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- A Beginner’s Guide to Reading Your Fish Finder
- How to Detect Bait Schools and Fish
- How to Find Fish Hidden in Structure
- How to Find Fish in Weed Beds with Sonar
- Using Traditional Sonar, Downscan and Sidescan
- Live Sonar: Watch Your Lure Working
- Fish Finder Basics Explained
- Using A Fish Finder Is Easier Than You Think
- How Are Fish Finders Powered?
- Fish Finder Tech Talk
To compilate this guide, we got in touch with fisherman, wildlife filmmaker, and Lowrance pro Romen Dicovski to get him to explain the basics of using a fish finder with the help of five images he took off his Lowrance sonar unit while fishing recently. Romen has deliberately chosen these images to help us illustrate how easy it is to use a fish fi...
Traditional Sonar, Structure Downscan With Fishreveal
The left hand side is traditional sonar imaging, and the right hand side is structure downscan. Left of the screen is the front (bow) of the boat, and right is the rear (stern) in both images. As a general rule, traditional sonar is better for picking up fish arches and bait balls, while the monochrome structure downscan, as the name suggests, is better for picking up structures such as drop-offs or sunken trees. “With traditional sonar, fish typically appear as arches. You can clearly see th...
Sizing Fish Based on Your Fish Finder’s Images
So how are we able to determine that the fish hanging off that rock is big (it’s about 40” or one meter long!)? In general, the thicker the fish arch, the bigger the fish, and if your boat or kayak is still, and the fish is too, the length of the fish arch can give an indication of size. But you have to remember to adjust for water depth. “The deeper the water, the smaller the return – so if you see a big return in deep water, then it is a big fish.” The Ryan Moody Sounder Skills 1 video cour...
Structure Downscan and Lowrance’s Fishreveal
This image shows the importance of structure downscan when it comes to structure and also how useful Lowrance’s FishReveal technology is. FishReveal adds a brightly colored highlight to objects in the structure downscan image that are actually fish. Handy hey? Take a look at the image on the structure downscan image on the right and then the traditional sonar image with the fish arches on the left. On the right of the drop-off, you can see the tall weed beds and the spindly tree labeled on th...
Here we see a very undulating bottom. We can tell it is quite hard or rocky from the yellow color on the traditional sonar image, and what we are looking at here is a rocky outcrop in about 9m of water. “This is a thick weed bed sitting on top,” Romen says. “You have got a fish on the left-hand side sitting above it and smaller fish sitting in the ...
Sidescan Combined With Vertical Sonar
There is lots to explain here. For this image, Romen has the Lowrance set up so the screen is divided in half vertically, with the top half of the screen showing vertical scanning and the bottom half given over to side scan. (For the best split screen setup advice and how to use sidescan effectively, check out the Ryan Moody Sounder Skills 1 course that we review in this post.) So the top half we should be familiar with now – left-hand side traditional sonar, right-hand side structure downsca...
Sidescan on a Fish Finder
This shows the view to the left (port) side and right (starboard) side of the boat, with the sonar beam shooting horizontally out from the transducer. The numbers of the bottom axis are meters from the center line of the boat. As you get five meters (approx 5.5 yards) out on either side, it begins to pick up the bottom. The first thing you see on the left-hand side of the sidescan image is the same group of three fish that we saw in both the vertical scan images sitting off that rock. The ext...
This image was taken while Romen was lure fishingin a river. You can see it is a hard bottom with the yellow there. It is either rock or compacted sand in a river bed. “You can see the lure dropping towards actively moving fish,” Romen says. “They look quite large, but you have to remember that you aren’t in very deep water.” “The fish labeled as n...
Key Features of a Good Fish Finder
These days modern fish finders include the best features – such as structure downscan and sidescan – right throughout their range, depending on the transducer chosen. With Lowrance, Romen says, all this plus the FishReveal technology is offered as standard on all current models in the range: The Hook Reveal series, the Elite Ti2 series, and the HDS Liveseries. The HDS Live also has Lowrance’s LiveSight function, which will be the subject of another article we are preparing. Screen sizes vary...
Hopefully, we have cut through a lot of the jargon and mumbo jumbo on fish finders in the section above. But of course, there are still a range of settings we haven’t mentioned. We are deliberately not going into these here as, in most cases, the automatic settings are usually fine. Romen says with modern fish finders, there is often no need for th...
Fish finders are battery-powered and operate on 12V or 24V DC power. On most boats, the fish finder is wired to the cranking battery with a fuse to protect it. However, for smaller outboard-powered boats and kayaks, where there is no separate cranking battery, an AGM deep cycle or lithium-based batteryis used to power the fish finder.
How Does Sonar Work?
Sonar stands for Sound Navigation and Ranging. Depending on the model you choose, a fish finder can be equipped with GPS, marine radar, and a compass to help you find the way when you’re on a boat or kayak. Fish finders use sound to locate objects underwater. They work by sending out sound pulses and waiting for an echo. The frequencies used vary, ranging from very low (infrasonic) to very high (ultrasonic). As we have discussed, fish appear as arches in traditional sonar imaging.
How Much of the Bottom Does a Fish Finder Cover?
The sonar beam from your transducer descends as a cone beneath your boat or kayak, so the area being depicted gets wider the deeper you go down as the sonar cone expands. The angle (from the vertical) of the cone depends on the frequency the sonar is operating (the higher the frequency, the more narrow the cone).
How Do Frequencies Impact This?
As a general rule of thumb for traditional sonar, when using the lower frequency (50 kHz or 83 kHz), the width (diameter of the sonar cone) of the area of the bottom you are scanning is roughly equal to the depth. In the higher frequencies (typically 200 kHz), the width is more like one-third of the depth. While you can switch frequencies, for most recreational users, your fish finder will self-select the most appropriate frequency. RELATED POSTS: Best Castable Fish Finder – Best Fish Finder...
May 17, 2023 · Table of Contents. However, a common challenge that most beginners struggle with is understanding how to read the screen of a fish finder correctly. Here we’ll show you exactly how to read a fishfinder, and interpret the results to improve the success of your fishing. Fish finder basics.
- Robert Ceran
Jul 14, 2021 · The best way to tell if a fish is larger than others is by the thickness at the center of the arc. Fish mark less as they get outside the cone of your sonar beam. A good tip to know if you have a very large fish, even if it’s on the outside of the cone, is when you see what I call “tails.”.
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Sep 17, 2021 · Garmin. How to read a sonar to find fish. When the sonar signal bounces off a target, it returns the transducer with valuable information. Fish finder signals are so powerful that an angler can...
How Does a Fish Finder Work? Fish finders use sonar technology to help you locate fish and underwater structures (where fish like to hang about). In addition, they also tell you the water’s bottom depth. They work by detecting pulses of sound energy that have been reflected by objects underwater.
May 17, 2023 · A fish finder is a sonar device used by anglers to locate fish in the water column, view bottom structure, and measure water depth. Fish finders use a transducer to transmit sonar waves into the water, and then interpret the resulting sonar returns to generate an image of what’s in the water underneath the boat.
