That said, the transducer is rechargeable, so a battery pack could be used to charge it relatively quickly. The app uses phone battery up pretty fast as well. The only things I don’t like about the Deeper is I can’t use my phone and the sonar at the same time, and the battery life of the transducer is usually less than four hours the way I use it. It also shows temperature and has a variety of viewing modes. Quality of the sonar picture is much better than I expected-better than the Humminbird mentioned above. The Deeper uses an application to serve as the interface between the Bluetooth transducer and your smartphone. It is designed to be cast, but I just tied it to my tube with a short piece of Dacron. The transducer is a sphere about two and a half inches in diameter. It is extremely compact in that all you have is your phone and a transducer. The only one of this type that I’ve used is the Deeper fish-finder. The third type of fish-finder solution is those with a wireless transducer that uses your smartphone or tablet as a display. I have since found that it is possible to cut open the transducer, but minor electrical surgery and soldering is required to access and change the battery. If Humminbird would have made transducers that allowed battery changes, I’d probably still be using their unit. What’s more, when you opened a new transducer is was impossible to predict if it would work for one month or six months. You had to buy another transducer for $39 or so. The transducers were built so you couldn’t change the battery when it died. This system had another problem, though-one which was extremely frustrating and which Humminbird seemed unwilling to address. I resigned myself to being content with depth and temperature. It showed depth, temperature and bottom, but the detail was nothing like the Cuda. This system was really easy to use: Launch float tube, open float-tube pocket, toss rubber ducky in the water, push power button on display, done. It’s designed to be cast, but for float-tube use, we simply tied it to a two-foot length of backing and attached it to our tubes. The wireless transducer for the RF-15 reminds me of a green rubber ducky from a distance. I used this system for a couple years, and then my friend Bob Andres showed me his Humminbird RF-15 Smartcast wireless fish-finder. Though it was functional, it was just a little too much work to set up and take down. However, it was a bit unwieldy to set up, kind of sloppy, and was a pain to put away at the end of the trip. This system worked well, once I was on the water. I then attached the power leads to a 3AH 12 volt battery. I rigged a transducer mount using a bungee cord and a piece of PVC tubing about 18 inches long, bolting the display to an electronics junction box and stuffing the cords inside the box. I wanted a fish-finder that would show depth, water temperature and fish at a minimum and still be somewhat compact as I sometimes hike into places to fish. The first fish-finder I mounted to a float tube was an Eagle Cuda 168. An application provides the interface between phone or tablet and transducer. There are three flavors of fish-finder devices that can be used on a float tube: a traditional wired fish-finder, which includes a display with cords that go to a transducer and a power source the wireless fish-finders that run on batteries and connect to the transducer via a wireless signal such as Bluetooth, and finally, wireless transducers that use a phone or tablet as the display. One thing that has always been problematic, however, is finding a fish-finder and mounting solution that works well on my preferred craft: a float tube or pontoon boat. A long time ago I realized that a fish-finder isn’t just for boats, and that they greatly add to my ability to figure out lakes and make effective presentations to fish. Subtle changes on the lake bottom are often key to success in stillwater, yet such structure is often invisible from a pontoon boat or floattube. The flat, wide expanse of water gives few clues as to what lies beneath or to where the trout might be, but a fish-finder helps. There is a bit of mystery in the depths of lakes.
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