Re: Electronics???
What are you fishing for and what's your budget?
I'll tell you that if you are looking for bait to find the fish and you have some serious sheckles the Furuno CH-250 is real hard to beat. It's a searchlight sonar machine-looks 360 degrees around boat as well as down. It'll find bait pods anywhere around you. I talked the owner of the boat I run in the Bahamas Billfish Championship to pony up for one and all I can say is WOW! Unit is about 13K.
The only negative thing about the Furuno machines is the fact that they only offer a relatively narrow beam [11 or so degrees I think] on their transduceers at 200kHz. This means your detail in depths of say 40' and less will be inferior to Garmin and Lowrance, who offer 200kHz xducers at a 22 degree cone angle.
Furuno machines do come in dual frequency, so the argument is that you can switch over to 50kHz and get a 37 degree cone angle, but the detail of the 50kHz signal is far inferior to a 200kHz at 20+ degrees.
I had a 582 on my boat and switched it out for a Lowrance X16 for these very reasons. I do a lot of freshwater striper fishing along with the offshore thing and the Furuno machine simply would not mark diddly in 20-40 feet of HOH. I had a buddy who had a Lowrance x85 run around in the same area and he was marking striper and bait everywhere, and I would mark straight lines and blobs.
Hope some of this rambling helps....
Tom.
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