Im now informed that my ,ok cheap, hummingbird 398ci si only records the image and not the data. as im not into fishing but wanted to map a very small area of the sea bed in sussex,no mention of this in there sales blerb.

Hi Seaminx,

Did you receive this information from Humminbird? The online manual for the 398 suggests that it is possible to record sonar, but I have no experience of the unit. Maybe someone on the forum does?

One option might be to record your track, which will give you depth and position, but not sonar. This is enough information for bathymetry, but not bottom composition or the sonar viewer. To use your recorded trail, you need to insert a writeable SD card into your card slot and select the menu option "Export all Nav Data". You should end up with one or more .HT files, located in a folder called "Matrix". These HT files can be selected for import into ReefMaster.
Matt

Hi Seaminx,

Matt is right - I just looked in my 2014 Humminbird catalog and the 398CiSI has all the same features as my 598CiSI, except for the smaller screen on the 398. Your unit displays your "tracks" on the screen (GPS view), but you MUST save them to the internal memory BEFORE powering down your unit or you lose all depth data. After you have saved your tracks internally, you need to download them from the internal memory onto the SD card. You can do that on the water or after you get home. Next: all screen shots and side-imaging recordings are automatically put on the SD card, because the internal memory of the 398 is not big enough for SI recordings.

Once you become more familiar with your 398 (read the manual, it explains how to record and save in detail). Hope this helps.

Lou

Yes I did save the record on the sd card and it did save but in the form of son file and idx files. the only information I could extract was a video clip on humviewer and a track on google earth ? Data files were on a saved as hummingbird files which on loading from the sd file into hummingbirdpc nothing was visable ?

Thanks
Jean

Hi Jean,
SON files are exactly what you want for ReefMaster. There should have been a folder called RECORD, and within that there should be some files with a .DAT extension, named something like R0001.DAT. Also present should be folders with the same names as the DAT files, but without the extension. E.g. R0001. In those folders you should find the SON and IDX files. When importing into ReefMaster, you need to select the DAT file.
See how you go, and if you have any issues please try to post a screen-grab of your folder structure showing the files that were recorded on your HB.