Thanks to one of our beta-testers for experimenting, and finding out the following.

Note that this "feature" is completely unsupported by Navico, and your results may vary. In particular, there is no guarantee that you will get the same colours as shown (or any colours at all). Try your maps out in one of the freely available Lowrance emulators to see what results you get.

Older Lowrance units are limited to the "Common" colour set, which is just the first 31 colours. Although you can make some nice maps, there are only a limited colours available for producing nice colour gradients.
Using colours ids that are "off the chart" can actually produce some undocumented colours in the finished map. The table below shows the results on an LMS 527c emulator.
Note that if you choose these colours when creating a user map (or user-defined palette) you should ignore the colour shown in ReefMaster, and just go by the ID number.

Also note that you cannot access all of these colour codes from within ReefMaster (e.g. 31 - 39), so if you did want to use those, you'd have to export your map in shapefile format and change the COLOR attribute to match the required ID values. This can be done in a GIS program such as qGIS.



If you find any more colours that work, or get some different results for different units - please report back to this thread!

I would like to explore if there are any more colours on my Lowrance lms522 that I can use for the display of my depthcharts. Especially colours that help to produce nice gradients are of interest. Is there any kind of testfile on which multiple colours with their id numbers are displayed so I can check what colours they produce on my lms522?

Kind regards,

Mörrum

Not that I know of Morrum, but it's a good idea. I'll see if I can create a simple 16x16 grid with filled square for each of the 256 possible colour values.

OK - here's a simple 16x16 grid of 100m cells, starting at lat/lon 0,0 (just to keep things simple).
This zip file contains the shapefiles - just build in the IMC to create your AT5 map. This file will contain a lot of colours that likely will not show on your unit. I don't *think* this can cause any damage, but if you do try this, you do so at your own risk.

Here's the grid in RM:




Please let us know if you find any more useful colours, however I think for the LMS most of the usable ones are already detailed in the first post of this thread.

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the files! I'm just a new reefmaster user so I'm not very familiar already with the program.I haven't been able to generate an A5 map with your zipfile. Is it possible to send just a A5 map that I can directly copy to my LMS522 emulator instead of the shapefiles?

Thanks a lot!

Mörrum

I've updated the zip file at the original link to include the generated AT5 file. This is generated using Atlas 10.

Hi Matt,

That's great. See how the colours work out on my lms emulator (see attachment)! Especially in the blues, greens, reds and yellows there are apparently much more shades which can be used. Would it be possible to make in Reefmaster some custom palettes for lms users? I think that will be a tremendous asset for reefmaster itself because lot of users of older lowrance units might get interested also!

Just my two cents...

Just for the other forummembers with older lowrance units. I use this palette. Feel free to use it for yourself!

Somehow I didn'n succeed in adding the palette file. Another try!

Too bad! The forum doesn't allow palette files to be attached.

Hi Morrum,
I think if you put the file in a zip, it will be allowed. There range of file extensions allowed as uploads is limited. An image would be nice as well :)
Matt

This is the palette I'm using.


So does it look on the unit. For now it's sufficient. But I hope it will be possible to get a palette with beter gradiënts. If anyone can give a quick tutorial how to use the other colours by changing the colours id's in Qgis for example, that would be great!

If would be even better if future releases of reefmasters would incorporate palettefiles which were specifically develop for older lowrance units!