Wow, I haven't been on TT in a while, last login was April 2008, crazy. I'm also surprised that there are no other threads here. Anyway, I'm beginning the process of researching fish finders for a new purchase. I'm in no hurry to make said purchase, I may even end up waiting til very late in this year or even 2012. My fishing situation is one that prevents me from making a purchase easy. Here's the deal, I fish in a reservoir where no power boats are allowed, just row boats that have to stay on premise. My fish finder has to be portable. Now I know that they make portable units, the one I've been using is an old Eagle that I got from Cabela's somewhere around 2003. It's worked well for me but I want to upgrade. Now I'm seeing all of this down imaging and side scanning stuff that I have never paid any attention to before and I have to say, it all looks interesting. I'm actually not even considering the side scanning because of the cost at this point. The down imaging units align with my budget more which caps at about $700-$800.
The real issue though is that I haven't seen any portables that offer this tech. Now what follows comes from someone who is admittedly a noob in such matters so please don't flame me if I sound stupid. It would seem that making any standard fish finder a portable fish finder, would only take conversions in transducer mounting and power cable connections. I have no problem doing so with the transducer but the power thing has me wondering. I'm not at all familiar with the way the cables connect to the battery on a unit that is stationary in say, a bass boat. Initially it seems like it should be simple but I don't want to assume that.
Then there is the matter of power supply, can I just use one of the little 12v rechargeables that I'm currently using or are standard fish finders rated differently? Again, I would think that I could use the little battery, but I guess these new big bright units using DI tech and color and GPS just has me wondering about power solutions.
Ok another thing concerning the DI tech, perhaps I should be thinking of this first because this could be a deal breaker. I've read the description of one of the Lowrance units and it said something about "ideal" boat speeds are 8 mph and below. So I ask, how far below? As you might imagine I'm not gonna be going too fast rowing, I have no idea actually what my rate of speed can be rowing other than slow. Is there a too slow?
I would really really appreciate any feedback. Really even if someone wants to point me in the direction of a resource to find out more info., that'd be great.
EDIT: I use the term "standard fish finder" to mean one that is mounted on a boat permanently as opposed to portable.
A million and one Fish Finder questions
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Toadslayer72
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thelatrobe33
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Re: A million and one Fish Finder questions
http://www.basspro.com/Humminbird-140c- ... 4/-1441798
The above looks to be along the lines of what you're looking for. You just need a 12V deep cycle battery, and the hookups will be standard positive and negative terminals like any other marine electronics. You could surely run it all day on a group 27M size battery. Since you want just down imaging you shouldn't need to worry much about the speed.
The above looks to be along the lines of what you're looking for. You just need a 12V deep cycle battery, and the hookups will be standard positive and negative terminals like any other marine electronics. You could surely run it all day on a group 27M size battery. Since you want just down imaging you shouldn't need to worry much about the speed.