Combo Unit Questions

I am planning to purchase a Sonar/GPS combo unit soon. I am curious if they can be easily set up to move to two locations in the boat, or is that a major undertaking/expense? I plan to primarily use the unit in dash, but would like to be able to move to the rear of the boat for applications where I prefer to use my tiller steer on the kicker instead of the helm control. I don’t believe I would be able to view the GPS from the rear of the boat with much clarity. Can this be done?
Also, I think I have narrowed down the selection to 332C or 337C DF. I like the power of the 337, but do not need Dual frequency. It looks to me that the 337 is a better deal, am I missing attributes of the 332 that I should consider?
Thanks for any suggestions!
John

Buy a unit with an internal antennae and then moving it from one location to another is as simple as wiring in additional power supply cables at the secondary location. A power supply cable for my Garmin 162 cost me $24 I believe. Ram mounts are great in this situation as all you need to be is a second “ball” and the rest of the mount will travel with the unit.

John,

The 332 and 337 have external antennas, so moving them may be a little bit tricker. But… (Wade, help me out here) the 332 I just bought came with a 25′ cord for the antenna and there is something called a NMEA 2000 buss that apparently allows multiple units to use the same GPS antenna and speed/temp sensor. It does not work for transducers. I haven’t taken the time to learn anything about it, but if you put a NMEA 2000 buss in your boat you could, as I understand it, mount the antenna and install outlets at two locations for the same antenna. Again, that’s how I understand it and I might be wrong. Another advantage: if you decide to add another unit down the road you would just have to plug it in to the existing network.

By the way, the 332 is the single-frequency unit and the 337 is the more expensive DF unit that is probably not worth the $$ to you. I’m pretty pumped about the 332 and can’t wait to try it on the water.

John

Well John I like the looks of the 20 c just for a little bigger screen, costs a little more but i didn’t think the split veiw there wasn’t a big enough screen on the 332c why i was looking towards the 20c. I Thought about being able to move it but sounds like options are limited in my price range. This will be an intersting topic.

John,

You could do this with the 332C (you really don’t need to spend the extra money on the 337C; that extra power is just excess for your purposes). You would need a second power cable and a mount like James noted. The GPS antenna has a very long cable but ideally you could set it up in a way that you simply move the antenna with the unit. You can use velcro or a magnet on the base of the GPS antenna to secure the module in a way that it can be easily moved.

So basically this can be done with a mount, an extra transudcer, and an extra power cable. I have some different mounts that can make this a little easier.

There may be other ways to do this but this is what comes to mind.

John, You can definitely have multiple locations for one graph/gps all around your boat. Somewhere on the Lowrance website there is a detailed Adobe Acrobat file you can print that spells out how the NMEA 2000 needs to be connected to your various hook ups. As you’d expect there will be some additional wiring harnesses and splicers required but that’s the price of going high tech. I’m putting my Globalmap 3300C on the console to back up my LCX25C and have another hook up on the bow just in case the spot on the spot is the place to be. Kurt