Water Depth Sensor?

So I've just recently purchased and am using the Tempe sensor. Very nice!

I noticed in the manual on the garmin there is an entry for water Depth. Obviously a different sensor and most likely hard wired in to the wired bracket.

Id love to experiment with this on my kayak. Has anyone hooked up the right sensor to the 700? Which sensor is it? Or is this more like a place holder feature and thy never released a sensor?

says needs the right nmea 0183 sensor ect.. anyone try this? figure it out?

0 TIMI01 over 2 years ago

Water depth? Where is it? I can't find this Item.

0 LMychajluk over 2 years ago

NMEA 0183 is a marine networking protocol. It usually involves connecting the 2 data wires that are probably already on the power cable of the Montana (sorry, I have a 650, I"m assuming it's similar w/ the 700). Though I think all the Montana line supports NMEA 1083 networking, no one at Gramin seems to know anything about it.

As for the actual sensor, it's usually part of a sonar transducer, which connects to a chartplotter / fishfinder. The plotter will then send the data to the NMEA network. There are standalone transducers just for depth, but you'd still have to power them and mount them. Look at some of the first few here: https://www.airmar.com/productinfo.html?category=NT&name=NMEA%20Transducers

Honestly, the cheapest way to go about this would be to buy a cheap fishfinder w/ transducer. This is the smallest model Garmin offers:

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/739009#overview

Technically, if you connect the data wires on the Montana to the data wires on the Fish Finder and enable the comm options in the menus, they should start talking to each other, at which point the depth data should show on the Montana. But, once you have the fish finder, the Montana would be redundant, as you can just use the FF.