Pro angler Scott Martin tells us why he loves the echo 550c

The wider range of transducer coverage allows you to pick up cover on the bottom like rocks and brush piles, which are all great locations for bass. I'm very impressed with this unit and very confident that when I troll over structure or fish, the new Garmin echo will show me it's there with a beautiful HD picture of the fish or structure. Another great feature of the echo 550c is that its very good in the bright sunlight with its new daylight readable screen. The second test that I put the echo through is its ability to read correctly in shallow water and again the Garmin was spot on. One of the key features of the Garmin depth finders is their ability to keep a lock on the depth. What I mean by that is that the Garmin units consistently read the depth and don't freak out and read crazy depths in shallow water causing you to have to turn the unit off and on to get it to read the bottom. With Garmin, you turn the unit on and never have to worry about it losing depth read all day. I'll fish all day long pulling my trolling motor up and down moving all over the lake and never have my Garmin unit freeze up and lose the bottom readings…very consistent and that's the way I like it. On Lake Okeechobee you have a lot of shallow grass and echo 550c was able to define the grass very well and was able to still read the bottom depth and visibly see the bottom through the grass, which in my opinion is very important. Again, what is the advantage to this? The advantage is that you're able to read the bottom depth and still see the grass definition very well which allows you to find subtle details in shallow water like rocks or little ditches or even an area that's just a few inches deeper than everything else around.

One of Garmin's most popular features with all of their units is there easy menu settings and they didn't cut any corners with the new echo line. All the menu settings in these units are very easy to understand and self explanatory, which makes this unit very simple to use when fine tuning the sensitivity, noise reductions and range. The echo units have started shipping, so if you're looking to upgrade to a great depth finder without breaking the wallet and play what I call “Nintendo Bass’n” be sure to check out the new Garmin echo series of depth finders - especially the 550c. It's really sweet.

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