~~ mutter ~~

Actually, you pretty much hit the fastening device squarely on the
flat surface provided for the use of a person with a hammer to drive
said fastening device into the objects to be fastened.

Usually, fish finders aren't set up correctly for the conditions,
transducers are almost always incorrectly installed and in general you
are looking at what was happening, not what is.

Doug is absoutly correct - they help you find structure and read the
characteristics of the bottom.. The rest is understanding the
relationship to the bottom and structure to the family of fish you are
targeting.

Every once in a while, you can see other things, but that comes with
practice.

Later,

Tom

Well, I have the finder mostly to tell my things like waterdepth and
water temp, not really to find fish. and also it just has this "cool"
effect to see in the water and know what swims there....

I think the finder is useful for finding fish in regards that you can
tell if there is no fish at all or if there is generally some where
you are fishing...


My questions are such as:

- Does the transduce just have to touch the water with the its bottom
or does it have to be submerged?


- for the sonar part I need to know things like:

- what makes the return big? is it object size or density?
- what shape of object yields what kind of return? apparently fish is
archs but thats rarely the case in real life it seems ...
- I often have all sorts of returns and speckles and want to know what
it is that creeps under my boat Not so much to catch and eat it but
just out of curiosity. I.e. on my last boat trip I had a relatively
small blob in 750 feet depth in a lake ... it was pretty much
round/square. I wonder what the heck is down there? Maybe it was just
a glitch or noise...
- What effect has frequencey on the echo and return. MY finder has 50
and 200 khz, why does certain frequencies get used and how does
frequency correlate with echo angle?
- 200khz being pretty fast how does boat speed change the return?
- up to what speed is the finder useful for identifying objects in the
water?
- etc. etc.


Matt