My step-dad bought a Echomap 93sv CHIRP (non plus unit) for a walleye trip he's leaving for Friday. He hooked it up last week and I finally talked him in to meeting me at the boat launch. To be honest I just wanted to play with it! I've played with them in the stores and a Helix unit my brother in-law bought 3 years ago.
This was the first time I've used one on the water. It was awesome! The only change we made so far was to slow the scroll speed down. This unit was the first new tech. expensive either of us had used. I started out reading the manual and he grabbed my rod I brought that had a bladed gig tied on and was fiddling around with that and quickly noticed he could see it in traditional 2d which he liked because he does a lot of jigging while walleye fishing.
After messing around with little things here and there I noticed there were two pot holes on the map of the lake that went from 30-35' to 56' in the middle. I had him go over this pot hole, I switched to DV and SV and could clearly see a nice school of fish suspended 20-25' over this pot hole! I wasn't expecting to see them without adjusting the settings. This was just on auto. Needless to say he was pretty impressed too. All of our lakes are natural and most are pretty featureless and mucky bottoms so I didn't expect to see a whole lot in the form of structure. Plus this lake is about 15-20 acres in the little town I grew up in.
We spent 2.5 hours on the lake messing with this unit, a little fishing, some talking, and mostly staring at the screen. I wish we could be spent more time out there but he had things to do. I could've spent the entire day out there getting acquainted with the 93sv.
I was really impressed with how easy it was to use. I was also impressed with the images we saw, like I mentioned before the only change we made was to slow the scroll speed to medium, everything else was auto. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that very very soon I'll be upgrading boats and picking a couple of these up because they're well worth the money!