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Random Quote: Boatowner's prayer. Please dont let my widow sell my gear for what I said I paid for it.
As much as I like the way my LCX-15MT has performed this season (sonar only, no GPS) , it's been acting up with increasing frequency and I finally yanked it out and returned it to Lowrance for warranty service today (purchased October 2001, professionally installed in a new boat April 2002).
Symptoms:
1. Sometimes when I turn it on, I get the usual "LCX-15MT" screen, then it goes blank and gives me an error message, "Program is corrupt. Please contact customer support." I was usually able to get it to start up properly by turning it off, waiting a few seconds and starting up again, but not always.
2. I sometimes get either an obviously incorrect temperature reading or it flashes "32 degrees F". Again, I was able to get it to work by cycling the power, sometimes, but both problems have appearing more and more frequently in the past few weeks.
I called Lowrance customer service on Monday, and the gentleman I talked to suggest I try a hard reset for problem #1. When I told him about problem #2, he thought I'd have to send it in. I decided to try the hard reset first, then call back if it didn't help. Hard reset means hold down the Zoom In and Zoom Out at the same time, then press and hold the power button until the map of the US appears. Did this Monday night, same problems still there.
I called Lowrance again on Tuesday, explained the problems again and my attempted quick fix, and this time they told me to send it in right away. They didn't want my transducer (thankfully). I've had great results holding bottom under power and getting good images of structure and fish when it's working.
So now I'm flying half blind for a while until I get a replacement. The old unit went out today, Wednesday, July 17.
Now you see, if you had bought a Furuno this would have gone quite differently. The fish finder part would have continued to work no matter what, but when your water temperature reading crapped out the folks at Furuno would have told you nothing and Airmar would have refered you to GEM, who would have denied anything was wrong and then proceeded to try to sell you a new transducer for twice what you could buy it for from a Persian goat merchant. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_rolleyes.gif[/img]
Thom
"I command thee, O fish of the ocean, rise to my bait"
Next time you should bypass the middle men and go directly to the goat merchant first. I bet if you buy a case of cheese, he'll give you a better price on the transducer.
I discovered one benefit of having my FF in the shop: There's a nice cubby hole in my dash that's perfect for keeping a sandwich, bag of chips and a hat handy but still protected from the elements.
fuzzy, did they upgrade your code first? The first couple of revs really did have some problems like you described. I cant get away from
poor code, at work or home! My lattest code for the WAAS upgrade has been fine though, 2.1 or 2.2 I think.
My software was version 2.1.0 and the guy on the phone said that one was more or less "bullet proof". (yeah, right) The current version is 2.3.0 and the updates all seem to be related to GPS. I only have sonar on this unit.
The current version is 2.4. One of the things it does is let you replay the sonar track AND GPS track in simulation mode. Thus, you can watch the depths change as you watch the boat move along the GPS track. Using the overlay, you can get it to display the position changes too.
A replacement LCX-15MT was waiting for me at the door when I arrived home from work yesterday. I plunked it back it the boat, took it for a test drive last night, and everything seems to be working well. The operating system in this unit is version 2.5.0 (version 2.4.0 is available for download at the Lowrance web site).
Lowrance customer service gets a gold star for no hassle, speedy turn around on this. They had me back on the water in about a week and a half at mid-season. It's too bad there aren't more businesses that operate this way.
Lowrance is tops when it comes to customer service. I also think they do have a superior product. My old LMS350 reads bottom at 1600 feet when out swordfishing with no problem.
Lowrance LCX-15MT returned for service 
