bobco
02-13-2002, 11:27 AM
From other post thom talks highly of Furuno 600l , anybody using this unit on inland freshwater or is it a deep water unit? does it have wide angle transducer for shallow water use?
Bobco,
You know, I really don't know how well suited a 600L would be to the sort of fishing you all do simply becasue I really don't know exactly what it is you're looking for with the bottom box.
To be sure the 600L has greater sensitivity and target discrimination than any of the less expensive recreational machines around, that is not the question though. The real question is do you need what it can provide and if not do you want to spend the money one costs for capability that you will make scant use of. For instance you probably don't need the depth one of them is capabile of. I use one and shoot to 600 feet without breaking a sweat, depending on the water conditions it will shoot to 800 or so before it starts to get patchy, but on nice days 1,000 feet is not uncommon. The best it has ever done was to shoot to just slightly over 1,400 feet and hold bottom for a while. This is in saltwater of course and performance will be better in fresh water. Now the reason I mention this is that for my type of fishng I spend a lot of time looking for odd bottom structure, or wrecks and such. Of course bait is important to me to but I don't know how important it is to you to see suspended small fish. I look for it not because I can get my baits down to a school of bait fish, but just to know to keep trolling in the area, where there's food there is usually something around to eat it. I look for theroclines too, and I don't know if you all do that.
For shallow water operation I really don't know if one would suit your needs either. They are very very good about discering bottom hardness, but that's the color of course. They also have the ability to define a return echo strength in the color of your choice, so you can do what some manufacturers call white-line or gray-line or whatever name they give it in their units, but with the 600L you can make it any color you want, The things are good down to about 2 feet, and then they loose bottom. Of course that is a function of pulse repetition rate, pulse length, and the range scale. With the Furuno range scales are user defined but the pulse length and pulse repitition rate are a function of that range so it pay to put a little thought into setting one up. The screen redraw rate is also user selectable, and you have choices that range from projecting one scan line per every 16 sonar pulses to a rate of 2 scan lines per ever sonal pulse - quite a range. Of course all the other parameters are user selectable too, so you get to set it up to suit your needs.
Actually for us, and I know full well that I don't use a depthfinder as much as you guys do, the machine is much more valuable as a water temperature gauge and thru-the-water speedometer than it is a device to show bottom or fish. I keep a fish alarm set on ours most of the time that will pick up any fish we pass over that is between 20 and 100 feet below the boat. I do that more as a matter of curiosity than anything else though.
When it comes to beam width, well this ones a pet peeve of mine. There is more misunderstanding of what cone angles really are and how they effect your ability to see targets than any other subject about marine electronics. Of course the basic truth is that there really isn't any important difference betwee the view for any standard transducers. That's because the cone angle is really a function of transducer size and frequency. Because they all are about the same size and they all shoot at about the same freqeuncy(s) they all really have about the same cones. Really, think about it. All machines that shoot at 200 kHz or there abouts shoot at somewhere around 15 degrees and all of the machnes that shoot at about 50 kHz shoot at about 45 degrees. One or two degrees difference is meaningless (although a lot of guys harp on it) and in the end it really doesn't define what you can and can't see on the screen anyway.
So, back to the point. I don't know if the 600L would be the machine for your fishing needs. I know that if I was going to set up a boat for fishine in the lakes or rivers around here (and I'm thinking about doing that) I would pick up a Furuno LS6000 (in 200 kHz) myself and if I got odd looks from guys who had never seen one before (and I can assure you that would be the case around here) I'd just smile inwardly and go about my business.
Thom
bobco
02-14-2002, 06:58 AM
Thom, thanks for your detialed response. I have just bought a lcx15-mt and really did not look at the Furuno, frankly because I never heard of them for inland water and I did not realize you could get such a nice color lcd for that price. Maybe buyers remorse is setting in but I was real curiuos how is would perform in shallow water ie. less than 100 feet most of the time. I mainly use my sonar for vertical jiggin in 20-60', need to have sensitivity to see 1/4 oz jig and fish chasing it!