Who has experience with a Echo Pilot Forward Looking Sonar

[BartW]

does it work ?
is it usefull
does it give more info then a normal sonar
Just found a competitive brand "interphase" in US
any good ?

 

[Bandit]

I had one on a boat i bought, sent it to the factory for a check over and reset all completed OK Fitted it It was useless.

Perhaps its me ?

A chap i know who is a well known expert vendor of marine electronics shares the same view as me.

 

[jfm]

I've got one, the platinum, displaying on Raymarine screens, on the new boat. Was fitted as an option before I bought the boat, so I didn't choose it. Seems ok, but have only used it for 5mins. Will report back later.

The control panel is horrid. I talked to them at LIBS last week and told them it looked like a bad DIY project and they acknowledged that they need to make it a bit more sexy. Till then, I've relocated the controls to a place where you can hardly see them!

 

[BartW]

I guess that a Raymarine C80 can not controll the FLS unit ?
(it can display through the video input)

 

[jfm]

Nope, none of the Raymarine units can control the FLS. They can only display the pic via the video input.

The FLS control box is the grey bricklike beaut lower right in this pic. Actually it looks fine; problem is it is too thick to mount nicely on a dash. It needs a flange so it can be recessed. You can't easily dismantle it and "lose" the innards and put just buttons on your dash becuase the whole thing is waterproofed by encasing the electronics in that hard-setting resin ("Potting" it, or whatever the process is called)

 

[Deleted User YDKXO]

No, no, no, don't know

I have an Echopilot FLS on my boat and it's useless. It only works, if it works, at dead slow speed. It tells lies and the display is difficult to interpret especially in sunlight. I've never trusted it
Before anyone says that there's something wrong with my unit, I inherited an Echopilot FLS on a previous boat and it was just as useless

 

[spannerman]

A mate fitted one to his sail boat and it just shows seaweed and other flotsam, it only shows land when you get very near, leaving it a bit late to go about in a Nauticat 40.

 

[BartW]

OK, no real positive comments until now,
I am sorry to say, but from the look of their webside you can see that this company is not very succesfull IMHO
so will wait with a purchase until later,
The plan was to have the FLS as an extra, but also as a backup for the standard sonar.
Thanks for posting, will probably come back to you later when you have more real live experience ?
regards
Bart

 

[jfm]

Yes i'll report back in couple of months when I've tried it, but it sounds like they're not very popular on here with those who have tried them. My first trip with it will be getting out of the Thames round to the Solent, so past all those Goodwins Sands things, so it would be nice if it were useful

I notice in the new 2009 printed Raymarine catalog that lots of the photo-ed boats have them, and there is a nice picture of the dash of the Quad-IPS Van der Valk, where they have cut/recessed the horrid control box into the dash (with a CNC cutter, prob) so it looks much nicer

 

[Gludy]

I had the platinum model with the flybridge extension unit.

Basically I found it useless but Io do know that they are useful to blue water raggies entering coral areas to look our for those vertical coral heads so for this reason I am having the same again but only for that purpose.

On MoBos in the UK, I found they are not very useable.

 

[trouty12]

Fitted one to my previous riverboat as I often cruised shallow rivers. Waste of time. Difficult to interpret and failed, in most cases, to give adequate warning of sand banks etc..