LMS 520C Sonar/GPS Chartplotter Combo :: Education by Design Store

Customer Reviews

Very, very good for the money

2008-05-21
This unit replaced a Lowrance x50 that came with the boat. The difference is so startling it's somewhat hard to believe both units come from the same manufacturer.

Whereas the x50 was slow, with a horrible little lo-res monochrome screen, and frequently gave bad information about depth and fish, this unit is fast, bright, high resolution, colour, and gets it RIGHT - I'm seeing underwater structure I never knew was there.

Installation was a breeze. All the neccassary cables are supplied, and they're of more than adequate length to traverse a good sized boat (mine is a 21 foot deck boat). One minor gripe is that the system REQUIRES in-line 3 amp fuses, even if you're wiring it through a curcuit breaker board. Happily, the manufacturer provides the fuses and holders. Unhappily, they're not pre-installed in-line and you have to get out your trusty soldering iron to create the neccessary path. This is something Lowarance should have done at the factory. I mounted the transducer in a shoot-through-hull configuration - despite the advice in the manual about how this might decrease sesntivity, it didn't for me, and inside the hull it's protected from external factors (like logs or swimming kids) bumping into it.

With respect to which unit to buy, do yourself a favour, and spend the money to get this one with the GPS antenna as a separate item: I spoke to a lot of different people and they all said marine GPS units that used internal antennas were problematic - the one that comes with this is very good, and never loses the signal.

Speaking of the GPS, it's VERY cool - you can split the screen to show where you are on the water whilst simultaneously displaying what's going on underneath the boat. As the GPS autmaotically produces a visible track, you can easily go back and forth over the same route if you need to.

As mentioned above, the sonar aspect is truly amazing - very clear, easy to read, and quite accurate - if it is showing there's fish down there, then there are! The sonar can be setup with 2 button pushes to split the screen into the whole pciture under the boat and a zoomed in window showing more detail at the depth range of your choice for greater definition.

The menu system is fairly self-explanatory - a vast improvement from the x50 model: if you can use a modern computer, you can figure this out quickly. That said, it could be better - while the system will allow you to configure what shows on the screen, it won't allow you to reorder the menus to suit yourself, or better yet, create a menu of your most commonly used features - it's for this reason I give it 4 stars instead of 5. A nice freebie though is available right on the Lowarance website - you can download a simulator to your pc and play with the unit as if it is the real deal: much easier and safer than figuring it out on the water.

Oh yeah - the unit is configured in such a manner that you can easily take it off and use it as a land based GPS, or as a portable Sonar for ice fishing, and theres' an expansion slot for SD cards for maps or even saving your GPS tracks and sonar plots: the SD slot also enables you to quickly install software updates from Lowrance - use your PC to download the files to an SD card, pop the SD card into the unit, turn it on and you're ready to go.