LakeVu 2021 Update worth it?

[jrfuda]

I have an Echomap UHD 73SV and 93SV. I saw today in Active captain that I can update LakeVu to the 2021 version (currently have 2020 version) for $59. Is this worth it? Are the changes significant enough to upgrade every year? If I skip updating for a year or two is the price significantly higher? I fish Eastern NC lakes, and will probably expand to some Eastern SC lakes and freshwater portions of the ICW and Waccamaw River in SC as well.

[pdxfisher]

It varies by lake. Check lakes.garmin.com to see if the lakes you fish have new features. The one annoyance is that it does not say what is new, rather just what features are there for the new release. You would need to know what features you have now for the lakes you fish and compare them to what is in the new release. I don't know why they don't publish a change log but it does look like there is an indicator for what features are new, but it looks like the new version they reference is 2020.5. I assume this will be updated at some point.

[Todd Driscoll]

You can view this heatmap to see all the locations that received updates by mapping version, including the current 2021.5 version.

https://www.navionics.com/usa/heatmap?type=garmin

[jrfuda]

Thanks guys.

Looks like all but the largest lakes are light on updates but the ICW has quite a few updates.

[Eyehunter83]

I had 2020 version for MN and upgraded to 2021.5. Not impressed with the updated version. Don’t get me wrong, they were good maps to begin with but for the $100 I paid to update I would have expected more map updates, newer lakes mapped, etc. Might want to hold off for a year or two.

[jrfuda]

I ended up being able to get the 2021.5 for free. I had not registered my Echomap UHD 73SV yet because Active captain was being difficult (saying I was a guest). Yesterday, I manually entered my unit ID and got it registered and the 2021.5 maps suddenly showed up as owned. It appears that the Lake view maps in general have rather poor coverage of rivers and pretty much no coverage once you get within a few miles of the coast. I did some digging around and saw that the coastal maps when a decent way inland. At first there was some major sticker shock with small regions of coastline selling for $350 a pop, but once I sorted the list by price instead of what Garmin wash pushing me to buy (the G3 vision charts, which I definitely don't need) I saw the standard G3 coastal maps were $70 off - $149 total. These appear to have filled in the gaps I had before. The vision and ultra charts do not seem like that great of a deal - aside from the high prices, it appears most of the cool features are only useable in Active Captain and not on the actual charts.