The Elite FS series is Lowrance’s middle-of-the-road line of fish finders, a compromise between the affordability of the HOOK series and the feature-dense HDS series. The Lowrance Elite FS 9 is the biggest member of the Elite FS line, and it’s got a lot of good things going for it.
All the hits you expect from Lowrance are on the Elite FS 9. Excellent mapping and chart compatibility? Check. A solid transducer? Check. Imaging, CHIRP, and tons of other features? Check.
This is an all-around solid fish finder; it is not the most exciting or revolutionary on the market, but it is great at what it does.
The technical specs for the Elite FS 9 are great, if not mind-blowing. There are tons of supported operating frequencies (including low CHIRP), a beautiful screen, and a great internal GPS; all very good things!
| Max Depth | 1000 ft |
|---|---|
| Range | 300 ft SideScan / 300 ft DownScan |
| GPS | Internal, high-precision |
| Frequency | CHIRP 50/83/200/455/800kHz |
| Transducer | Active Imaging 3-in-1 |
| Screen | 800 x 480 backlit WVGA |
| Maps Included | C-MAP Contour+ |
| Memory Card Slots | 1 Micro SD (32 GB) |
| Max Waypoints | 3000, 100, 100/10,000 |
The Lowrance Elite FS 9 has a beautiful display—at 9”, you can see it from quite a distance, and it’s well-illuminated, giving you a wide range of different viewing angles. This makes it an excellent unit for boats where more than one angler will want to use the same fish finder.
The size of the display is a huge boon. Lowrance has included multiple panel displays on the Elite FS 9; this split-screen functionality means you can display two or three different apps simultaneously. Four has become more standard in recent years, but three is usually all I personally need—navigation, traditional sonar, and down or side imaging.
All of the features you’d expect on a high-end fish finder are here, too; you can adjust brightness and contrast, change color palettes, and more. There’s also an adjustable backlight, so you can fish day or night, rain or shine.
The interface of the Lowrance Elite FS 9 is intuitive and functional. Well-laid-out menus are paired with a hybrid touchscreen and button controls. Most of the navigation is done via touchscreen; I wish there were more button controls (or a joystick) for when the screen gets too wet, but it’s not the end of the world.
The buttons that do exist on the unit have a number of functions. You can:
The FS 9 is fairly feature-dense, but the easy-to-learn, intuitive controls take some of the stress out of learning how to use the unit. We’re almost always impressed with the user interfaces that Lowrance develops, and the Elite FS 9 is no exception.
The Lowrance Elite FS 9 has excellent sonar compatibility, a fairly good out-of-the-box transducer, and lots of sonar display options. Let’s delve a bit into each:
For sonar compatibility, the Elite FS 9 can handle CHIRP sonar from 50 kHz (Low CHIRP) all the way to 800 kHz. That leaves you with many options for transducers and frequencies; the unit has you covered from deep-water fishing to imaging in shallow water. That means you can spend less time swapping between fish finders and more time fishing.
You might find it takes some time to find the sweet spot between all of the different sonar options; in my experience, it’s best to use a lower frequency with a wide angle when you’re scouting and then a higher frequency when you’re actively fishing in shallow water. For deep-water fishing, you’ll almost always want to use a low frequency.
The Active Imaging 3-in-1 Transducer included with the Lowrance Elite FS 9 is a pretty great all-around transducer; it supports Medium and High CHIRP (83/200 kHz) as well as 455 kHz and 800 kHz frequencies for imaging. While this doesn’t give you the super low CHIRP you might be looking for if you’re into deep-water fishing, or the super high imaging frequencies offered by some manufacturers, it does leave you with most of your bases covered.
The sonar display options are fairly standard—you can zoom in and out, use split zoom to display the full column and an enhanced section, replace sonar readouts with fish icons, adjust sensitivity, frequency, and more—great stuff.
All in all, I’m pretty impressed with what Lowrance has done here. The Elite FS 9 might not be the most powerful fish finder on the water in terms of sonar, but it leaves you with a lot of different sonar and transducer options, and all the features and functions you could need. Well done!
The imaging features on the Lowrance Elite FS 9 are a lot like the sonar—solid, if not mind blowing. With the Active Imaging 3-in-1 Transducer, you get 300 feet of imaging below the boat with DownScan, and 150 feet per side with SideScan.
This means you get clear, detailed images with the unit—you can see everything from a school of baitfish to the individual fish you’re looking to catch—in detail. I love to use DownScan and SideScan to look for structure that fish might hide around; by knowing what kind of cover a species likes to use, and how deep they like to hang out in the water column, you can catch a lot more fish.
The only real downside to the Lowrance Elite FS 9’s imaging is that you’re capped at 800 kHz. There are more powerful transducers out there that offer clearer, more precise imaging; some recent models even offer frequencies in the MHz. While the Elite FS 9 doesn’t go quite that far, it still offers excellent imaging that will help you catch more fish.
There’s one last imaging feature I thought I’d mention—StructureScan! This feature basically overlays the images you’ve taken through SideScan onto one of your charts. This can be handy if you’re trying to develop a big-picture idea of how all of the structure under a body of water connects—and that can help you find your next perfect fishing spot.
The mapping capabilities of the Lowrance Elite FS 9 are excellent. For starters, the unit comes with one of my favorite basic map packs of all time, the C-Map Contour Plus. There are almost 25,000 different lakes across the US and Canada covered by this map pack, all of which feature 1-foot contours. You may not need another contour map pack again—here’s the full list of Contour Plus lake maps.
The Elite FS 9 offers great compatibility, too—you can use most C-Map and Navionics charts with the unit, including C-Map Reveal. You can also use the Genesis Live tool to create and share your own charts.
I’ve always found the maps on Lowrance’s units to be fairly impressive, and the Elite FS 9 is no exception. There are tons of features to help improve marine navigation, both on lakes and in coastal areas, and you can always upgrade to a more powerful chart with the excellent compatibility.
Lots to like here.
Here at Fish Finder Tech, we love tethering all of our toys together, and you just can’t do that without great networking options on your fish finder.
The Lowrance Elite FS 9 does an excellent job of offering many different networking options. They include:
There’s only one port for Ethernet and NMEA 2000, but that’s no surprise given the size of the device; it’s pretty sleek. The only real miss here is the lack of NMEA 0183 support, but fewer and fewer consumer devices actually use 0183, so it’s not that big of a miss.
The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are as reliable as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth ever are (quite reliable and not so reliable, respectively), and the Ethernet and NMEA 2000 ports provide solid, high-speed connections. I’m very happy about the networking on this unit.
Given the Lowrance Elite FS 9’s wide range of networking options, you won’t be surprised to learn that there are several features I haven’t covered yet in this review; they all depend on what toys you have available.
First, the Elite FS 9 has ActiveTarget compatibility. ActiveTarget offers live sonar, which means you get real-time images, as opposed to the slightly delayed images you get from Active Imaging. It’s basically as close as you can get to having an underwater camera that sees all around your boat—without actually needing an underwater camera.
You have to buy an ActiveTarget unit, of course—and products sold separately make up all of the other features I want to talk about. You can, for example, use Autopilot by connecting your Lowrance Elite FS 9 with a Ghost trolling motor. You can also connect your fish finder to a Power-Pole anchor.
There are radio features, radar features, and much, much more—Lowrance has truly designed the FS 9 to be a hub for all of your marine electronics.
And so, we find ourselves at the end of this Lowrance FS 9 review. I think this is an excellent mid-tier fish finder, one of the best on the market at its price point. With incredible networking and chart compatibility, a solid out-of-the-box transducer with the Active Imaging 3-in-1 transducer, and a well-designed interface, it’s a unit that will work beautifully for many anglers.
I think anyone looking for a reasonably priced high-end fish finder/chartplotter combo should consider this unit. Undoubtedly, it will make your fishing trips more enjoyable if you don’t have a fish finder already. I’d say this unit is an excellent all-arounder, with solid imaging and sonar, a great design, and some of the best mapping options in the game.
If you’re looking for a fish finder and you want one that does everything fairly well, the Elite FS 9 is an excellent choice.
