mnkota or motor guide

[bobberdown69]

looking to get a different trolling motor any one have preference

[CaptainMusky]

In all honesty it will depend what you have for electronics and if you care to dip into the power of linking the electronics to the trolling motor. Beyond the using its sonar on your graph but controlling the trolling motor with the GPS functions. If you want to do that then get motorguide if lowrance and minnkota is hummingbird. Im very impressed with the motor guide xi5 trolling motor. Extremely quiet uses very little power compared to similar terrova and the power steer is lightning fast compared to them as well. Either will work but to me it boils down to whether you want to link to your electronics or not.

I had minnkota for decades so it was a tough move for me but love it!

[h8go4s]

From what I've seen, the MotorGuide Pinpoint GPS feature (linking the trolling motor to the map card contours) is still not released, just a promise. So far only Humminbird is the only brand to offer that capability. Am I wrong? There is a 10-page thread on the xi5 on the walleye central site you might want to search for.

[ClownColor]

Agree with that above. But if you're planning to just use a basic motor without tying electronics up, i'd be leaning towards motorguide. After some research, those minnkota foot pedals are junk.

[CaptainMusky]

The motor guide version of I pilot link is not out yet but is slated to come this fall yet sept I believe. They are rolling it out in concert with the 3.5 lowrance update apparently.

[h8go4s]

Agree with that above. But if you're planning to just use a basic motor without tying electronics up, i'd be leaning towards motorguide. After some research, those minnkota foot pedals are junk.

That's a pretty broad generalization. I have seen no complaints about the Terrova foot pedal, but I know a lot of people, including me, have had trouble with the Powerdrive foot pedal. I don't understand why Minn Kota hasn't redesigned it after all these years. There's another thread on this forum titled "minnkota foot pedal" where I posted my fix. I'll quote it below.

"I took mine apart and cleaned it, re-lubed the white plastic slides that actuate the left-right switch. That worked for a while. Then I did the same thing and also carved off some of the bottom of the actual pedal piece on the left side. That fixed it for 2 years so far. If you look at the slides, you'll see that to actuate the switch on the left side requires more travel than the right side. So modifying the bottom of the pedal to give it more travel works, at least it did in my case."

[mojoputter]

I've had both and I just replaced my motor guide with a minnkota. I fish a lot of bass tourneys and if your going through weeds the minnkota is the way to go, other then that I have no complaints with the motor guide it just didn't go through weedy areas all that well.

[Farley]

We've had both. Right now we have a Minnkota Powerdrive V2. The first few years were good, the remote was AWESOME! then that quit working, replaced the motherboard, bought a foot pedal, worked for a couple more years, never did get the remote working again, now it wont work at all even with the foot pedal.

The motorguide was a pretty decent motor but I questioned thier quality when the motor got slammed down once and the PLASTIC gear broke. Thats what made us switch.

Its a crapshoot either way.

[CaptainMusky]

I can tell you the new motor guide is light years ahead in the quality standpoint compared to the minnkotas that i replaced.