I've spent a good part of the last day and a half running V2, and overall loving it. There have been bumps and bugs along the way because its changed, but outcomes are all positive. Now all I do is create shaded relief maps of a 90 mile long lake for fishing. That's all. Shorelines, islands, and shaded color contours. Pretty basic compared to some of what I read about. I fish this lake about 120 days a year to depths of 200 feet. The highlights so far:

1. I Absolutely love the water level offset feature for each project. My lake fluctuates 20-30 feet a year. Now I will have the true depth, instead of constantly adjusting in my head. I correct all my tracks to a "full pool" elevation so I can get the actual lake elevation, and correct the project from there. I'll have several maps for several different lake levels as needed. This was the one change I looked forward to more than all the others combined. OUTSTANDING!

2. The Layers panel is great. I'm still playing with adjusting the light direction for the shaded relief. Moving it really changes the perspective. Vertical Scale? I don't even know what that does yet. And brightness. Its like photo enhancing for my map.

3. The ability to toggle and adjust the map area square is a big improvement. I can get the map area "just right" in relation to my shorelines.

4. Bigger maps and more stability? I haven't had a crash yet, and have created larger and more maps on V2 than I could on the earlier version before it shut down and I had to start over. So far, no crashes. Its still slow on my system, but I'm running it hard with 1350 tracks covering around 300 miles of shoreline. (Going to try and put the whole lake on one AT5 shaded relief!)

It's taking some adjustment to different ways of doing things like importing 20 island files. I had to combine them into one file on Google Earth (thanks Matt), but now they are good to go. I'm enjoying being able to keep one workspace open and one project open to create different AT5 maps for different sections of lake. It keeps the same settings (palettes, water levels, contours. . . . ) for each project when I keep the program open. One thing I learned is to uncheck isobaths when making a shaded relief map. I guess its overkill, but worked better for me without making isobaths or vectors. Adjusting the depicted contour ranges on the map is now done through palette selection and creation instead of a setting. That took a bit of set-up, but once they're done, they're done. I've made several for different depth ranges. Uploading, editing, and storing the SL2 files from the sonar has changed, but again I'm getting it. Seems simpler overall.

One big change I found out the hard way was that if you convert your SL2 files to CSV for storage purposes, use the "feet" setting instead of "Meters" if you're making maps in feet. Before, the conversion was made in meters for whatever reason. Not sure why, but its different now, and that makes more sense anyway. My first map displayed about 3 times too deep using the settings I used in RM1.

In general, I've found moving on from one project to the next in the same workspace is smoother. Moving from one mapped area to another within the same project is very smooth. And yes, the layout functions all seem a bit smoother. Maybe it's the newness of it all, but its working great.

Still a lot of new features I need to figure out, but I have at least eight AT5 maps I've made for the lake, and they're all beautiful and perfect. The wait for this made me a little crazy, but now that we have it, I'm lovin' it! Thanks for the upgrade. So far, for me, its as advertised.

Thanks for the feedback TJ!

This is still "early access" - there may be a few wrinkles, but hopefully not too many. One thing we haven't had time for yet, and plan before the big release, is a series of tutorials to ease the transition, as well as fleshing out the manual a bit. So at the moment I'm afraid you are winging it a bit, but do please post any questions on the support forum.