I hear ya on the brain fry. Shoot, I can't recommend ANYTHING
without condition... They've all got their weak (and strong) points.
For what it's worth, I'm running 787 and 797 Humminbirds.
If it were not for side imaging, I would probably be tempted to have seperate
sonar and gps, and the gps would most likely be a Garmin
After the last software upgrades, the H'bird sonar is really, really good in
my .02 Lowrance was always great, but I'm not liking
what I'm hearing about water intrusion and service issues on the new ones.
I've never heard a lot about Garmin's sonar models, but they don't seem to
have much of a following, at least round here
Vexilar makes a darned good stand-alone sonar too, comes the closest to
unconditional praise you'll see from me. Their customer service is EXCELLENT! Only bad thing I could
say about them is their color model is hard to see in the sun.