February 29, 2016 - Added Hummingbird Sonar Guide & User Submitted Paths

Post date: Mar 01, 2016 5:29:7 AM

A couple local residents of the Stillwater/Beaver River area were gracious enough to ship me their Hummingbird depth finder for experimentation. I attempted to load my project data onto the unit, with limited success. After a bit of research online, and some trial and error, I got a route loaded onto the unit. However, it ended up taking about 5 painful minutes per route to enter the data. With 62 current routes in the project, it would take me approximately 5 hours to load all the routes. That's not even counting the hazards, which number in the hundreds. The unit did not fair well with a hazard polygon, and I made no attempt past the first try. It's just more trouble than it's worth. The 46 campsite way points were easy to load and only took a minute. The unit only had enough memory to store three routes, so you're definitely limited with what you can do. The underlying map data on this unit was very simplistic, with only a rough outline of the reservoir and only utilizing two colors. As a result, I'm not going to bother writing a guide for loading data onto Hummingbird units. If you have a similar unit and want to try to load a few routes, I can provide individual help on a very limited basis. However, I cannot recommend this device for utilizing the data from this project. The mobile device procedures are so much easier, and provide all the data layers, hazards included, as well as a myriad of other features too long to list.

That is not to say that this unit wouldn't be helpful on the reservoir. In my recommendations on this site, I say a depth finder should always be used while on Stillwater. And this is one of the nicest depth finders I've used.

I did write a guide on how to enable sonar data collection on the unit. This is a very interesting feature on modern depth finders with GPS and memory. Using the high resolution, geolocated data it collects, a very detailed contour depth map could be created of the reservoir. Even just collecting data while following my routes closely would provide an additional sanity check to my data. It would be a really useful additional layer in the project. By default, the Hummingbird unit does not collect sonar data. It must be manually enabled before every boat trip, and then turned off at the end of the voyage.

The depth finder does collect GPS/WAAS position data on its internal memory by default. I was able to export the owner's track data off the unit and integrate it into the Google Maps link on the main page. The track data included runs made from the Stillwater boat ramp to the Beaver River dock over the course of the summer of 2015, plus a few short excursions elsewhere. The data provides a very interesting insight into how much route variation can occur when attempting to navigate by a set of rules utilizing visual way points on shore and estimations of distance by sight alone.

I want to thank the residents who trusted me enough to ship me their expensive depth finder in the name of furthering this project. I won't name them here, but they know who they are. Thanks again!