Home Forums Fishing Freshwater I got the bird from Humminbird

I have the Humminbird 997c with side imaging and have used it a few years in Canada. It worked well then, but I just bought a new battery and wanted to use it on a new lake up north. It flashes on and all the buttons work, but the back light intensity has no effect and the screen is very dark. I can see the screen images with a flashlight, but not on the unit itself. A call to Humminbird "Customer Service" gets me to a woman who says that they no longer support that model. It is not a bulb or LED that illuminates the screen, it is something on the circuit board. This thing was $1,600. ten years ago and I have not used it probably in the last five. Talk about a waste of money and a company who says that they have customer service. Any ideas from the group aside from throwing this thing in the trash?

Unfortunately with consumer electronics you're lucky to get manufacturer support much past 2 years, 5 years you'd be really lucky. It's not entirely their fault, they get their chipsets from a third party and once they've used up those parts they simply can't support the product.

Even with industrial control systems we're lucky to have manufacturer support beyond 10 years which can lead to some very expensive upgrades when a critical part is no longer available and the new systems isn't fully backward compatible with the previous generation.

You're probably best off providing your own illumination for the screen and live with it.

On the flip side, there have been massive gains in sonar technology over the past decade and if you can swing a current model replacement you'll likely be glad to toss your older unit.

Hmmm, this is what I would do before I tossed $1600 away.

Take it to a shop that repairs computers. After all, a sonar is pretty much a laptop pc looking down all the time.
And a circuit board is a circuit board.
Its not like Hummingbird uses secret transistors and such.

You could try Fish Lectronics in Minneapolis. They repair Hummingbird. See if they'll give you an estimate before going ahead with the repairs.

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This actually happened to me and if all else fails, you might try it.
I bought a trolling motor on sale' Used it once and it quit.
Called the maker and because it was an older model they refused to do anything about it.
An outdoor show was coming up so I made two sandwich boards tell about the lousy customer service and paraded back and forth in from of the makers display at the show. I stayed in the aisle so as not to be preventing people to access the m/g display but said loudly "Don't buy this junk"" over and over.
In less than 20 minutes I left with a new motor to replace mine.
The factory reps seemed happy to see me leave.

I like that proactive approach, must remember that.

Thanks guys, I'm back up at the lake and I'm going to give it a go with my lantern flashlight pointed at it to try short term. I wondered about the local computer repair place myself because I'm not believing the customer dis-service person telling me that it is the circuit board that lights up. They control the light panel that lights up and the fact that the thing flashes on for an instant when I turn it on tells me that it might be as simple as a bad solder joint or a loose connection.They do take a beating out in rough water. Lesson learned about buying expensive electronics though. You are on borrowed time if the thing is out of warranty. I enjoyed the the proactive trolling motor approach. Our company use to drop $500,000. just for a booth space at the Mccormick Center in Chicago for a week long packaging show, so the price of a trolling motor to get a guy gone would be a non-issue.

I would try resetting factory defaults. Sometimes this will fix problems.

I thought it might too and when I discovered that I could read the menus with a flashlight, I tried that and nothing changed. Reading on the Internet lots of guys were complaining that they had issues when they updated their software. I never updated anything and have no idea which software version that I'm running. It did what I needed it to do when it worked.

Might try asking at the Humminbird Forums on BBC. Lots of users there.

http://www.bbcboards.net/forumdisplay.php?f=133

Lots of info there, thanks.