My experience with Humminbird customer service has been all positive. Easy to get on the phone, and really fast service. I haven't had to send a unit in, but I broke a transducer bracket, and they sent me a new one in a couple of days. Online software updates, free Humminbird PC download so you can edit your waypoints without having to push all the buttons on the unit. I transferred my waypoints from my old Lowrance LMS 160 to the Humminbird 797. The Lowrance software would print them, but I couldn't get it to save them to disk. So I had to manually type them in on Humminbird PC, then load them to an SD card and put that in the unit, and presto! transferred waypoints. All the Humminbird stuff worked fine.
The 797 is a really neat unit. You can find all kinds of "Secret Spots" with it and get a better understanding of why your old good spots are good. It's a little tricky to read in shallow water(less than 10 feet), but still works fine. In deeper water it's awesome! I've only used it in the salt once, and it helped a little, but I was fishing in mostly less than 3 feet of water. Bass fishing it has helped a lot. I found an old road bed with bass on it, a school of white bass, some old tires on the bottom, an old sunken duck blind on the bottom, and several midlake humps and creek channel intersections.
