Customer Reviews

LOWRANCE 000-00103-001 Elite (TM) 5m Base US Chartplotter

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I just set this up on my boat in Beach Haven, NJ, about 15m n. of Atlantic City. I'm about 5 miles from the inlet to the ocean.

Connecting it to power was a snap. It powered up, with the microSD Navionics card installed. I set it up for the NJ coast.

There are a number of set up screens which allow you to configure what data you want to see on the chart screen. With 5" of screen, there's plenty of room for all the info you want to see. My marina is right on the ICW. The Navionics card doesn't exactly match the charts, and the ICW boundaries are marked in purple, which is hard to see against the blue background. Once I got into open water, the chart's white deep water areas, with depths, were clearly visible and easy to follow.

Zooming in and out for more detail is accomplished with a single key push, good for underway quick checking of areas of concern. The screen is easily visible under all lighting conditions.

The biggest negative is the manual. Lowrance uses this manual for both their chartplotter and fishfinder. Almost all the manual is dedicated to the fishfinder, so working with the chartplotter is mostly self teaching.

It comes with an NMEA output but no cable, so I wasn't able to interface it to my computer.

Overall, I'd say this is a very good, moderately priced chartplotter, typical of Lowrance's dedication to value. I got it for $480 bundled with the Navionics card, but the place I bought it from raised prices by $50 the next day, so typical price, WITH the card seems to be about $525. There are lots of places selling the base unit for this price so make sure you get the 'bundled' package.

I bought this to use in the 10,000 Islands area of SW Florida and Tampa Bay primarily. I found the mapping detail to be extremely poor. Any feature, water or land, smaller than about 200 - 300 feet across does not appear. While traveling through the 10,000 Islands, I found islands where none appeared on the screen and traveled through creeks between islands while the screen showed me traveling over land. Almost totally useless for finding anything other than the largest geographical features.