Are you backing up your Waypoints?
Back up your waypoints for maximum performance
Walmart FLW Tour pro Todd Hollowell shares some good advice on preserving those precious pathfinders to fishing prosperity.
If you’re using your electronics to their maximum potential, it’s likely that you’re accumulating thousands of waypoints on your unit. Did you know that your Lowrance unit is similar to your computer in terms of its capacity? The more information you store on it, the more memory it takes up; consequently, the performance of your unit is slowed to a degree.
With that in mind, here’s a tip that will help you back up your waypoints and save the data you’ve accumulated over the course of the year so that you don’t have to keep them in your unit all the time.
First, you’ll want an SD Card that has a minimum of 2GB of memory. I like to use one that has 4GB. Next, consider how to save your waypoints to the SD Card. Hit the Page button and scroll over to the Wrench/Gear screen. Select Waypoints, Routes, and Trails. If you’re simply backing up your waypoints, or you’re transferring to another HDS Unit – select Version 4 and press Enter. Of course, Lowrance gives you many more options than that. If you want to transfer to an older Lowrance unit, such as an LCX unit, select Version 3. If you want to transfer to, say, Mapcreate software, select Version 2. And if you want to transfer to a program such as Google Earth, select GPX.
Next, make sure you select the correct memory card to save your waypoints to and press Enter. Then you’ll want to give your file a name. I’d suggest you name this the date that you save your data, such as “January 2014.” Or, if you’re like me and visit many different lakes, perhaps you’re better off labeling your file specifically to that particular lake: say, “Erie 2014.”
I actually save my waypoints to an SD card, and then erase my unit every time I leave a body of water to make sure it’s performing as quickly as possible and I’m not bogging it down with thousands of waypoints collected on lakes that I’m unlikely to fish for another year. More importantly, it backs up waypoints so that I don’t lose them! If you follow the same regimen, just make sure you don’t lose your SD card in the process! I back up my SD card on my laptop or my desktop computer at home, so that my data is safe and secure with little chance that I’ll ever lose it.
All of this information is located in your Lowrance unit’s user manual, along with instructions on how to load those waypoints back into your unit. See you on the water!
Todd Hollowell is host of the WFN TV show,”Bass Dr.”
For more information, visit www.bassdr.com and www.toddhollowell.com
