I’ve had a couple inquiries/PM’s about which I like better – not sure I have the answer people might expect/hope for, but will cut/past here how I responded:
First, I’m primarily a bass fisherman but have targeted pike, walleyes, white bass and crappies at times this past year. I have had Livescope for 3 seasons and 360 Imaging for one. This was the first year I used them together. Much of my opinions below are generalities and there are always exceptions.
Livescope: Absolutely excels in the spring pre-spawn period where for me, 360 Imaging isn’t worthless but not very useful IMO. Outside of spawn beds (which I don’t target much, and you can just sight fish with good polarized sunglasses anyway) fish aren’t set up on/near structure yet, they are roaming and that is where Livescope kicks tail. Seeing schools of crappies, white bass or other species moving around is lights out with a jerk bait. You not only see the fish, but also what depth they are at, how far down they are suspended, etc. I also found walleyes just off the emerging weed line on Opener and caught a limit. I’ll post a picture below of a large school of white bass in 16 fow, about half way down. I could figure out whether to use a shallow or deep jerk bait a lot easier once I knew their depth. Livescope also is awesome in down view for drop-shotting as the season goes on.
360 Imaging: I didn’t get much benefit from it until post-spawn when the fish set up on off-shore cover, drop-offs and rocks. Pre-360 I could always find a concentrated boulder field but struggled to find broken/chunk/scattered rock even with side imaging (I could find it on SI but didn’t always successfully pinpoint it when fishing). I was amazed this year how I was able to find some isolated areas and catch more than one fish. Finding the big boulder field is a no-brainer, but you can really key in on specific rocks – the biggest one, or one on the end of a point, etc. I even found a sunken picnic table on the Mississippi in 18 feet of water and could drop my jig right right through a missing plank after a few tries. Was great target practice to learn depth perception, distance from the outer rings on the 360 graph, etc. When it got hot this Summer and fishing was really tough, finding bottom structure with a Ned or football jig was sometimes nothing short of incredible.
Both: Livescope didn’t come much back into play for me again until Fall when fish started to transition and move again. But at that time, it was a great combo with 360 to see rocks or sunken trees and then see fish moving around it with Livescope to see if anyone was home.
A couple other general observations:
I was surprised how little the two technologies overlapped. Rarely ever got benefit from them simultaneously.
Both technologies were good to see/track the outside weedlines. I had heard some people previously say one or the other is better – but both work well.
Sometimes big fish (or 2-3 together) look too good to be true but you can’t get them to bite. Wish I had an Aqua-Vu to determine if they are rough fish which they probably are.
Besides a jerk bait bite, I seem to catch more fish now when the lure slowly gets into the bite window and gradually moves versus – fast retrieve. Confirms I have always fished too fast. I had much better results with finesse applications. I have been a long-time critic of the Nerd-Rig (slow, tedious, last resort) but I learned it this year and it absolutely saved my bacon time and time again when I put it in the spot-on-the-spot.
Fish rarely sit still in one location very long. You have to be in the right spot at the right time. These two technologies absolutely help you do this.
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So the question I get a lot is if you had to buy one, which would you? Wish I had an easy answer, but I don’t. If you fished one way or the other as described above – roaming fish vs. fish set up on structure/cover – you could pick one over the other. Unfortunately for me anyway, the expensive answer is both. Neither is cheap, but kind of like when you added automatic windows to your car in the 90’s, you’d never go back to a crank up system now…
Glad I purchased them both and am looking forward to next year to learn them more ~
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