dizzyfish

Hello, I have read alot of your forum topics about fishfinders, and your members obviously have alot of information regarding them. I am hoping you can help me. I am looking at purchasing a fishfinder, but unusually it will be used on multiple boats - my own foldable dinghy (pike fishing and light sea angling), reserviour boats (pike/trout fishing) and hopefully a sea kayak (hoping to purchase Ocean Kayak trident some time this year). Before I get into techie questions about transducer location/attachment - I have some simple questions regarding fishfinders which may seem stupid/simple but no-one has answered :- Q1. I thought looking at the images of fishfinders, that they gave a contoured view of the bottom to the left and right of the boat (with the boat being in the middle of the display). However, after looking further, it seems that the display scrolls, and is made up of the history of foward movement. ie. If the boat is stationary for a period of time, then a flat horizontal line will eventually be drawn across the bottom of the screen. Is this correct ? Q2. If this is correct, then what is the point of having dual frequency/wide scanning units ? It seems to me, that if I am correct, then you cannot tell from the display, where the fish/bottom features are, in relation to the boat. ie. all you know is that they are within the SONAR beam cone somewhere (could be to the left or the right, or directly under the boat !!). In fact, it seems that in a way, you are worse off with a wide angle 90 degree 83 khz beam, because all you know is that there may be a fish within 30 yards of the boat, somewhere to the left or right ????!!! Q3. Again, if I am right on Q1, then what IS being drawn to show the bottom at any given instant - is it the highest point within the scanned area (ie. the highest point on the bottom in the 60 degree slice beneath the boat) - or maybe the lowest point ? I would really like someone to help me with this before I go on to ask about units/transducers/attachments. Sorry if the answer is obvious, but if I am right, then I think a fishfinder is probably a waste of time and money, and I would be better off with a cheap digital depth finder.

When your broadband link is dropped what message do you get ? There are many reasons that the link can be dropped, but the most common are - contention (too many people sharing the same link), ISP problems - ISP servers crashing, attenuation (bad signal to noise ratios on local loop), host problems - one of the most commonest is the yahoo type toolbar add-ins which many people use in their internet browsers (Internet Explorer etc). If you have windows updates switched on (bad idea) - very often these IE add-on's can cause the browser to crash intermitently/spuriously - after IE has been updated following a windows update. Hope this helps.

Can anyone advise me on buying a portable fish finder ? Primarily for use whilst trout fishing - but I also have a small rowing boat which I use for river pike fishing and estuary sea fishing - so I would like to be able to use it there also. Main considerations are :- Battery type/life, Tranducer type - suction cup or I have seen some which are mounted on the end of a pole type thing which is attached to the side of the boat, side sweep/dual frequency Many thanks.