My chart has a depth range of 0-60ft, major contours at 5ft, and minors at 1ft and I generate minor contours in the 0-40ft range. When I export the map to gps I get files 000.HT through 007.HT. I have been able to discern that Files 000.HT through 004.HT contain minor contours and files 005.HT through 007 contain major contours. File 005.HT corresponds to track projectnameC0 in my Humminbird unit and when I set the colour of this track I see that the majors at 5,20,35 etc take on this colour so I'll assume that RM combines every third major contour into one track file.

My request is that unless there is some limitation with Humminbird units, RM create a separate track file for each major contour, and group of minor contours so that I can configure each major contour and group of corresponding minor contours to be displayed in a different colour. This would greatly aid in navigation. An appropriately named file (as it appears on the unit) would be a bonus also.

We have no control over track filenames for HB; they are always 000 -> NNN.HT. All we can do is set the name of the track, which you can then see in the unit when you need to set the colour and style.
We could export a separate track for each major, but that would often result in a very large number of tracks - 12 in your case, but for some maps many more. There is a limit of 50 tracks in total for most HB units, and the effort involved in styling them track by track in the unit would be considerable, and also the range of colours available on HB units is not really wide enough to provide different colours for every contour (although this may have changed with more recent units?).

The "colour cycle" option (which it sounds like you are using) is our attempt to solve this issue. What is does is create three separate tracks at alternating major contour depths. E.g. if you have contours on 5 metres, you'd get a track for 5, 20, 35 (C0), another for 10, 25, 40 and another for 15, 30, 45 (maybe more than one .HT track file per CX, if there are more than 21k total points for those levels). With three alternating tracks, you can set three colours which is enough to discern the direction of a depth change.

I'm not ruling out an option for a track per contour level, but I'm not sure how useful it would really be.

Matt

Thank you for your response Matt. The reason that I ask for this feature is that on my HB unit I see only contours and depth changes. I have no idea what the actual depth is until I pass over it with my sonar. The body of water that I fish has numerous small reefs and knowing for sure that a reef tops out in < 5ft of water, not possibly 20ft or 35ft is a critical piece of information. I think that any effort in setting a colour for each major contour and group of minors in the unit would be well worth it for me. By the sounds of things you are already using a value of 3 when determining track separation so wouldn't it be a simple matter to make that a user selectable value (in my case 1), warning of the aforementioned issues and limitations of course.

I'll have a think about it and see if we can add an option, although I can't promise that it will be soon.

One thing you could consider is to make a separate user map for these shallow contours; create a user map with your map contours using the right-click Add to map/contours/New user map option from the contour view (hide minor contours beforehand, if you just want majors). Then open the edit window for the new user map and just select and delete everything over a certain depth. You could then export the remaining contours as a single HB track, which could you style as you like.

I ought to add the usual disclaimer at this point, which is that you should not rely on ReefMaster output for navigation, and in particular you should not assume that just because shallow depths do not exists just because are not shown in an area of the map. With any significant interpolation at all (and there is always significant interpolation), we just don't know.