Helix 5 G2 review

I know a lot of guys are posting about the helix products and also a lot of questions. I pulled my helix 5 g2 off of my boat this fall and built up a shuttle, i have used it for about 14 total hours on 3 different outings and these are my comments on what i have seen so far:

Interface: very easy to use once i got the update and put into ice mode. Coming from a mechanical flasher it takes a little more time to power up and get fishing and a little more effort to adjust things like gain, zoom, or IR than a standard mechanical flasher but it is all pretty intuitive. I didn’t read any manual on the ice mode operation (not sure if there is one?), although i might to help me understand a little more on zoom toggling. I also don’t understand the difference between 15 deg, 21 deg and 15 – 21 deg transducer settings?

Sonar: The CHIRP transducer works beautifully, not much to say here other than it works as well as any flasher i have seen. There is no lag, its crisp, the digital display is fantastic. very very impressive. Maybe the most impressive thing for me is that i can actually pick out bigger panfish with it out of a school. People say they can do that with other units, i never have, this helix is good enough to do that.

IR: I think the IR features work very well. I did have to do a little messing with it when i had LX5 and a FLX28 going in close proximity over 30 FOW. Between going to the 15 deg cone and reducing gain and using the IR features i was able to clear it up just fine.

GPS: Works just like in the boat. Looks like when you put a waypoint it labels it differently than open water which is very nice.

Battery life: I got a new 9ah sealed lead acid battery and its worked great. I fished for about 3 hours yesterday at max brightness and it was 85% battery when i turned it off. Other times i fished 6 or so hours on 6 brightness and i had about 75% battery when i left. I don’t see this being an issue for the helix 5.

all of my fishing has been done in 7 to 30 FOW, i have not tried anything really shallow so i cannot comment on how it does there.

15 locks you into the narrow beam chirp range, 21 locks you into the wide beam chirp range…12-21 sweeps the entire range of frequencies

There are a few tweaks you can make to make things work better…adjust surface clutter settings, manually set the max depth (not lower range but max depth the unit is accepting sonar returns from, this is similar to adjusting gain), etc.

It used to be that when you were in ice mode you lost all control of max depth, surface clutter and sensitivity adjustments, even though you were manually setting each the unit would “fine tune” for you. I found it to be a complain pain in the rear and never used ice mode after that. This is with a Helix 5 g1, however.