Greenman
the way i look at it is you cannot go wrong with a garmin. its a very good unit,easy to use and will hold up.
I have a garmin 182 on my boat. its a older unit but still performan great.
I do also have a humminbird 997C SI. i bought it in the start of the 07 season. It is just a bigger version of the 797 that Capt Dom mentioned.
It is a combo unit but i use it just as a FF. i do all my navagating with the garmin.
the humminbird sidescan does everything they say it does and more.
it makes it very easy and fast to locate where the fish are holding on a reef. you are able with this unit to mark a piece of structure while in the FF mode. so if you see something on the side scan, you are able to move the cursor over to that structure and get the gps numbers for it.
i was very impressed with that feature and use it often.
We do alot of gill netting. this unit has been great in locating bunker that are not showing on the surface. it took all the guess work away on where to drop the net.
The display on the unit looks like these picture
