Transducer location and types

What does everyone think of shoot through hull transducers vs. externally mounted? Also, what about universal Min Kota; vs mounting a unit specific transducer.

Shoot through the hull you will lose sensitivity (it all depends on the install the better the install, the lesser the losses), personally I won’t do it on that virture alone, but to some the idea of not having it expose to the elements (stumps and such) with no chance of breaking if off seems to far outweigh the loss of senstivity. As a generalization Bass guys tend to shoot through, walleye guys almost always prefer the transom mounting, I suspect the walleye are a little more reliant on the fish finders.

I do think most PRO’s are ok with the Universal mount transducers for their TM’s, myself I didn’t seem to notice any downsides versus and lowrance transducer and the universal.

How abou fish arches versus the symbols. I do not show arches, but turning on the fish ID I get tons of symbols on the TM and none on the unit at the helm. Both units have identical setup

Arches in a lot of cases are kind of mythical, conditions need to be pretty much perfect to get arches, you need the right boat speed, right transducer angle, the right graph speed, and still you may not see a good arch. The fish ID mode just tries to interpret the graph for you, you kind of need to take the leap of faith and turn it off and start watching the graph, you start being able to notice things like pods of bait and the big fish hanging around underneath them. I actually see more of blobs of color on my graphs that indicate fish. You can also see things like thermoclines in the water that will show up on the graph and indicate where there are dramatic differences in water tempurature, you can also see how the fish are relating to the thermoclines. Generally speaking my graph speed is a fast as it will go along with the ping at 100%, and that will in most cases give me a better pic of what the fish are doing than arches for say. In general I’d say turn the fish id off, focus on the raw info on the fish finder screen, stare at it long enough and it should click for you, you’ll never want to go back to fish ID mode. (btw I find fish ID is terrible for accuracy)

Let me see if I can dig up a fantastic sonar article, that opened my eyes a lot more.

Here check out a link, from Doc Sampson’s website, Doc’s known as a tech wiz, he offers courses and seminars and DVD’s on how to use you sonars to their fullest abilities. Plenty of people sing the praises of his courses, I had a chance to catch a quick glimpse of his class and it was very helpful.

Lowrance sonar

And Doc’s site

http://www.hightechfishing.com/

Thank you this just what I need.