Cleaning up and speeding up Lowrance HDS units??

[AllyFishing]

I remember reading a few years back that deleting trails will free up memory and I guess hard drive space on the HDS units. I have 2 Carbons and 2 Lives. The one LIVE is new and dedicated to AT.

I've deleted trails but what else can I do to get them speedy again. They are noticeably slower than before. I've read somewhere about waypoint management but don't know how to do that. I saw a video a while back on one PRO stating he sends each body of water that he fishes onto a Micro card and keeps all off his units until he fishes that lake. How can that be done?

any help in pointing me to the right documents or manuals would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Craig

[fly by night]

TC or NC will be along soon to steer you in the right direction.

[Basshopper]

As an annual maintenance item, If you have no issues going on, Back up Settings and Data, Purge after backup then. Do a factory Reset including check everything other than registration. Once Done Import back in the settings and data. I have done this every year sense updated on units started.

The big item that slows down your unit is if you install and delete your data by lake, and never purge leavea a lot of fragment on the storage drive which the processor and memory have to read every time.

[LittleGazoo]

I've deleted trails but what else can I do to get them speedy again. They are noticeably slower than before.

Important question is how are they slower? Slower overall? Slower importing/exporting WRT(Waypoints, Routes, Trails)? Slower mapping? HDS Live units with .37 hardware had ethernet issues. Lowrance fix was software and/or a NEP-1 ethernet box.

Bad Ethernet can result in unit pauses, slow mapping, dropping of network units, etc. Also pauses in Ethernet sonar like Active Target, S3100 box, SS3D. Or just overload the HDS in correcting network connection.

I've read somewhere about waypoint management but don't know how to do that

WRT performance issues I've observed are users Deleting & not Purging, continually recording trails or rarely corruption in the WRT database.

Excessive Deleting & not Purging can cause overall slowness, but normally import or export slowness. Especially import slowness as all import data will be checked against purged data and for duplicates. USRv5 introduced waypoint UID(universal identifiers) which greatly improves import speed, but still slowed some.

Maximum Trail size is ~24K track-points. A trail being recorded reaches ~24K track-points causes the trail to be saved and a new trail to be started recording. I've seen HDS units with a dozen or more 24K trails causing a slow unit. Just use trail maintenance. Contrary to Lowrance documentation a HDS unit can have over 300 trails.

WRT data is maintained in a UDB(Universal DataBase). You can see it here: SYSTEM->NETWORK->DIAGNOSTICS->UDB tab. (FYI: This page will also show you the IP addresses of all Ethernet units and The HDS running the MASTER DATABASE. I'll skip the importance of the MASTER UDB.) But corruption can be corrected by two methods, Hard Reset or System Restore.

A Hard Reset clears everything and resets HDS to factory defaults.

A System Restore for clearing the UDB is done as follows:

Power up only the unit to be restored.
Go to SYSTEM->RESTORE DEFAULTS
CHECK ONLY Waypoints and Routes, Trails.
Clear all other boxes.
Select OK and HDS unit will reboot and all WRT data will be cleared, but all settings will remain.
Power up the unit in a network will synchronize waypoints back, but not trails.

I had a case with a corrupted trail that could only be deleted by the above Restore Defaults. It is more powerful than a Delete & Purge.

I organize my HDS data by lake. I only load and save the current lake. I import and export USRv5 files to a Waypoint Folder on my SD-Card with a naming convention of LAKENAMEv5-YYMMDD. I do the same for Settings and Sonar-Logs to respective SD-Card Folders. I have hundreds of USR backups for my lakes in OLD folder.

I synchronize all SD-Card folders onto my home laptop. Old USR files are moved to a folder named OLD. Thus my SD-Card Waypoint folder contains current data thus easier to find for import.

Also I highly recommend the Reefmaster Waypoint Manager/Sonar Viewer for Lowrance(about $39). Very powerful and useful software for you home PC(Windows only).

https://reefmaster.com.au/index.php/...ypoint-manager

Three most useful features for me are:

1) Allows copy&paste from Google Earth,
2) Allows one to name all waypoints and set to Icon-Only display,
3) Allows sorting by name, icon/color, etc for bulk-editing.

[JTN]

How does a new trail start once it reaches 24k, if you don’t start a new trail on the trails page? I’ve left the same trail on for ever what I notice once the trail reaches 24k it start’s erasing the oldest part of the trail as new is added.

[LittleGazoo]

How does a new trail start once it reaches 24k, if you don’t start a new trail on the trails page? I’ve left the same trail on for ever what I notice once the trail reaches 24k it start’s erasing the oldest part of the trail as new is added.

So Lowrance has changed software, in past a new trail was always created unlike HB. Personally, I don't record trails that large. So maybe . . .

Curious with Lowrance now doing this, I'd believe trail over-writing would be by trail-segments and not track-point by track-point.
Lowrance would create a new track-segment each time you power a HDS on/off/on. So unload on Lake1/power-on, load-up/power-off. Then Lake2, Lake3, so on. Then unit reaches 24K on LakeX, so unit deletes Lake1 track-segment?

[JTN]

So Lowrance has changed software, in past a new trail was always created unlike HB. Personally, I don't record trails that large. So maybe . . .

Curious with Lowrance now doing this, I'd believe trail over-writing would be by trail-segments and not track-point by track-point.
Lowrance would create a new track-segment each time you power a HDS on/off/on. So unload on Lake1/power-on, load-up/power-off. Then Lake2, Lake3, so on. Then unit reaches 24K on LakeX, so unit deletes Lake1 track-segment?

Yes, slowly deleting the oldest part of the trail as new is added no matter what lake the oldest trail is on, is what mine seems to.

[limit5bass]

[LittleGazoo]

WARNING. Evers' video has some serious errors for others.

Save By Region only saves waypoints defined by the region. Then Deleting All waypoints, routes, trails will delete ALL including other lakes existing outside the region saved. Also he didn't Purge.
He should have done the following:

SELECT: PAGES->STORAGE->WAYPOINTS->EXPORT
SELECT: DELETE ALL
SELECT: PURGE

Now I suspect he only had Lake Fork waypoints, so what he did would have worked in his instance. Or he could have fished side trips on near-by lakes which be didn't wish to save. I suspect this also. He still forgot to purge.

[NoCAL]

I have never understood not starting a new trail for every fishing day. I start a trail in the morning, name it by the date and if the day was good, save it, or if not, delete it at the end of the day. Maybe because it’s so easy to get lost in the Delta AND almost impossible to get back to a location that was good but you aren’t as familiar with.

NoCAL

[LittleGazoo]

I have never understood not starting a new trail for every fishing day. I start a trail in the morning, name it by the date and if the day was good, save it, or if not, delete it at the end of the day. Maybe because it’s so easy to get lost in the Delta AND almost impossible to get back to a location that was good but you aren’t as familiar with.NoCAL

+1
Texas lakes might have more hazards than the West Coast. So Texas has products like Lance Vick's Boatlanes and Tom Mayne's Guidelanes which display hazard waypoints and safe navigational trails.

https://www.boatlanes.com/

https://www.tommayneguidelanes.com/

But like you, I save daily trails which I can manipulate and merge into personal trail to complement on the above. Lowrance is hands down the best units for navigation.

[AllyFishing]

All good stuff fellas, I appreciate it.

[Team Colibri]

I remember reading a few years back that deleting trails will free up memory and I guess hard drive space on the HDS units. I have 2 Carbons and 2 Lives. The one LIVE is new and dedicated to AT.

I've deleted trails but what else can I do to get them speedy again. They are noticeably slower than before. I've read somewhere about waypoint management but don't know how to do that. I saw a video a while back on one PRO stating he sends each body of water that he fishes onto a Micro card and keeps all off his units until he fishes that lake. How can that be done?

any help in pointing me to the right documents or manuals would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Craig

Trails, routes, waypoints and settings are all stored in the units internal memory, and as you mention the load from those can slow a unit down. It will take a lot of data though, so you should also check what else you might have stored to the units internal memory, like screenshots and sonarlogs. Other things that can slow a unit down is low voltage, bad memorycards (in any unit in the network), failing networkcables (ethernet and NMEA) and incompatible units or modules in the network.

You mention a new Live. The last batch or two of HDS Live have issues with networking, so ensure that this unit and the rest of units and modules have updated software.
A hard reset of each unit after updating is never a bad thing, just ensure you save waypoints from one unit to a memorycard before the resets, save one file as USR and one as GPX for backup. If you have any trails or routes you want to keep, save those as well before the reset.

If you have a lot of waypoints (thousands) I would recommend that you look into Reefmaster, waypoint-management software for your PC that supports Lowrance-symbols for waypoints.