Darryl,

If what you are trying to do with the PC is to save all of the Waypoints you make when you find or make new brushpiles, than you will have to either use an SD card or you could use a connection cable from your 997 to the laptop – but you could not do this real time and would have to stop using the sonar to put the unit into a communications mode with your PC. It would be easier to just download the waypoints to an SD card while the 997 is running than plug the SD card into your laptop. Only problem with this is that when you download the waypoints; it downloads all of the waypoints in the 997 – even those you may already have in your laptop. I think it would be best to wait until after a day of fishing to download all the waypoints in your 997 to the SD card, load them into your laptop via HumminbirdPC and save them as a file (this can be named per the body of water and you can keep separate files for each body of water). Than delete all the Nav Data on your 997 – only after you have it saved on your laptop! Make whatever name or icon changes to the Waypoints you have in the file on your laptop, than export the file to the SD card again. Than when you install the SD card into your 997 and power it up, all of your waypoints – new and old – along with whatever changes you made, will be in your 997 and you will have a duplicate copy on your laptop in case something bad should happen. Also, if you keep GPS data for each body of water in separate files, you can load only the data you need for the body of water into your 997 for that day. This will keep you from having to scroll through or search through hundreds of waypoints just to find the one you want. Another nice feature is that you could have more than one file for a body of water as one fisherman told me that he loads a different set of waypoint data when certain friends of his are on his boat – as he doesn’t want them to know all his honey holes!

For those of you who don’t use a PC to keep a copy of your GPS data consider this: what happens if something goes wrong in your GPS unit? You could lose all of those hard earned waypoints and possible safe passages marked with trackplots or routes. When you send your unit in to be serviced, do they keep your GPS data intact or do they erase it all? What if your unit ends up having the internal circuitry or memory device replaced? Also, having your Waypoint data on a PC can help you keep track of and quickly search through all your waypoints. Example: the water level on a body of water you are on fluctuates enough so that some waypoints you have marked may be too shallow or too deep the day you are fishing. You could use your PC to search through and eliminate those waypoint locations that are not of any use to you due to water depth (or lack of water). The same thing could be done for types of structure (man-made PVC structures, stumps, logs, Christmas Trees,…). You could than save this waypoint data in a separately named file and eliminate those waypoints that aren’t of use to you and load only those into your unit that will be useful.

Looks like all you will still need in addition to the cable connector holder and unit switch is a trolling motor mounted HDSi transducer: XTM-9-HDSi-180-T This is the same as the transom transducer except that it comes with a trolling motor adapter. You could use the smaller Compact Side Imaging transducer with your 997 as it is smaller but you will give up some sonar resolution in doing so.