# In need of a good fishfinder.



## Bowdacious (Sep 16, 2007)

I am looking to get a fishfinder for my boat and was wondering what specific things to look for. What is the difference in transducers and dual beam...etc etc.... What kind of things are important and what kind of things are just fluff........ Thanks for your help.


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## Grandpa D (Sep 7, 2007)

This has been discussed here before and I found that there was no condenses as to which finder is best.
I like my Eagle Fish Mark 320.
Your best bet is to go to Sportsman's or Cabela's and look them over and ask a ton of questions.


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## DallanC (Jan 13, 2009)

IMO,

#1 wattage. When I had cheaper finders a lot of junk in the water looked like fish. Later I realized alot of what I thought were fish, were anything but fish. Going to a higher power will give you more accurate readings and show you whats REALLY there. My new Humminbird is 8000 watts. I'd recommend anything 1000 watts or higher.

#2 gps. It might depend on what kind of fishing you do but I've started using the GPS on my finder and it really works well to mark fish in areas when trolling around (my current finder didn't have a built in gps reciever, but it did support plugging an external GPS into it so I bought a $15 cable to plug my garmin into it). It also calculates a more accurate speed vs the paddle wheels.

#3/4/5/6 etc etc features are just really frills and cool things that you think are neat. Nothing really is critical, it just makes things nicer such as screen rez, color vs black and white, internal maps, various views etc.

Everyone thinks their finders are the best of course, but for someone else I'd start looking at models with a minimum wattage, then based on my budget, pick models that offer more features. Dual Beam is irrelevant in our fresh water lakes. Fish are only picked up on the Higher frequency beam anyway... lower frequency is used for tracking the ground in deeper water.

My current finder is the Matrix47 which is a easy to read 3D finder. It shoots out 5 beams in different directions making a "fan" below the boat. It knows which beam hits an object so you know if a fish is on the left or the right of the boat, as well as the conture of the ground.










-DallanC


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