The HELIX series is a new line of Humminbird fish finders, freshly released at the beginning of 2015. Although the models in this series don’t bring a lot of new features to the table, they all have a new, more effective and user friendly design. Also, they are significantly less expensive than the previous models with similar features.
The HELIX 5 SI GPS is currently the top fish finder of the HELIX series. That’s because it comes with both Side Imaging and Down Imaging sonar technology, features that provide the angler with a crystal clear view, side-to-side or directly under the boat. These two features alone make the HELIX 5 SI GPS a highly flexible unit, perfect for almost any fishing method, in fresh or blue water.
It has DualBeam Plus as standard sonar, with the 60° / 83 kHz view for a wider coverage, or a 20° / 200 kHz view, with a narrower, but more accurate coverage. For SI and DI, the sonar operates at 455 kHz. Side Imaging offers a total of 180° side-to-side perspective, with a 240 ft. coverage on each side of the boat. The depth capability of this fish finder is 1500 ft., while the Side Imaging and Down Imaging can provide the angler with a crystal clear view at depths up to 100 ft. This unit comes with a standard Transom XNT 9 SI 180 T transducer, with a power output of 500 Watts RMS (4000 PTP).
The head unit of this HELIX 5 has a 5-inch diagonal, 256 TFT color, backlit display. What makes it different from other similar models, such as the 698ci HD SI Combo for example, is the 800H x 480V pixel matrix, as opposed to 480H x 640V. This allows a much better reading of the SI, or split screen view of sonar / cartography.
As the name of this Humminbird HELIX unit suggests, it also has a fair amount of GPS features. Precision Internal GPS and chartplotting with the built-in UniMap cartography package, are some of them. It can store up to 2500 waypoints, 45 routes and 50 tracks (20,000 points each). Although it comes with the UniMap package, it can also support Navionics Gold / HotMaps, via the extra SD card slot.
Other features that must be mentioned here, regarding the Helix 5 SI GPS are temperature function and temperature alarm, selective Fish ID+, SwitchFire, Screen Snap Shot, Split Screen and Wide/Narrow Cone Split Screen and Sonar Recording.
