Re: Fish Finders NAKED?
Many fish finders are sold without transducers, but I don't know of any that are sold without power cords and mounting hardware. I wasn't aware that Lowrance was packaging any of their units without a transducer though. <br /><br />For most of the better finders you'd find in the salt they are frequently sold without transducers. When you buy one this way it is then customarty to buy the transducer that best suits the use you will make of it. At the same time you can usually buy the same units with pre-packaged transducers from most of the major retailers. In that case you get what are the standard trasducers, though it might be in either an in-hull, thru-hull, or transom-mounted configuration. Most folks just go ahead and order the transducer from the same people they buy the fish finder from - sort of an a La Carte way to buy electronics. <br /><br />The thing is, if you have a rather narrow set of interest in how you use your fish finder then it might be worth the time to look into one of the high performance transducers. <br /><br />It might also suprise you to find out that you can actually work with the transducer manufacturer (I use the singular for good reason) to make a special transducer for your application. Just a couple of months ago a fellow on another message board got a couple of guys together to buy a single production run of in-hull transducers optomized for shallow water operation. The cost wasn't very much more than a standard transducer - I believe 3. guys had them made.<br /><br />There are also over the counter high performacne transducers you can buy. I have one that is optomized for deep water use. It made a big difference in how my fish finder worked. The major manufactur is a company called Airmar, the do their sales through a company called Gem Electronics. They make transducers suitable to Lowrance products (although Lowrance is one of the few fish finder makers that also makes their own transducers).<br /><br />Thom
