So I gave the AutoChart Live on the Helix 9 a test drive a couple days ago on a little 400 acre lake near the house and mapped about a quarter of it. On the plus side, using it was very easy and the returns were impressive. I had the ZeroLines card in the unit during recording and it did record directly to the card.

I then plug the ZeroLines card into my 859ci HD DI unit and it loads the lakemaster lake outlines one would see from AutoChart, but no contours from my recording on the Helix. The Base Layer option wasn't even present on the Chart Menu.

For laughs, I then plug the ZeroLines card into my laptop and fire up AutoChart Pro and as expected its a no go. I'm hoping I missed something in the process, but I'm fairly confident I did not. The data on the ZeroLines card from the AutoLive appears to be in a different proprietary file format. It appears, again if I have not made a mistake, that AutoChart (standard & Pro) and AutoChart Live are two distinctly separate products with limited to no cross-compatibility.

I love the concept of Live but at this time from what I saw and have read on this forum, it appears very singular in functionality and deployment.

So in conclusion if I want to use the AutoChart Pro tool for bottom hardness and side imaging mosaic, I need an additional ZeroLines card and process sonar recordings as I did with the core series...essentially duplicating efforts for the two products.