VEXILAR PRO VIEW DUCER

I got the flx-28 this year. Like it thus far. Question is… My old flasher had a 9/19 degree cone angle (duel beam) and in my fish house. In 25-30 FOW I could pick up the set lines in the hole next to me, or my buddy jigging in his hole a few feet away. While this was always kind of annoying having other things besides my jig flashing in at times, it let me know how big of a “window” I was looking through.

Now with the vex and the PRO DUCER… it is supposed to be able to switch the cone angle based on gain. I usually have the gain on 0 with a walleye spoon in 30 fow it is so sensitive… And I no longer see the set lines next hole over or buddies jig at all….

So question is how does this ducer work for sure? What is my cone angle in 30 FOW with the gain at 0?

Well I don’t have anything to back up my claim, but I believe the whole “cone adjustability” thing is nothing but snake oil.  The Pro View has 1 crystal, this we know. The crystal determines the sonar cone or lobe. In other words you cannot make your cone bigger or smaller by adjusting the gain. Sure you can increase the sensitivity of the outer edges by cranking it up, but guess what, now you also increased everything else. It’s sort of like trying to listen to music on a station with a lot of static, you can turn it up to hear the words better, but now you have static blaring. IMO the transducer is nothing more than a single beam 9 degree, a very good single beam, but it’s not a magic crystal. If you want better performance throughout all depths a tri beam is a better choice you will however give up some deep water resolution.

dtro hit it on the head. its a highly overrated transducer as far as i’m concerned. the new and improved tribeam is way better.

and to answer your question about the cone coverage at 30 ft. 9 degree is about 5ft diameter and 19 degree is about 10ft. So with that proview you will only see jigs about 2-3 ft to one side or the other. You will see your own jig very good though.

That makes sense from my experience. Thanks for the clarification. Disappointing, I guess I thought I was upgrading units but in reality I down graded… Having a 9deg. cone is kind of a hindrance when popping holes and trying to locate fish.

I guess it makes sense why a 1/12 oz jigging spoon shows up with multiple bars of the highest return on ZERO gain.. makes it tough to decipher the size of fish coming around the lure.

Was not a fan of the Preview on my FLX28 so I picked up the Tri-beam and now its fantastic!

I prefer using the 9 degree for most my vexilating. I have a 12 and a 19 that I use occasionally. The tri beam IMO offers muted feedback and rather unreliable performance reading swim baits like jigging raps. I feel there are blind spots with the tri beam.

The schtick with the proview is that by cranking the gain, you open up lobes of secondary harmonics. The 9 degree is the absolute best ducer for fishing 0-2′ from the ducer because of this, not something you’d assume considering it’s a narrow beam.

I have a love-hate relationship with my Proview. Absolute best hands down in 25 FOW or so. What I don’t like is having to put it in LP and turn the gain down in shallow water, but it works like a charm when done. The feedback is awesome and it makes reading bottom relatively easy with the narrower beam. What I have notice when fishing shallow on the FLX is to change to 3 colors, it gets rid of lots of clutter.

I had my 28 it last night in about 13′ of water, in auto mode it would read and than keep resetting, also when I’m in the shack I like to dead stick and jig, and it is annoying not being able to pick up the dead stick to set depth having to constantly move it to the other hole, on the bright side I do love the unit when using it when I’m using one pole

Ill start out by saying ive never owned a vexilar but am not averse to them, as such though, ive often read about their many varieties of transducers with much confusion. How is a chap supposed to make sense of so many options? Kinda the same thing with the different vexilar models – its not too clear to me what the difference is between all of them. Anyway, carry on…

YouTube has some great tutorials on Vex transducers. I love my Pro View. I can punch holes and gauge fish and structure like never before. I scan by setting the gain up and once honed in set it to where my lure is green on the display. When I fish two poles I just punch 3 holes, middle for the Vex and the two outer for one deadstick and one jigging. Increase the gain until both lures are green… the one that moves with jigging is my jigging pole lure, the stationary is the dead stick. Now when a fish moves in the question is which bait is he interested in? The only way is with a camera…but wait, what if I punch 4 holes and place 2 Vexs in the outer holes and adjust each to its own lure? Sounds insane huh…what are you really expecting out of your electronics? KISS

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I have a love-hate relationship with my Proview. Absolute best hands down in 25 FOW or so. What I don’t like is having to put it in LP and turn the gain down in shallow water, but it works like a charm when done. The feedback is awesome and it makes reading bottom relatively easy with the narrower beam. What I have notice when fishing shallow on the FLX is to change to 3 colors, it gets rid of lots of clutter.

we had no issues in 20+ feet of water. it worked well (except for the OP’s issue, but we don’t do that very often)

shallow water the proview was just a turd. there was no good marriage between turning the gain up enough to “widen” the cone angle vs not having your jig take up 6″ of water column. even in lp/weed mode. we fish in less than 10′ so often that my buddy switched to the tribeam.

not being able to clear the screen on the vexilars is the main hindrance for me regarding their units and shallow water.

there is a guy i know who has a proview on a fl18 and runs 2….count them 2 supression cables on it to be able to get it to work they proper way in shallow water.

What am I expecting out of electronics? I expect for $675 plus or minus… When the company say the transducer is adjustable from 9deg. to 30deg. that is what you are going to get.. Im sure you use a 9deg. transducer on your boat as well? Because it excels at locating fish? Do you want to have a contest to see who can graph more fish you with you 9deg. or a boat with 19deg. See who wins.. The fact is unless you are fishing lets say 30/40 ft or deeper.. a wide cone angle is better for most guys more often than not.
I am well aware that if I drill 3 holes right on top of each other I can get two or three lines and a camera inside a 9deg cone. Not sure why you would want to do that, but maybe your techniques are different than mine.

A choice of a narrow and wide beam is almost always going to be a better solution for a multispecies/multidepth fisherman. Honestly, I think it’s pretty tough to find a better mechanical flasher than the LX5 (although the ICE55 is close). When I had my LX5 there was only 1 time in 5 years in which I was disappointed and that was one time I was on Superior fishing in 200+ FOW and the Marcum was useless. Don’t get me wrong, I really really like my FLX28, and Vexilar is a great company with great customer service but not super stoked about how the ProView is marketed and how it performs. Luckily most of the water I fish is 20+ so it doesn’t affect me a whole lot.

so when you buy a vexilar does it come with a pro view ducer standard? and you have to “upgrade” to a tri-beam for more money?

Do they offer a FL-28 packed with the TriBeam transducer?

Just from a quick search through their website and a few others, it looks like the 28 only comes packed with the proview. Tri-beam appears to be an extra $130.

Or a Tri Beam can be had for $85 in the classifieds from fishwater!

yikes! so a Vex 28 with the ducer people rave about will cost you north of $700! wowzers

my buddy called vexilar and they swapped it for no charge.

I thought you could exchange the proview for a differenct ducer? Maybe i am mixing up the transducer swap program for humminbird?

Anyway, Here is my story about the proview. I have an FL-12 (which for those that don’t understand the vex series, its just an fl8 with a flat screen), i got it 8 years ago, been a great unit, came with a 19 deg cone angle, two things about that transducer sucked: 1) in over 20 FOW it was just too wide for my liking 2) it was terrible for interference with other units, i mean terrible. I think i banged the ducer on the pavement by accident once and broke the crystal, so i did some research and ordered me a tri beam about 3 years ago and honestly i thought it wasn’t great. Toggling between the crystals yeilded some oddly different results, i felt it performed quite sub par of my 19 deg but it did help a little with IR. Then my tribeam broke, turns out this was a common failure and i contacted vex, then replaced it with whichever transducer i wanted, they talked me into trying the new proview and i have been using it for about 2.5 seasons….here is my review:

I rarely fish over 30 ft, most of my fishing is done 8 to 25 fow, some under 8.
First thing i noticed is this transducer does not get bothered by another flasher at all, the other day i had my buddy put his marcum in the same hole as me and couldn’t get it to show interference. This alone was huge for me.

I felt right away the transducer does an awesome job at 15 ft and deeper. 8-10 it is solid and quite usable, i actually don’t put it in LP mode at this depth, under 5′ ft can be a challenge and this is where i have to go LP and crank the gain up and make my jig look massive, but it doesn’t bother me that much, i can still tell when a fish is on it and it is serviceable. If i fished less than 10′ all the time i would recommend a different transducer. I never got to use the 12 deg ducer and i think that is probably the best all purpose transducer. Can someone tell me if the tribeam has been re-tooled since about 3 or 4 years ago? I thought that sucked.

I was told by Vexilar they went back to their original manufacturer they used before they had the problems with a “new” manufacturer that provided the “Red collar” at the bottom Tri-Beam of which many broke and Vexilar replaced for consumers when they called into Vexilar. The newer Tri-beam has a “Red” bottom but if you put the transducer on a flat surface you cannot see the red at all. I have been very happy with my Newer Tri-Beam!