Deeper Smart Fishfinder Review (Ice Fishing Focused)

I did some testing on this unit, which is the only smartphone fish finder that has an ice fishing mode, which offers a 290kHz signal, 15° cone, and circular and vertical flasher display. It has some really big upsides, like price, size, weight, no cords, flexibility on screen (smartphone, tablet, mount wherever you want, etc). Makes it really nice for hole hopping. There are some limitations for the “sit in one place for a long time” style of fishing, mainly due to a non-removable battery, some signal lag which I measured, and lack of certain functions like interference rejection. I put together a review structured as the following:

Unboxing
Ice Shanty Testing
Hole Hopping Testing
App Features
Technical considerations
Conclusion

which is the only smartphone fish finder that has an ice fishing mode
WRONG – FishHunter has better separation and the flasher mode for ice fishing

From Deepak Bassi when i inquired about the engineering and feature differences:
Compared to Deeper

– Adjacent to the circular flasher, FishHunter shows high-resolution, zoomable Raw Data whereas Deeper has a static vertical flasher. FishHunter’s Raw Data split screen shows you history where as Deeper is simply a vertical representation of the same instantaneous flasher data without any history.
– FishHunter stores both regular and ice fishing data for playback. Deeper only stores non-ice fishing data (can not playback ice fishing data).
– FishHunter has transducer power control where the user can set Low, Medium and High gain to improve sonar imaging depending on the environment, no such transducer control options on Deeper
– FishHunter has range control (33ft & 66ft for Ice Fishing) to enhance precision according to depth, Deeper does not have range settings and likely uses a one-size-fits-all setup for all depth ranges.

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Cool, thanks for posting. I couldn’t find any information at all about the ice fishing flasher on the FishHunter website. It must be brand new. With the Deeper, you can choose between different cone angles, but the power is always on max. You can adjust the sensitivity as well.

The thing about all of these options is, they are all easily added with firmware and software updates, and competition will probably force each to adopt the best features currently available in the other. Probably the best way to test them would be a side-by-side comparison to compare the hardware capabilities. The Fishhunter is about 22% heavier and advertises a longer battery life, so it seems reasonable that they might have a similar or higher powered transducer.

Do you have one of the units?

http://www.fishhunter.com/

I would think one would have to get it below the ice to get the best results.

bee wrote:

I would think one would have to get it below the ice to get the best results.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work under water. The reason why is that water is much denser than air. That surface reflects the bluetooth signal, and you will disconnect. It’s an unfortunate limitation of any such sonar. Heck, even my Sony action camera loses WiFi communication under water. I can look at the remote view on my smart phone until I stick the camera 1″ underwater, then it’s gone.

Thanks for the review.
I like the ultra light feature of this unit but with only 4 hours of run time per charge I would rather buy a Marcum Troller 2.0. Keep in mind that with the Deeper you also are running your cell phone or tablet battery. If you are only fishing for 2-3 hours at a time and are hiking into more remote lakes it sounds viable. Otherwise I think it would only frustrate me.
Does it have the option to carry additional batteries so you can swap them out?

I thinks that’s an awesome product. I am really surprised it really does function that well. However I don’t have a smartphone and if I did I would likely be the guy to send my fancy phone down the hole, that’s the only reason I would not be very interested in this.

Wharf Rat wrote:

Does it have the option to carry additional batteries so you can swap them out?

No, that’s one thing I really hope they implement in the future, though. It only charges with microUSB. So even though I normally have a portable battery pack on the ice for my camera gear and cell phone anyway, I’d need to fish blind while the unit charges.

grprahl wrote:

The Fishhunter is about 22% heavier and advertises a longer battery life, so it seems reasonable that they might have a similar or higher powered transducer.

Do you have one of the units?

I have three of them. 1 of the older models and 2 of the newer. The weight difference is minimal.
As for battery life, I get the majority of the day with no problem. However I have a sealed 12V 12amh battery with a cigarette lighter/adapter on it. Can charge my cell phone, transducer, our use spot lights off of it.

It seems to me carrying a 12v battery defeats the purpose of going light. The battery is about 2/3’s of the weight of a flasher unit. I put this one in the same category as using your smartphone with a lake master app as your go to GPS unit. It would be a good lightweight backup or to bring on a fly in trip, but as your #1 depth/fish finder, not so much. This is just my opinion, I am sure that some people are using their smartphone for this application and having good results. I am old school, and have been taught, use the right tool for the job. Just remember, smartphones don’t float, and when dropped on the ice or fishhouse floor, will always end up down the hole.

It seems to me carrying a 12v battery defeats the purpose of going light. The battery is about 2/3’s of the weight of a flasher unit.

The battery is mounted in my clam flip over anyways. Its not like I’m carrying around a battery just for the sake of bulking up the tone in my arms. Its there for lights at night, recharging stuff, weekend trips where I don’t have access to electricity. Just like in one of my deer stands, I have a set of batteries for the radios, cell phones, dome light, and so on.

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Randy Wieland wrote:

It seems to me carrying a 12v battery defeats the purpose of going light. The battery is about 2/3’s of the weight of a flasher unit.
The battery is mounted in my clam flip over anyways.

I do pretty much the same thing usually with my portable power source. It has 13,000mAh and weighs 10oz. I just make sure that all of my accessories run off of microUSB.

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Hello guys!

If you have any questions regarding Deeper Fishfinder, please do not hesitate to ask and our Deeper team will be happy to assist you with every issue.

Tight lines!