Lowrance Ifinder H20

[+briansnat]

Lowrance was nice enough to loan me an iFinder H20 for the past few months. Here is my evaluation. My only regret was having to send the unit back yesterday .

[+user13371]

Lowrance was nice enough to loan me an iFinder H20 for the past few months.  Here is my evaluation.  My only regret was having to send the unit back yesterday  .

Yes, it's an incredible value! My only gripe with it as that it's a bit large to conveniently mount on the handlebars of my bike.

 

And yet - that bulkiness saved me from an injury. Back in October, I was out bicycling and had the GPS in a large cellphone case clipped to my belt.

 

Got hit by a car, bounced a few times, ended up in the hospital. The GPS, which I assumed would be a total loss, turned out to have just a small crack in the screen - near the edge, not across the viewing area. Still functioned perfectly, and even stayed waterproof - I guess the crack go all the way through the hard-plastic cover.

 

Among other injuries, I had a neat rectangular bruise on my hip where the GPS had been :-)

Edited August 3, 2005 by lee_rimar

[+user13371]

Lowrance was nice enough to loan me an iFinder H20 for the past few months.  Here is my evaluation.  My only regret was having to send the unit back yesterday  .

 

I just re-read your review and noticed a few things:

 

1) I didn't know the H2O was a 16 channel receiver. Is 16-channel a new feature in the 2005 model? Lowrance's own web-page says it's 12-channel.

 

2) I did have one gripe with the iFinder H20 that you missed in your review.

 

When you set waypoints, the iFinder will include the time stamp and elevation. But when recording tracklogs, it does not include time and elevation data. This might not matter for geocaching, but for hikers, bicyclists, hang-gliders etc - anyone who wants to track how fast or high they went - it's considerably less useful.

 

Offsetting this slightly, the waypoint and tracklog data files are very easy to decode and encode. On long bike rides I would frequently set several waypoints, and could usually cross-ref the time and elevation for the track logs.

 

3) Unrelated to the H2O - shouldn't the copyright at the bottom of your review read 2005, not 2004?

Edited August 3, 2005 by lee_rimar

[+Tahoe Skier5000]

Lowrance rules!

 

Brian, is it true that the iFinder H20 and Pro dont include the power saving function? I was messing around with the emulator and its not on there!

[+briansnat]

1) I didn't know the H2O was a 16 channel receiver. Is 16-channel a new feature in the 2005 model? Lowrance's own web-page says it's 12-channel.

 

The rep from Lowrance said it was 16 channel. I'll have to check and correct it if I'm wrong.

 

Brian, is it true that the iFinder H20 and Pro dont include the power saving function? I was messing around with the emulator and its not on there! 

 

I could not find one. Not saying it isn't there. That's a quarrel I have with the unit, functions are buried all over the place.

 

I did leave out battery life from my review by accident. It consistently got between 12 and 14 hours on two AA alkalines.

Edited August 3, 2005 by briansnat

[+Tahoe Skier5000]

Weird... It seems they took that feature off the H20 and the Pro versions, but put it back on for the Hunt, and PHD.

 

The thing that sucks is that the power saver was the only way you could turn WAAs on and off and change the update rate. I thought it was pretty useful..

[+IVxIV]

My iFinder Pro came with a "battery saver" series of options when I bought it. Yep the first level of conservation would shut off WAAS, then incrementally increase the amout of satellite sampling rate time, if I recall you could set it as long as two minute intervals!

 

Then I upgraded the firmware, and suddenly the battery saver feature has vanished, including the ability to shut off WAAS. I was initially peeved about that, then learned (as others had) that the iFinder is actually so good with battery efficiency that the battery saver mode was really unnecessary. I routinely use mine over a full day and not run out of juice (1800ma NiMh rechargables with frugal use of the backlight).

 

Also I heard something about, because the iFinder has 2 processors (CPU's) the battery saver interface was kinda complicated lol. Perhaps they disabled that feature to remedy a problem (a problem I have never heard of )

Edited August 3, 2005 by IVxIV

[+roygpa]

I've had a Lowrance Ifinder H2O for just about a year. I love it. I would agree with most of what Brian says except the part about it being "somewhat unattractive", but that's subjective anyway.

 

Nice review Brian... Thanks.

 

Roy

Edited August 3, 2005 by roygpa

[+user13371]

This may be a distinction without a difference, but you said...

Though any card reader can be used to download waypoints, you will need a proprietary Lowrance card reader to download maps.

More precisely: You need Lowrance's card reader installed to run MapCreate 6.3 and newer. You need it to register your SD cards (up to a limit of 5).

 

BUT -- When you actually create/extract/compile the maps you want, you can save them on your hard drive. And later on, you can transfer those saved files to your SD card using any reader you want, even without MapCreate running.

 

If you want to spend a couple of afternoons extracting the whole US into region files - just one time - you can put away Lowrance's software & card reader and never worry about it again.

Edited August 4, 2005 by lee_rimar

[TerraVador]

You write in your article that the minimum distance for an arrival alarm is .1 mile. That is incorrect. The default is .1 mile, but the minimum is .01 mile (53 feet). If you set it to metric, then the minimum is .01 km, or 10 meters. At least that is how it works for me in firmware version 1.4.0

[+briansnat]

he default is .1 mile, but the minimum is .01 mile (53 feet). If

 

Not in the version that came with my unit. Glad to hear they fixed it!

[+user13371]

...is it true that the iFinder H20 and Pro dont include the power saving function?...

I could not find one. Not saying it isn't there....

The current version of the firmware (1.4.0) in the iFinder H2O does have a power saver mode.

 

Menu - Menu - GPS Settings - Power Saving...

 

I haven't done any battery run-down tests yet. I've only fiddled with the first level of power saving (turns off WAAS, keeps sampling at 1 second) and thought it seemed to lose 3D lock more often. 2D position seemed to keep up with me on my bike, the pointer on the map matched where I was. Not a scientific evaluation, just a general impression.