Make fish returns stand out

[SHOTGUN RUSS]

One more thing that popped into my head while thinking about this topic is the shallower water you fish the easier it is to know/ figure out where the fish are. The Fish are more likely to cause a shadow and if no shadow then the fish are quite high in the water column (as I alluded to in a previous post) . The shadow is slant angle so the further away to the side the shadow is from the mark of the fish in the water column, the fish is further out to that side. Or Take a straight edge and align the fish mark and shadow on the screen with the boat symbol, this will tell you the angle to the side also. Now I am much more well accustomed with Humminbird's 455, it has full coverage from past vertical on the opposite side to the water surface, and I believe is the best shallow water performance in the industry. Humminbird's 800 and the other manufactures Structure Scan, Side Vue, ect. all I believe are looking more down. The new Mega SI has no appeal to me by drastically reducing range for a better picture. Humminbird 455 has very good usable picture detail already and has good range. I went the opposite route and got the Garmin 260 for the extreme long distance powerful Side Vue for seeing fish and far structure (none of my lakes are mapped so I need to find structure sometimes with side imaging).

[SHOTGUN RUSS]

[QUOTE=Larry3215;8086626]Not quite.

The deceptive thing abut sidescan is that it looks like you are seeing distance to the side or depth under the boat, but neither one is really true.



In the next sidescan pic, you see what looks like a herring ball start starts about 100 ft to the right side of the boat and extends over to about 175 ft and touches the bottom.

Thats not even close to true.



The last donwview shot shows the herring ball is actually almost directly under the boat but a little more on the right side. It does go from about 100 ft deep to about 175 ft but does NOT touch the bottom.


Hey Larry just wanted to make a quick comment on your quote here, what pertains to side view also pertains to down view, you cannot tell what "side" or depth vertically a mark is in the water column. Down view beams like side view is narrow and very wide, there is also never a shadow in down view to give hints on orientation. The only thing you know in down view is distance from the transducer and where the bottom structure is. I just about never use down view other than to verify what you are seeing on 2D(better target separation). A better depiction of a mark suspended above bottom on down view would to have a circle around the whole water column screen at the distance the mark was measured at. Hope this helps, maybe clear up some misconceptions.

[Larry3215]

Good point. Most people dont think about how the fact that the down image cone is usually as wide or wider - side to side - than the 2D cone, effects how things are drawn on the screen.

hehehe Actually, I think most people dont want to know those things. The mfg's certainly dont want us to know! If everyone realized that their "depth" finders were really distance finders - and how that effected everything they think they are being shown on the screen - they would be really ticked off about the advertising for our toys :D

[SHOTGUN RUSS]

Yes very true, only technology right now that seems to be fairly straight forward without illusion would be panoptix(still has marketing hype). Will be interesting to see how panoptix matures (better target separation, more range, less clutter/interference) like the other sonar has over the years.

[Larry3215]

Im looking forward to when you can tell the species - and if they already had breakfast - at 100 yards :)