A fish finder is a generic term for an electronic device that uses sonar (SOUND NAvigation RAnging) to provide an image of what is under water. It does not help you find a map where you can find fish, but it will help you decide whether a place is a good place to fish or not.
Fish locators are available in a wide variety of sizes, from wrist watch size units to devices that need to be mounted on a boat. Of course, the smaller the fish finder, the less information will be displayed, so you need to decide what is the balance between portability and functionality. We will take a closer look at the portable and fixed fish finders in another Fast Fish Finding module.
How do fish finders work?
To better understand how search engines work, it is good to first highlight some of the basics.
The fish finder sends sound waves through the water. At the source, these sound waves are narrow and usually expand to form a cone. This is what is called a ray. When a beam encounters something “different” (a solid object like a fish or the bottom of a lake), it bounces back to the fish finder sensor, which converts these minute echoes into an image that you can interpret on the display. Some of the advanced fish finders will have more than one bundle so that you can get a clear idea of what is happening under the surface of the water, as well as the general direction where the fish is (left, right, front, back). A wider cone will give you a wider coverage area and, therefore, preferably a narrower cone for shallow water.
If you are a recreational fisherman, you may not need dual, triple or side optics. Again, if you usually go fishing in different places, you may want to have such opportunities.
TIP. If you are not sure how many rays you will need in the future, why not choose a model that you can upgrade along the way, as you will find what works best for you.
If a fish passes under the ray of a fish finder, it usually appears as an “arch”, as untreated sonar with fish usually looks like. With time and experience, you can generally tell which fish is nearby, depending on the type of images you get from a fish finder. For example, slow-moving fish will have thicker arches, while very fast swimmers will look more like a dotted arch.
Some of the more sophisticated fish seekers will even have software to guess from the interpretation of the sonar readings, displaying the fish icon instead of the arch. It’s up to you to decide if this is really what you really need. Some fishermen actually prefer the challenge of interpreting sonar returns.
In addition to showing fish arches, a fish finder can help you find fish in other ways. Sometimes you can catch more fish by learning to use these other functions than relying solely on your fish finder to discover fish arches. You will learn more about this in our next Fast Fish Finder Facts installations.
1) Converter - an electronic device that rejects sound waves from objects (for example, fish or the bottom of a lake) and converts them into electrical signals, which can then be interpreted as an image.
2) Display - where the image collected by the converter appears.
