Dear Marcum…..

ok, so you were unable to get a LX software update out for yet another ice fishing season….

Please do one of the following:

1) Remove all of your advertisements that tout the Digital LX lineup as “Futureproof” with “Regularly” released updates
or
2) Hire additional software developers to meet the needs of your customers
or
3) Be alot more transparent and keep your customers informed on what’s going one, tell us why there hasn’t been any updates in 2+ years?

Love the product, just feels like I was lied to in terms of promised updates…that’s not a good feeling for your customer base..

I understand your frustration. Did you send this to customer service at Marcum? Or was this the first place it was posted at? If you did send to Marcum first, what was their response? I’m not trying to take away from your aggravation. If the manufacture had an opportunity to address this with you before a public blast, you have much more credibility in your rant IMHO

yes, I’ve spoken with Marcum Customer Service many times about the topic, either the person has no idea about any new updates or they said it’s in testing. This has been the response many others have received as well..

I really hope they follow my 3rd point and just be more open and honest with their customers. I’m not expecting Apple like frequency with updates, but I don’t think 1 update per year/season is too much to ask for? again i’m just following their advertising for the LX lineup that states “Regularly” released updates…

I think they do more harm keeping customers in the dark vs just officially (on their website) updating us that they are still working on it and hope to have it released on X date, if that date is missed, then again simply update us on the reason why it was missed (lack of developers? new bugs found and additional testing needed?) and the next potential release date is X …

LOL, I never update my locators. If they turn on it’s good enough for me. But then i’m old also.

Mike Martine wrote:

Are there problems with these units that need to be fixed? I’m not a marcum owner , just curios on why the need for updates.

Sometimes there are fixes needed (Shallow water jig pickup) but it’s mostly the promise of new features/settings. With the units being digital in nature, they are open to enhancements (new screen layouts, allowing more user customization features, etc..

Here’s a simple feature/enhancement request for LX-9 owners as an example = Allow us to turn the transducer pinging off when only using the camera…Marcum should be able to allow this in the menu settings..

I completely agree with you. The update was supposed to be out in January and they never got it out. I am really annoyed shallow water issues and they need to be fixed. I really like my 7 and I still have my LX5 and my girlfriend uses that. I would like to keep my 7, but if there is not a fix by next November/December I may have to look at other options. I can honestly say that it has cost me fish and I don’t have time for that.

The shallow water issues are the sole reason I don’t own one. You’d think they would be working hard to get it fixed as it’s costing them a ton of sales.

Not defending Marcum one bit, but could it be the ice season is just too short to test effectively, fix the bugs, wash, rinse, repeat?
Yeah they could test during open water and in a tank, but nothing completely matches being physically on the ice.

Honestly beside the garbage case the thing comes in I haven’t had any issues with my LX7. And until an update comes out that enhances and adds functions I don’t see myself updating beyond what came with the unit.

Joe this post is spot on. It kind of floored me how the stepped out of the box and opened the digital world up and away from the motor units to see them come out with a new motor unit and dropped the ball on the digital units. Seems like a step backwards and I feel a little betrayed. I really like my LX7 and personally would not like to go backwards.
MarCum has always treated me rite when it comes to customer support. Normally the shallow problem doesn’t affect me but this year I had to change up the way I fish due to lack of normal seasonal patterns coming together and got a taste of the problem.
Just a little honesty would be nice even if the fix ment I had to purchase a new transducer or something. If I have to buy another unit to fish shallow I will not be very pleased.

Not sure why some are having problems with shallow water. I use my lx7 in 3.5ft depth and have no problem.

Center pick in hole, just under surface of water, in open water mode, adjust your sensativity and target adjust, 20 on cone angle. Just need to play around with settings. No update needed thus far.

Todd Henneberg wrote:

Not sure why some are having problems with shallow water. I use my lx7 in 3.5ft depth and have no problem.

Center pick in hole, just under surface of water, in open water mode, adjust your sensativity and target adjust, 20 on cone angle. Just need to play around with settings. No update needed thus far.

I shouldn’t have to mess around with switching to open water mode, cranking my sensitivity, and target adjust. It should simply work! I bought this in large part because of not having to mess with my zoom and depth range when hole hopping, I sure don’t want to have to change settings to hole hop. I also want my transducer off to the side and out of the way.

Todd Henneberg wrote:

Center pick in hole, just under surface of water, in open water mode, adjust your sensitivity and target adjust, 20 on cone angle. Just need to play around with settings. No update needed thus far.

that reminds me of my old Nintendo days entering the cheats codes to get extra player lives…

While I don’t have a big issue with shallow depth either (I typically fish in 8′ or deeper water) for some guys it’s a big issue that has been acknowledged by Marcum as being an issue, so they are fixing it…

Again I just want them to be more transparent with their customers…we paid a big $$ for these digital units with promises of future enhancements and they’ve left us hanging (imo)

I have never once been disappointed by my VEXILAR!!! Great customer service and their units don’t need upgrades or anything because they just plain work!!

Buckeye86 wrote:

I have never once been disappointed by my VEXILAR!!! Great customer service and their units don’t need upgrades or anything because they just plain work!!

Are you the same guy that wears all Bernie Sanders’ apparel in the center of a Trump rally??

Now that’s Funny right there! ^^^^^^^

Randy Wieland wrote:

<div class=”d4p-bbt-quote-title”>Buckeye86 wrote:</div>
I have never once been disappointed by my VEXILAR!!! Great customer service and their units don’t need upgrades or anything because they just plain work!!

Are you the same guy that wears all Bernie Sanders’ apparel in the center of a Trump rally??

Nah, probably Hillary apparel.

I agree, I bought an LX7 this year. I now find myself telling people to go with the ICE 55, NOT an lx 7….. sad for all the hype. I wouldn’t count on Marcum every fixing the shallow water issues, if it was fixable it would be fixed by now.

I could puke

nblasius wrote:

I could puke

?

$600 + for a unit that cant do what their entry level unit does? Makes me want to puke too! Glad I didn’t sell my VX1P at this point. Granted for 30FOW the LX7 is great, target separation is awesome.

Just some more food for thought I have a 15’yr old fl-8. Love it but struggle to pick baits up when fishing in 3 feet of water. With my lx-7 no problems in 3 feet of water.(yes some fine tuning was required but works perfect)

I could puke cause I have never had a problem with my LX7. How shallow do you people fish? I have ran mine in under 5 fow and had no problems after making a few adjustments. A person should have to make adjustments in that shallow of water! I had vexilars for 10 years before this and they sucked in shallow water also! Mainly because you couldn’t adjust them like you could a marcum…. Go fish

I dont know about you guys but when im drilling holes and come up on anything less than 5ft i keep drilling. 3ft is not gonna give you much sonar coverag. I love my marcum lx6 and wouldnt trade it for anything else. The only issue i have with it is not being able to wear my polarized glasses while fishing with it, so my fix for that is a new LX5i. Unfortunatley i bought it after the season was over.

Good post
I have been a Marcum Supporter for some time. I just recently sold my LX7 because I am frustrated with the lake of Firmware updates. When you purchase a Flagship sonar and spend a premium dollar and 4 years into it Im not that impressed. I think the future is digital but Marcum is not there yet.

So I will continue with my LX5, Showdown 5.6 dual beam, and Showdown troller. When they get it figured out I might be back

I’m disappointed that the updated didn’t make it out this year as well. I do know that when I was at the St Paul Ice Show they were certain that they would be ready by early January… Obviously that didn’t happen and I’m not sure what exactly caused the release date to slip. Most likely the rationale behind the delay is not wanting to put out a product with bugs. Does that make it acceptable? Nope, not really. However, just think about any other SW driven product you have (smart phone, computer, etc.) and how often there are SW related hiccups… I’ve taken some project management classes recently and I there was a statistic that said something like only 15-20% of IT related projects were completed on time.

As the great Chris Rock once said “I’m not saying it’s right… I’m just saying I understand!”

The last update was released on January 20th, 2014!

All i’m asking for is an explanation of why nothing has been released in 2+ years? Tell me it’s because of no developer capacity, tell me it’s because of software bugs, tell me it’s because of Obamacare….. just tell me SOMETHING!

all we hear is crickets…that’s pretty poor imo…

I think everyone’s biggest gripe is that all we hear from Marcum (and their prostaff/reps) that the next update is “almost done” or “being tested” or “it will be released very soon”. BUT then when the “supposed” release date passes by, then the entire fishing season, then the next “supposed” release date, then another whole fishing season without ANY update, hint, rumor, public release, or even as much as a sneeze from them. The transparency with this is worse than the government and that’s not a compliment.

I personally don’t have any issues with my lx7 and the shallow water stuff. I think the main issue Marcum has with their update is that they are trying to do a “fix-all” release and jam everything into one update. While some of the other updates/improvements they could make probably aren’t as important as the shallow water issue, they could still make smaller releases more frequently (2-4 times a year, but that’s probably just a dream with this company). Here is a few things that shouldn’t take a semi competent programmer more than 1 month to do and would have little/no effect on the functionality so they wouldn’t need extensive in-field testing.

1. Being able to turn off the transducer on the lx9 while using just the camera
2. Adding a new type of graph or tweak an existing graph
3. Adding a new combo of existing graphs by altering the size of existing graphs
4. Adding the option for “hot buttons” so pushing a certain sequence of the buttons (pressing the up button 3 times in a row, then menu twice) changes to a group of preset settings. For example: settings for shallow water, deeper water, sunny, dark inside conditions (try scrolling through the menu when the backlight is at 0 and it’s sunny outside, its impossible). This could literally be done by a programming intern and would have zero effect on the actual functionality of the unit but would make it easier to use their unit while they twiddle their thumbs trying to fix the actual issue.
5. Hell, even just adding more colors/designs for the backgrounds to know they actually have a programmer.

amen brotha

In for update info. Shallown water was atrocious.

I love my lx7, its never failed me. my only issue was the case that it came in.. which I fixed putting the unit into the Clam flasher bag.

sorry to hear that others are having issues, Marcum does promise firmware upgrades, but as I am sitting on the john; I cant think of a whole lot that can be improved from my end.

its still better than my all my buddies fl-28 though!

Guess when I move around from hole to hole, lake bottom is changing too, so I have to adjust my settings anyway. I don’t get bent out of shape over it, I do what’s needed to make it work. I understand your frustration, I spent the $ just like everyone else. Yes it would be nice to have things changed to more user friendly. But if they are not releasing it just yet, means there’s technical issues needed to be fixed first.