' (Shades the screen to make it more readable in bright sunlight.

A picture before I got the hood:

Here's one from when I was roughing in the electrical system but it shows the mount which is highly reccomended: http://i789.photobucket.com/albums/yy173/longjohn119/image008-1.jpg

You can check with your state government website and usually they'll have a map server with photo and topo maps of the entire state and usually several photo maps for different years. It's all part of a Federal program for agriculture [SIZE=-2][/SIZE]so the maps are free for personal use. There are also programs out that that will download the tiles from Google or Bing Maps.

You can find some examples of the custom maps I make on my blog: Netbook To Chartplotter Project: Custom GPS Enabled Fishing Maps

Netbook To Chartplotter Project: More Custom Fishing Maps

















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[blackwaterkatz]

Wow! John, you've put a lot into it. Thanks for sharing.