Choosing fishfinder package

[daddyb]

Hi all,

We are rebuilding a 26 foot commercial line fishing vessel. We are stripping it to bare hull and fitting new deck, wheelhouse, engine and of course electronics.

A good deal of the year we fish on wrecks for white pollack, a member of the cod family, at a depth of 80 to 160 meters, the mean/most common depth we work at is 120 meters. We very rarely go beyond this depth but it can happen that we go beyond 200 meters. Another part of the year we fish in closer to shore, longlining for various species from 0 to 80 meters.

My last boat was fitted with a Furuno package,the main sounder was a DFF1UHD sounder with CM265LH transducer, running on Timezero Professional. What I loved about this package was the bottom discrimination (only worked well inshore up to maybe 80 meters), and its ability to mark accufish on the map which is extremely usefull. The memory which allowes to scroll back on the sounder screen and the ability to click directly on the sounder image to create marks on the map was also very usefull.

What i didn't like about it was that I always found the quality of the image poor compared to other sounders (worked on a boat with a FCV1150 which had a much clearer image). It was also unable to do PBG on some wrecks, as if the echo was going trough the wreck (will try to attach images).

I was initially thinking of installing a WASSP F3 but the local electronics firm and furuno rep are worried that it will not work very well on my small boat and it is extremely expensive in continential Europe.

After a lot of thinking (and reading this forum ! ) I have been thinking of installing the following package:

-DFF3D for scanning a wider zone when searching for wrecks and aquiring PBG data at a much quicker rate.

-DFF1UHD for marking accufish on map and generating bottom discrimination maps.

-165T/265LH-PM488 DFF3D/CHIRP Combination transducer for pre mentioned sounders.

-FCV1150 with a 2 to 3 kW transducer for the clear easy to read image and its ability to go deeper than the dff1uhd.

Any recommendations on transducers for the F1150 ? Would like to have a high and a low frequency, I have heard that 38 kHz is superior to 50 kHz for marking Saithe/black pollock which is a close cousin of my main taget species. I would like the high frequency to have a narrow beam for manually drawing underwater reefs and wrecks more precisely. I understand I must install two transducers to have high and low frequency over 1 kW.

Does the package seem coherent ?

Thank you for your replies !

 

[C-Bass]

Good afternoon DaddyB,

Thank you for your inquiry.

Couple of things. You mentioned that the DFF1-UHD was not as clear as the FCV1150 so I wanted to try and get more details to figure out what was going on. Do you have any photos you could post of the DFF1-UHD that describes what you were seeing. We learned a while back the the DFF1-UHD can be plagued by noise if the transducer shield wire is not properly grounded. While the manual says the shield wire should terminate in the wago connector of the DFF1-UHD we found in some cases that ground point did not provide a good enough ground to eliminate the noise on the display. We asked those customer to ground the shield of the transducer to the case, many times improving the performance of the DFF1-UHD dramatically. So I guess, what do yo mean by a clear image? Was there noise on the screen? We have found the DFF1-UHD to have an extremely clear image when setup properly and can provide really good resolution for vertical spaced targets.

Aside from that yes, the package that you mentioned should be able to cover many different types of fishing effectively.

Regarding the fcv1150 transducer's to go deep and to find fish deep its all about high output power and low frequency. So for the if the species you mentioned below are deep then it would service you best to have 2 or 3 kw of output power and 28kHz or 38kHz as the frequency. Regarding the high frequency yes, a 2kw or 3kw 200kHz transducer is going to provide you with a really narrow beam angle. Something like the CA200B-8B that has a 5.5 degree beam angle.

Keep in mind that the DFF3D does a great job of providing detail really good PBG maps with high detail, that is the nature of a multibeam. It is not quite as good as WASSP but it is also much less expensive. When connected to TZ Pro the DFF3D draws 50 PBG points across the 120 degree swath. So if you divide 120 by 50 you get 2.4, which means for every 2.4 degrees port to starboard it is drawing a PBG point that is stabilized based on the motion of the vessel.

Below are a couple of examples of wrecks that the DFF3D mapped when connected to TZ Pro.