Apex and Lakemaster VX

I have Apex units in my boat. I store them indoors in the winter, and after hooking them up this year, and installing the new update, my VX chip won’t read or be recognized. That is, unless I change slots repeatedly, reboot the graph, and ding around with it for 15 minutes or so. There is no process that I can find that consistently makes it work. I spoke with very pleasant people at humminbird tech support twice, and both times they said they were aware of this problem and there would be a update/patch coming “soon”. They sent me the legacy map to download to a blank chip as a work around, but that doesn’t work either. On the BBC forums, I just found a thread talking about this a year ago. And yet, even with a new update in Feb 2024, no fix.

1. Does anyone else have this problem? And if so, do you have a way to consistently make your chip work.
2. Anyone know how soon “soon” is?

I feel like for the cost of these units, any widespread technical issues should be resolved a lot quicker than this.

I know this may not help but it did in my Helix first I would take some alcohol and clean the contacts on the card and leave a little alcohol on the card and slide it in and out of the slot to clean any dirt. The VX card is huge are you giving it enough time to to load?

That’s why I never update my Helix, still rocking the version it came with.

What software are you currently running on the Apex? When you go to the chart page under settings is the chip recognized?

I just got a VX Premium chip. I wanted it for my G2 Helix 9. It wouldn’t work. Put it in my Helix 10 G3 or 4. Worked like a charm. Called HB. It won’t work in G2. My fault for not reading the fine print. I’m sure they would like me to buy a new Helix for the chip to work on the wheel.

bigcrappie wrote:

That’s why I never update my Helix, still rocking the version it came with.

Every single time my buddy updates his he has some sort of issue. He lost all his trails this year or they were still there but they were not showing as lines anymore but rather little dots and he couldnt even see them. He lost trails completely one year.