The Digital Difference
Ice fishing without electronics is like hockey without skates. Hockey without skates? Unthinkable. Ice fishing without digital electronics? Think about upgrading.
Every sport relies on essential equipment. For ice fishermen, electronics have become as indispensable as a quality rod and reel. And for years, mechanical flashers meant the difference between catching fish and just sitting on a bucket in the cold.
With recent innovations though, digital flashers are becoming the must-have difference-makers in ice fishing.
“Mechanical flashers are what we all started with and what many ice fishermen still use. They’re tried and true – reliable, but fairly fixed in their evolution, with their spinning dials, motors and brushes,” says ICE FORCE Pro-Staffer Brad Hawthorne. “And while ‘good enough’ is good enough for some, many ice anglers, including myself, have seen the need for improvements, additional features and flexibility in the way information is displayed.”
MarCum Technologies’ LX-7 was the flasher they’d been waiting for – a digital color unit that could display a real-time return. For those keeping score at home, returns are delivered in 20 milli-seconds.
“That’s faster than some mechanical flashers on the market today,” says ICE FORCE Pro-Staffer Calvin Svihel. “And that’s paved the way to the revolution we’re seeing now in ice electronics.”
Digital sonar devices like MarCum’s LX-7, LX-6 and LX-9 now allow ice anglers to watch the water column in multiple ways, simultaneously.
Traditionalists can choose the familiar, circular, “flasher” display, but there’s also vertical and chart modes. And all three display modes can be mixed and matched onscreen to suit an angler’s needs.
“It’s like going to Burger King – you get to ‘Have it your way,’” says ICE FORCE Pro-Staffer Chris Granrud.
Features impossible to implement on mechanical flashers abound on digital units. They include:
Target Adjust, which allows anglers to fine-tune the appearance of targets in the water column without affecting the way the bottom return is displayed.
A user-defined, on-screen “dashboard” that can display your depth, battery voltage, range, gain, interference rejection (IR) and target adjust
Sonar Footprint technology, which displays an area of bottom coverage at any depth, with either an 8- or 20-degree transducer cone angle.
One of the biggest advancements in ice electronics is MarCum’s LX-9, which is turning heads with its ability to display sonar returns and underwater video at the same time, on the same screen. With this, MarCum created a single unit that performs jobs previously done by stand-alone cameras and flashers.
“This completely revolutionizes ice electronics,” says ICE FORCE Pro-Staffer James Holst. “What we have here is the greatest sonar training tool ever created. Imagine being able to see video of a fish eyeballing your bait and seeing that same info interpreted in sonar – at the same time!“
“And as the guys at MarCum love to remind us,” he says, “This is only just the beginning!“
Offering a glimpse under the hood, so to speak, MarCum’s engineer and design team members offer perspective in a video on the evolution from mechanical to digital technology. Pretty cool stuff!
