Raymarine Live: Fishfinder and Sonar Basics

hey boaters it's jim at raymarine it's thursday night at 7 p.m and this is raymarine live thank you all for coming out tonight on facebook and youtube we've got a great episode for you we're going to be talking sonar technology sonar basics transducers looking at all sorts of different options for axiom and element systems as we get started here tonight i see we already have wow we got over 50 people all right a quick shout out to johnnycake johnnycake was our first uh comment of the night we saw that uh right before showtime so thanks for getting on early johnnycake and um i also wanted to give a shout out to all of our teams down at the ska nationals down in fort pierce florida that's going on all this week ska is the southern kingfish association and raymarine has a bunch of anglers in that competition so good luck guys and i hope one of you come home with the big prize so tonight we're going to be talking all about sonar technology and i have a whole bunch of different show and tell items for you we're going to do some stuff on the product cameras as well showing you some setups on axiom and element and of course we'll be taking your questions and comments along the way so feel free to pop those in at any time we'll pause a couple of times during the broadcast to take some questions i want to thank you all who've been tuning in regularly for the last several weeks we're really seeing this broadcast take off and i really appreciate you all sharing it uh with your boating friends and family and letting them know what we're doing here at raymarine live so let's get down to it let's start talking with uh transducers transducers are really the foundation of any sonar system and i brought a whole bunch of them out tonight i have some on the table in front of me i've got some behind me as well because we just have so many different options but let's start with the basics uh transducers basically come in three styles we have transit mount transducers kind of like this guy here this will mount to the transom of your boat and hang into the water this is called a cpts a very basic one we have a transit mount transducer like this guy here this is an rv 100 real vision 3d transducer so significantly larger a little bit more capability inside this we'll talk about what all it can do in a moment but these are examples of transamount transducers the next most common type are through-hull transducers and they come in several different styles and materials as well here's an example of a very basic through-hull transducer this one is made from plastic it's an engineered plastic so it's super strong water tight this one is from a basic navigational depth instrument i think this is from an st60 or st40 series it's a 200 kilohertz transducer and we'll be talking frequency in a second you know exactly what that is all about but this is a fairly simple transducer just for giving you depth in a through-hull configuration there's also more advanced transducers this is an rv 200 which is a real vision 3d through-hull transducer this transducer has all the same capabilities as this big transom mount that i held up a little bit earlier this particular one is bronze this one is plastic you'll also find through hulls in stainless steel the through holes come in different styles as well this is an example of a flush mount transducer so this pops into the hull it sits completely flush with the fiberglass or maybe sticks out by a millimeter or two not very much at all these transducers ideally should be pointed straight down or they may have an internal offset so the transducer may sit at an angle with the dead rise of your hull but the the pulse actually comes straight down out of the bottom of the transducer this rv 200 is a surface mount transducer so again you're going to drill a hole through the hull this stem is going to come through and be secured with a brass locking ring on the inside and the only part you're going to see on the outside is just basically this rubber portion you'll seal it to the hull with some underwater adhesive it's got a temperature sensor in it and it's got all your different real vision 3d capabilities in it these are available in two different configurations this particular one is an all-in-one transducer so this does left and right important starboard side vision channels it does your down vision it does your 3d so it has about 180 degrees of beam coverage on it it also has a high chirp element in there for fish finding and basic navigation sonar um all in a single housing there are some versions of this where you actually get two of these transducers and basically one of them is for the port side of the hull the other is for the starboard side to cover your side vision on a deep v hull so you don't get any blind spots in it they um they also utilize offset elements in them so they are matched to the dead rise of your boat so you put one of these in on the port side of your keel at an angle the other will go on the starboard side of your keel at an angle but internally all the electronics are tilted either 12 or 20 degrees so they're all shooting in the proper direction even though they're not necessarily level with the horizon another type of through-hull transducer something like this this is an airmark chirp transducer inside of a fairing block i believe this is a b744vl transducer and let me separate the pieces for you so you can see it looks a lot like the rv200 it's a bronze transducer it's got a threaded stem on it this is an extra long stem for a very thick hull so it might be for a wooden boat where you might have a lot of thick planking on the bottom now this transducer fits into this fairing block and the fairing block serves to give it some hydrodynamic efficiency so it gets the water flowing smoothly around the transducer it allows smooth flow over the face of the transducer the other thing that the fairing block does is this is what compensates for the dead rise angle of the boat so when this fairing block gets installed your installer is going to take some measurements on your boat for dead rise they're going to take this block and put it on a band saw and they're going to cut it at an angle and half of the block goes inside the hull of the boat the other half goes on the outside of the hull of the boat and ultimately what happens is when the transducer is fitted into the fairing block it will sit straight up and down on the hull of your boat so your hole your boat is going to come through at an angle half the block is going to be on the inside the other half on the outside and that keeps it straight up and down so the beams on this transducer are all downward firing so we want to keep it straight and level for maximum accuracy and the fairing block allows you to do that so it's really kind of two different uh approaches to getting the transducer in the proper orientation in a transducer like this we take all of the guts and we turn them to whatever angle we want them so the transducer just sits on the side of the boat as it is and it works just fine in this configuration we do a little bit of woodwork a little bit of handicraft work with the fairing block we custom cut it to the shape of the boat and this transducer is going to mount straight up and down now the advantage of something like this over something like this is you're going to have a little bit less drag here there's not much of this actually exposed to the water where a transducer like this or even a larger transducer there's bigger ones with bigger fairing blocks um depending on the size of your boat and what you have for an engine configuration it could create a little bit of drag or a little bit of cavitation on the hull so it's just something to consider as you're choosing your transducer i want to show you another through-hull transducer option um this is a little bit larger one this is a uh b755 medium transducer i think is what this one was um these this is also from the tilted element series so this transducer will mount flush with the fiberglass on the bottom of your boat and then these are internally tilted so that the transmitting elements are at the proper orientation to fire downward and what you'll notice across all these different types of transducers is as they get uh larger there's actually more ceramics inside and we'll take a closer look at that in a second and explain what the ceramics all do but basically the bigger housing allows us to put bigger ceramics which makes these more sensitive now there's a third style transducer that's very popular and those are called in-hull transducers and i have an example of one of those here this is an aramar p six uh p79 adjustable inhale transducer so the way that an in hull transducer works is it's actually got two main pieces it has a reservoir and this reservoir gets bonded to the inside of your hull so you'll put some some waterproof uh marine epoxy you'll bond it to the inside of your fiberglass hull you'll actually fill this cavity up with liquid and then the transducer will screw into the top and you can actually twist this and adjust it to compensate for whatever angle it's mounted at so the transducer is actually pointing in the proper direction pointing straight down what's nice about this type of transducer is you don't have to drill any holes through the bottom of the boat to use a transducer like this you do have to have a fiberglass hull these will not work on a wooden boat they won't work on a metal boat but fiberglass has the proper characteristics that we can actually shoot a sound signal right through the fiberglass material and into the water and these work pretty well this is a very small one there are much larger versions of in-hall transducers with much the same capabilities as some of the really high-end uh transducers from aramar and they do get quite large they'll just have a much bigger reservoir or a bigger tank but the means to install them and the basic theory of how they work is all the same let's talk a little bit about a fish finding transducer versus a navigation transducer so fundamentally what a transducer is is a ceramic puck that gets struck with high voltage electricity when we hit it with high voltage electricity it makes a tone it rings and that ring is what's broadcast into the water as an acoustic pulse that sound energy travels through the water hits the bottom of the ocean or the lake or the fish in the water column in between and those return an echo back to the transducer that ceramic actually kind of switches over from being a transmitter to being a receiver and the very very minut sound signals coming back will actually excite the ceramic the ceramic turns it back into an electrical signal that goes to your sonar your or your depth finder which turns it into a number or a picture navigation sounders generally are going to give you a depth readout so something like a an i-40 depth instrument or one of our i-70 instruments it's just giving you a number there's 10 feet under the boat there's 12 feet under the boat there's 100 feet under the boat versus a fish finding transducer fundamentally it has the same thing going on inside it will have a ceramic element or it may have more than one ceramic element depending on its capability but generally the fish finding transducers tend to be a little bit larger a little bit more sensitive and they may have multiple ceramics inside to support different frequencies and capabilities so this is a basic navigation transducer this is also a basic navigation transducer this is a raymarine cpts this supports the high chirp channel only at 200 kilohertz you can do some basic really basic fish finding with this but not nearly what some of these other transducers out here can do so if these are generally used on a cruising boat um a power boat that doesn't go fishing but they're just want to know what the depth is underneath uh this is primarily a sailboat transducer or cruising powerboat navigational sounder versus these other guys here are hardcore uh fishing machines okay i want to show you um some beams let's talk about transducer beams um we're gonna switch for just a second to um our slideshow mr producer man and you can probably bring that up full screen if you want to or i can do it for you there we go so what we're looking at here are the b by one of our axiom uh real vision 3d transducers so the real vision 3d system supports side vision which is our side scanning sonar it supports downvision which is our high definition down looking sonar it has a high chirp channel which is primarily for fish finding and navigational depth and then we can combine together the down vision and the side vision and produce a 3d image out of that so this is kind of what the beam angles look like you'll notice that each beam also has a specific frequency assigned to it um these actually have frequency ranges because they are all chirp transducers and that's a term you'll hear a lot when you're talking about fish finding sonar uh what chirp technology is chirp actually stands for compressed high intensity radio pulse and with a chirp system instead of the sonar making a single tone on a very specific frequency over and over again it actually creates a blast of frequencies or sweep of frequencies so in the case of the side vision and the down vision it's between 320 and 380 kilohertz if you could actually hear it with your ears which thanks fully we cannot but if you could hear it with your ears it would actually wail like a siren you'd hear the tone go up and down and up and down kind of whoop whoop over and over again it's the sound that it would make now you understand why we don't want to hear that sound um you also have your high chirp channel 170 to 230 kilohertz so a little bit higher sorry a little bit lower frequency which gives it more depth penetration now let's take a look at some other views of this so this comparison is based off of a slightly more advanced system this would be like an axiom plus uh multi-function display i'm sorry axiom pro multi-function display or a system that might use an external sonar module so again looking at the top you've got your side vision you've got your downvision you also have your high chirp sonar so with these systems that'll get you down to about 900 feet of maximum depth but then when we we're talking axiom pro or or one of our accessory modules we can start to go into even lower frequencies and every time we lower the frequency on one of these sonar systems uh we're picking up more depth or more range so we could jump we uh jump from the high chirp band into the medium chirp band which is 180 to 130 kilohertz and that can get us potentially down to 5000 feet of depth uh we could go into the low chirp band 28 to 60 kilohertz and with the right transducer and the right sonar driving it you could potentially get 10 000 feet of depth capability so something that's very important to know when you're choosing a transducer is what sonar you're going to be driving it with and what its power output is um there are many different grades of transducers many different capabilities within them and you do want to try to match them up to some extent it is possible to put a very very very high expensive and highly capable transducer onto a sonar that's not going to be able to take full advantage of its capabilities so you could spend a lot of money you will pick up some performance advantage but you could potentially not be getting everything out of that transducer you might be capable of getting just because you don't have the right sonar module attached to it let's take a look at another comparison here this particular slide comes from aramar amar is a manufacturer that makes a lot of the high power chirp transducers that we use on our axiom pro models axiom pro rvx and our cp470 and cp570 sonars they have three different examples here and you'll see the the saw boat on the left is a one kilowatt transmitter uh the boat in the middle is transmitting at two kilowatts and the boat on the right is transmitting with up to three kilowatts of power so the amount of power we put into the transducer directly impacts how far it can go but even more important than the power is the frequency that we're transmitting at high frequency sonar is very much like fm radio if you think of uh fm radio versus am radio your fm radio sounds great uh very hi-fi stereo sound you know you get in the groove listening to your favorite beats you listen to that music on am radio and it's kind of scratchy doesn't sound quite as nice but the advantage that am radio always has over fm is that it can go very very far think of all those am radio stations that you know you can pick them up in chicago um you know when they're and they're broadcasting from new york they can go thousands and thousands of miles with am radio and it's because of its longer uh frequency wave so the same thing plays out in sonar if we can get to lower frequencies that gives us more depth penetration uh let's pause for a second and take a look at some of the questions that have come in i see a bunch of good ones in there mr producer man if you got your eyeball in any of them wanna go ahead and pick a couple so raymond would like to know can through hulls show water temperature or are they only going to show uh the hull temperature uh raymond they do should they do show water temp and just as an example i'll pick this one because it's very obvious where the sensor is this is an rv 200 real vision 3d transducer um this is its uh high precision water temp sensor so this is in contact with the ocean or with the lake so it is reading the water temperature though it is reading it at the bottom of the hull um but it is reading water temperature it is not taking a reference temperature on the inside of the boat it is on the outside of the boat so hopefully that answers your question um pretty much all the through-hulls um have a temperature sensor in them if they do not it is specified um in the description but but pretty much all the through-hull transducers have a temp sensor in them isaac would like to know what's the advantage of running a 1kw transducer versus a 600 watt when paired with the rv 200 okay so rv 200 is a real vision 3d transducer so this one does a lot of imaging functions this is your side vision your down vision your real vision 3d which are all kind of very very visual sonars with high levels of definition um the adding the 1kw or a 600 watt transducer is going to give you a lot more depth capability so the real vision 3d system here does have some limits into how far it can go um it's high chirp channel which is 170 to 230 kilohertz um it maxes out at about 900 feet on one of these transducers and sometimes it's a little less depending on the water conditions but best case about 900 feet uh your chirp down vision which is the high def um sonar for looking at structure or looking for man-made objects in detail that goes to about 600 feet and then the side vision and the 3d are only to about 300 feet if we add a 1kw or a 600 watt transducer we're going to get a lot more depth capability so it gives us a few more channels to play with with that 600 watt sonar you're probably going to be in the i'd say 1200 to 1500 foot range depending on what transducer you go with you bop up to a 1kw transducer uh you could probably hit 2000 feet maybe a little bit more maybe 2500 feet again depending on the transducer there's different models they're capable of accepting that power they have different capabilities let's try one more jim baker would like to know when running the transducer cables on a sailboat where space is tight what to use to protect the end of the cable that's an excellent question jim um when you're pulling transducer cables and we can look at kind of any one of these um some of them can be quite thick and it really depends on what the capability of that particular sonar is that it's attached to um here's a good comparison this is a very typical sailboat transducer this i got this out of a kit that was with an i-40 instrument but you can see it's got a very very thin wire and the nice thing about the other end of it is it just has spade connectors if you really had to you could remove these spades and then reattach them or replace them but they are pretty small all on their own i know what some installers will do on a setup like this is they'll take the entire end of this cable and cover it with a piece of heat shrink tubing um and then they can pull it uh safely through their cableways and chases and then cut the heat shrink off at the end but if you have to reduce it even further you could you could nip those off and that would give you an even smaller cable to run when we look at a transducer like this our options get to be a little more limited this is an rv 100 it's a real vision 3d transducer you have one two three four four channels five channels of sonar going on here maybe even a few more if we count left and right channels of different things the connector for this is much larger that first transducer we looked at had three wires this one has 25 wires in it so if you have to run this through a very very tight place my suggestion is to not run this cable if you don't have to and you might say how are we going to avoid that well this could be run to a network module and then from the network module we could run an ethernet cable up to the rest of the system so for example we could run this transducer to an rvx 1000 which is this guy right here this is essentially a black box version of an axiom so you could run all the thick cables up to this guy and then from here it's a very thin ethernet cable up to your display so that's one way to get around it um you could also use an extension cable it's about the same thickness but it might be a little bit easier to work with because it doesn't have the transducer attached to the other end of it as well that you have to contend with so definitely thicker cables are more challenging but you do want to be protective of the ends as much as you can it really isn't possible to cut that off and replace it it's just really not designed for that there's too many connections inside all right um what we're going to do now is let's take a look at some of the different ways that we can get sonar on our boat i have all my show-and-tell items here kind of taken over let me shift some things around all right so there's really uh let's say three primary ways uh to get a depth finder or a sonar on board your boat the most basic way of all is with a very simple depth instrument right here's a an i-40 it actually has connections on the back uh this little transducer plugs right into it and this is going to give me a numerical readout only of what the depth is under the boat the other way we can do it is with an embedded sonar product so i bring fourth for your consideration uh one of our axiom mfds a really dirty one so this axiom seven has a sonar built into it so on the connections on the back you may remember this from our prior episode uh this big port out here on the end is a 25 pin real vision 3d connector so this does downvision side vision 3d and high chirp all through that but there's no extra modules to buy all you do is take your transducer run it through the boat hopefully you have a nice big cable way because it is that pretty big one but usually you can get that through and it plugs into the back here so this is an example of an mfd with embedded sonar we offer that on our axiom and axiom plus line also on our axiom pro lineup now the other way you can get sonar is through an external sonar module and here's an example of that so this is a rvx1000 this is a fairly advanced one this is basically a black box version of what is in an axiom pro multi-function display so this is just the sonar uh torn out of there into a black box setup and this could be used anywhere on board the boat you can just mount it somewhere where it's going to stay dry but it's got connections on it for a real vision 3d transducer as well as a pair of aramar chirp transducers you can actually connect two transducers using a y cable to this so you can have two bands of high power chirp at one kilowatt you can have um your real vision 3d for downside 3d and high chirp and then you have a power cable and a network cable to tie in there are other variations of these sounder modules as well some are simpler than this some are even more capable than this this is a rvx1000 i have another one here that looks pretty much the same slightly different connections on it this is a cp370 uh this one only has a single transducer cable uh the difference between these two kind of fundamentally this is a chirp sonar system so this is uh sending out those uh blasts uh or sweeps of sound into the water this is a non-chirp sonar so a cp370 sends out discrete frequencies so this one broadcasts at 50 kilohertz or 200 kilohertz you'd use it with a transducer that has those capabilities um this transmits with up to 1kw of power so it gives you some nice deep depths but this is a non-chirp setup but again it has a transducer connector a power connector and a network connector so you can tie it into your mfds you get a lot of people that might choose an axiom or maybe a boat builder installed an axiom onboard their boat that was not a sonar equipped one that happens sometimes if you want to add the sonar capability uh you can do it with an external module without having to change the display out these are also very commonly used with our axiom xl systems those are the really big monitors the 16 19 22 24. they have big screens they have lots of video connections but they actually don't have sonar built into them so you have to use some kind of an external module to feed them sonar information all right i'm going to stick these behind me to get out of the way and while i'm doing that mr producer man why don't you find me a couple of questions all right on the 3d transducer what is the best bottom paint all right if you go into your local marine store uh be that you know your local chandelier or west marine whatever go into the paint section or ask the electronics manager there's a couple of companies that make transducer specific paint i know pettit makes a transducer paint um there's another one that used to be very common called mlr it comes in a plastic bottle and the cap has a brush on the inside but what is special about those anti-fowling paints is they do not have the heavy solvents in them that the typical boat bottom paint has on the bottoms of all of these transducers whether it's the 3d transducers even a basic transom mount transducer they have these rubber windows over the ceramic elements so the rubber windows enable the sound signal to efficiently pass through the transducer but traditional bottom paint the solvents that are in it can actually attack the rubber and will cause it to break down over time so look for either that pettit or mlr or a transducer specific paint it usually comes in a small bottle it's probably four ounces or eight ounces and you can use that to paint up your transducers it's a great thing to do you know if you haul your boat once a year just put a fresh coat of transducer paint on it and it keeps it nice and clean keeps all the barnacles and all the slime from growing on it and wade would like to know if i get a chance could you cover the tuning function of the conical transducer uh let's well let's use that as our transition to take a look at some sonar capabilities on our displays so let me move a couple things around on the table here all right i think we got enough room now so we're going to switch over to our product camera and let's see what we have got here so the first unit that i am going to show you is this is actually an axiom plus um and the reason i am using this unit is it has a pretty good representation of all of our different sonar capabilities on it um i'm going to pop up here to the home screen for just a second just to show you that um to get to any fish finder channel you can actually go in through any of the tabs marked fish finder it actually doesn't matter what color it is or what icon it has if it says fish finder that does get you into the sonar capabilities of the product and the icons change depending on whatever was last used on that channel so we were in real vision 3d so it had a 3d icon but it'll change depending on what you last used it for so the conical transducer uh weight is what we call um high chirp or just sonar so i'm going to bring it up here on my axiom as far as tuning it goes there's pretty much everything to configure it is right here on the corner of an axiom this allows you to get into its adjustable sensitivity settings sensitivity and filtering is basically in here the other way you can get to this if you don't want to use the corner of the screen you can get up here in the menu and you see adjust sensitivity and it takes you to the same place so here's the controls that you have available to you the first one is gain and gain normally runs in automatic but you can make manual adjustments to it and gain is basically an adjustment of the overall sensitivity of the system and how much sonar information we're going to allow into the digital processor in this product so if we increase the gain what you would see on a live system and you'll see a little bit of it in our simulator here is our targets will get brighter but we'll also start to let more uh small targets and more noise into the system so as the gain goes higher we're getting more sensitive um but sometimes that comes at the expense of more noise similarly we can go the other direction we can reduce the gain it will start to take away noise it will start to reduce the targets and if we go far enough it'll even take the good targets away what is really cool about all of the riemarine sonars is that you can adjust the gain while the system is still running fundamentally in automatic mode so it'll take the base gain level for auto and then we can add or subtract just a little bit to it and as the conditions change it'll try to maintain that level of picture that you have desired so if it starts to get very noisy in the water column it says okay jim's running gain plus 11 it'll try to maintain that picture quality even as the conditions are changing around the boat the next control down here this is called intensity and what intensity does is it basically controls the color thresholds on the system here so typically our hardest or our densest targets are in red so we see the bottom for example is a nice hard red target some of our fish may also show up in red if they have a particularly solid sonar return just like the gain we can also run intensity in fully automatic mode or we can run it in kind of a what i'll call an auto plus so i can tweak it outside of the automatic parameters and you can see as i increase the intensity that red color is being applied to more and more contact so it makes the smaller fish appear to be harder targets so it helps me to kind of define them a little bit better and if i go the other way i can start to remove that red color until it only shows on the very hardest targets this could be great if you're on a sandy bottom and you're looking just for the rock for example that's probably what we're showing here we've taken all of the weaker returns out now we're only seeing the hardest of the hard targets in red so we know that that's likely rock or something some other structure down there that's very very uh very echoey to the sonar this is called the surface filter sf is the surface filter and what i want to show you with the surface filter what it basically does is it removes noise only in about the first uh four to eight feet of the water column it's taking out a lot of the noise that is generated by the water slapping against the hull it takes out noise that's created by your propellers churning up the water it takes out noise created by other boat wakes but the range of operation of the surface filter is very limited i'm just going to punch this for a second to get it back to normal let's see if we can get the surface filter to play a little bit here let's turn it down at first so you can see how it has the most impact up in this top section here of the display and it's working at taking out the noise so if you have a lot of fish that are working at the surface but they're getting lost in the wake noise they're getting lost in the chop just from the sea conditions surface filter is going to clean that up very nicely now the last control here i want to show you is this one that says all to auto so what's really cool about axiom is you can get in here and you can tune it and tweak it and play with it to your heart's content and you cannot break it if you get it really really fouled up and you have a hideous picture so you have the gain too high and we have the intensity too low and we have the surface filter jacked all the way up when we get into some really weird picture and you're not seeing any fish this is your bailout button right here all to auto it'll say are you sure you want to do this yes and it puts everything back to its default settings with fully automatic management of all those controls um so you can always get back to where you started um so it's a great feature so while we're here let me explain a little bit of what we are looking at when we're looking at a chirp sonar display so this it always scrolls from right to left so this is your newest information over here okay this is what is underneath the boat right now all of this is historical information this is all stuff you have already run over and it's somewhere in your wake behind the boat obviously this is the bottom so we're going to see all of the undulations of the bottom going up and down and up and down so it could be sand it could be rock it could be man-made structure down there um the sonar will also try to break for us the difference between the bottom and things that are suspended above the bottom so we could be looking at fish in here this could be the top of weeds or other growth sometimes it's difficult to tell and that's why we actually have many different channels of sonar at different frequencies because they all image this slightly differently and we'll look at some of those in a second some of the basic readouts here we have a depth scale down this side so this is 20 feet this is 40 feet we have our zoom control here this allows us to range in or range ouch it also allows us to magnify the display so you can see as i start to turn on the zoom control over here i get a frame of reference of the entire uh depth uh to the ocean bottom and then this box represents what is magnified over here so this allows me to blow things up and get a little bit more detail so i can um activate that simply by hitting the plus button and you can see it begins magnifying everything over here if i want to go back to normal i just keep zooming out until the little side box disappears uh we talked about uh in here to get into your controls to adjust your different sensitivity options so that's just a quick way to get in and get out there's a second level of settings for sonar in the main menu so we hit menu we come down here to the gears but let me show you some of the things we have we can adjust the color palette um the color palette can actually make a huge difference in how the targets look depending on what the lighting conditions are on your boat so if you're out there on a bright bright sunny day for example you may find that you get better contrast with a white background if you're out there fishing at night you might want to have a black background we also have some other alternative options in there we have some gray scales we have copper color they all kind of do different things to your eyes so it's definitely worth playing around with this you may find that there's just one that works really really well for your eyes there may also be one that works very very well for the tint of your sunglasses if your sunglasses have a colorized tint to them some color palettes work better than others i'm going to go back to one of the classic palettes here just show you a couple of other things this is called a scope and a scope this is the the most live version of what is in the cone of the transducer right now the a scope is sometimes called a flasher so if anybody has been fishing for a long long time you might have had an old box that had a bunch of lights on it and when a fish was underneath the boat the lights would light up this is what this kind of digitally mimics is what the old flasher used to do so this actually tells me when a target is in the cone of the transducer it's actually getting hit by the beam and then we see it roll out here onto the display with the a-scope you've got some options in here this is the center position we can actually set it offset so it moves it over to the right side it makes the targets all look a little bit bigger in the a scope we also can show the transducer cone so it just kind of helps to visualize the spread of the beam as the beam leaves the bottom of the boat it gets wider and it tells us down here right now at what are we about 30 feet of depth this transducer has a cone that's about 14 feet in diameter and that'll change dynamically as as the depth increases the cone is going to get wider as the water gets shallower the cone gets narrower depending on your transducer they are available with different cone angles so you if you fish a lot of shallow water you might choose a wide angle transducer just so you're covering more area as the sonar scans some other things you've got in here you've got depth lines and it's it's just basically a marker a reference mark so now i have 20 feet on this ticked line all the way across white line emphasizes where the hard bottom is everything below the hard bottom is mud or silt but the white line shows me where the actual trace of the bottom is this can be helpful if we're trying to break out fish that hide very close to the bottom like this guy right here the white line just kind of takes some of the confusion out of where the bottom is and where the fish start another thing we can turn on is bottom fill some people are not interested in what the character of the bottom is whether it's a very dense bottom or a very loosely packed bottom this just fills it in with a solid color again it helps to discern things that are hovering above the bottom versus things are very close to it in here we also have color threshold so we can also delete colors from the display so this helps in very noisy environments if you need to take a lot of air bubbles out if you're in an area that has very very intense amounts of bait and you're not interested in seeing the bait you only want to see the game fish you could actually reduce the color threshold and take all the smaller contacts out of the display this last one here is scroll speed and this controls how fast the scroll actually updates generally if you slow the scroll speed down you'll get a little bit higher level of detail because it allows the sonar to dwell a little bit more on the targets you get a little bit more information about them in deeper water sometimes people will want to slow it down just to get more information about what's down there in shallow water the scroll tends to run a little bit faster because it needs to update quicker as to what's underneath the boat it will run typically in automatic but if you have a preference you can come in here and set it to whatever you like all right so that is the chirp sonar and so this the settings that we've seen in here will apply to the 200 kilohertz um high chirp um on a real vision 3d system if you have an external module like a 470 a 570 370. the settings all apply to those units as well they all have a similar presentation and you'll have all those different controls for color palette a scope bottom lock all that sort of stuff in there the next one i want to show you is the downvision so this is an example of a downvision display so we're looking at the same stretch of ocean bottom but we're looking at it with a different frequency so instead of 170 to 230 kilohertz we're looking at before this is 320 to 380 kilohertz so higher frequency gives us much more detail vision is primarily used for identifying structure and fish habitat so if you are looking for a reef if you're looking for a rocky outcropping if you're looking for a very small break in the bottom a hole that you know that fish tend to congregate in this is the channel you probably want to be in to see the most detail if you run over a man-made object like a shipwreck or a junk car that somebody dumped in the water or an artificial reef that's built out of old school buses if you run over it with downvision you are going to see old school buses old subway cars and whatever man-made objects they used the level of detail that a down vision system produces sometimes is stunning it's almost frightening sometimes it looks a lot like an ultrasound and it's because it is working actually in a similar frequency range to what ultrasound technology uses now in downvision we have basically the same controls that we had in the high chirp we've got our depth scale over here we have some basic adjustments for sensitivity again gain intensity our surface filter and we have our all to auto button so we can bail out and go back to the way it started out we also have color palettes in downvision so i'm going to go into the menu into the gears typically it runs in this copper color but again depending on the lighting onboard your boat whether you have a hard top to shield you from the sun or if you're getting direct sun on your display you may find that one of these alternative color palettes just works better for your conditions or your eyes so there's a lot of different options in here for colors so definitely play with them see what you like we can turn on or off depth lines again so you have some reference markers just for depth again we can take away some of the colorization and we can adjust the scroll speed as well next we're going to take a look at side vision and side vision is a very interesting tool but a lot of people have trouble visualizing what it is that they're looking at so on a side vision display this is side scan sonar so instead of looking down we are actually looking horizontally through the water so this is the center line okay this is where my boat is my boat is actually up here at the r so my newest information is at the top and this is all historical data as we pass along here everything to the left of center is off my port side everything to the right of the center line is off my starboard side right now we have targets out to just shy of 150 feet so this is a 75 foot marker right here uh so double the width of the screen would be 150 feet so port to starboard we can see out to 300 feet with side vision and that's about its maximum range in some conditions you'll go a little bit further so here's a target that actually spans both sides we're seeing most of it off the right side but some of it off the port side so we kind of ran over the top of it of that target that's probably a wreck or something like that you can see fish on side vision you can see man-made structures this is using the higher frequency chirp the 320 to 380 kilohertz there's a few things we can do with side vision as well we can specify where we want to look so right now we are scanning port and starboard at the same time if i was running my boat along a line of docks and i wanted to scan underneath the docks to see if there were fish i could look just to the port side or i could look just to the starboard side so what i've done really is just crop the image the advantage of doing this is now i have more pixels on the screen i'm taking the entire screen it's giving me higher resolution now to actually plot targets so in this color palette i am actually seeing some targets sticking up off the bottom and that's what this is here this is really the trace of the bottom and then this is everything moving out to the starboard side in this particular color palette my solid objects and the bottom are dark so my fish above the bottom are actually these white pips all these white pips are fish if i change the color palette it may adjust the way that that looks for us let's go back to a more traditional copper color you can see how the copper color changes it up but now here's the white pips they actually pop a little bit better so those are probably hard targets like fish sometimes in side vision you'll also get shadows as well so you get a pretty good sized fish like a tarpon on side vision uh you will see the fish you'll see it's outline you'll see its fins and you'll see a shadow behind it as well because it actually um if you imagine that sonar was not sound but was light you shine a big flashlight at a tarpon there's gonna be a shadow behind it same thing happens with sound energy when we broadcast it at the fish there's actually a shadow behind it that the sonar can detect um next i want to show you real vision 3d so this is something we've had in axiom for a couple of years and um it's it's a pretty cool technology and that what it does is it takes the side scan sonar the side vision and the down vision um and it combines it with two other elements that are in the transducer and it creates um a 3d model of what is around the boat so with the typical side vision or down vision you can see that something is down there or you can see that something is off to the side but in the case of down vision you don't know how far left or right it is and with the side vision you don't know how deep it is so this kind of takes all of that guesswork out of that so when you run over a school of fish like this we'll in a moment we can actually see that these fish are oh 25 feet off the starboard side there's a big school of fish so with a 3d presentation like this we have some some controls as well that we can adjust these are some quick ways to adjust the viewing angle so i could look um from above kind of a three-quarter bird's-eye view i can look straight down on the scene or i can go from the rear looking down at a 45 degree angle with 3d you can also just use your finger and pick whatever angle you like so if i touch and drag if i want to look from the front if i want to look from the back i can do all of that you can also pinch and zoom this in or zoom this out so you'll notice that this boat has been kind of doing a figure eight pattern the 3d system will hold anywhere from 8 to 15 minutes of track history and it will build it into a model so as you drive back and forth over your fishing grounds it will build a whole 3d environment and it'll update with every pass depending on the water depth it can hold up to 15 minutes of information and then the oldest information will start to drop out and get replaced by new information you'll notice every time you run over where the fish were it updates their positions so when we're looking at 3d here the bottom is colorized in this case in copper but i can change the color palette to a different color if i want but i've got copper selected and all of my suspended targets are shown as spheres and the spheres are colorized according to in this case their depth or i could colorize them by their intensities with stronger stronger targets being red weaker targets being white but in this case they're actually colorized by depth and that's uh in the settings here let me show you that so here's what i can configure in my 3d vision i'm going to go to my settings first of all i can change the boat icon so if you want to have something other than a giant sport fish you can certainly do that we can choose what color the targets want to be so we can use like a full color palette or we can just make them all blue or all yellow or all green whatever you prefer if you keep them in a rainbow of colors then you can do some colorization options so right now they're colorized according to their depth or i could change it and colorize them by intensity and you'll notice now i have clusters of colored spheres and it's just showing the different echo levels coming off of those targets versus if i go by depth now targets at a common depth are all going to be the same color um we can make the targets either spheres or we can make them points and if we make them points they become very very tiny where points come in handy is when you're over something like a shipwreck if you're trying to get a high definition view of a wreck maybe it's a barge or an artificial reef the points will give you more detail because they are much much smaller but as individual targets they're harder to see so if you're looking at fish which are already small to begin with in the big scheme of the ocean you're probably better off to be in spheres save the points for when you're looking for a wreck here's my control for bottom color i could be copper i can be gray i can be blue all sorts of different options there you can also change the background personally i like the gray i think it works well for my eyes but you might like black you might like blue there's also a white option as well which can be nice and super bright sunlight and then finally there's two different ways that we can track a real vision 3d system so the real vision 3d transducers actually have something called an ahars in them it's an attitude and heading reference system it's basically a little solid-state gyrocompass inside the transducer and it measures the boat's pitch roll yaw and heave this 3d image is stabilized by that sensor in the transducer when we're in gps track mode like this it uses the ahars and it uses your gps receiver to build this model that shifts dynamically with your course changes so you get a very realistic map of the bottom if i change this into scrolling image what it's actually going to do is work a little bit more like a traditional fish finder it is not going to change course when the boat changes course it's just going to run a continuous strip off the back side of the boat it still puts everything in 3d perspective so you can see how deep or how far your targets are off the center line of the boat but if i were to turn 180 degrees now you would not see the boat turn in the 3d model it would just keep going straight so it just straightens out all of the vessel motions all right let's uh pause again for a second and take a look at some questions ross would like to know assuming axiom pro mfd what is the best transducer to see the bottom detail in 100 to 300 foot depths currently running a through-hull 50-200 kilohertz only application is finding small wrecks rocks etc all right in 100 to 300 feet of depth ross um the real vision 3d transducers that is their sweet spot so for finding the wrecks rocks looking at structure you will want to be in a real vision 3d transducer that's going to give you the highest resolution in terms of what is the best transducer you've got a couple of options you could do a transom mount uh or you could do a through-hull uh version in real vision 3ds and that the determining factor on that is really going to be your boat um if you um have an outboard powered boat then you could do a transom mount if you have an inboard powerboat you're going to have to use a through-hull transducer because we don't want to put a transit mount behind inboard engines because the prop wash basically makes them blind the transducer can't see through the prop wash but with an outboard power boat it's really your choice you can do a transit mount you could do through hulls the through hulls probably are always going to give you a slightly better picture and the reason i say that is the through hulls tend to be up in a part of the boat that is a little bit calmer there's a little bit less wash a little bit less motion of the water around the transducer they also tend to sit a little bit deeper in the water than the transom map transducer does but that said a well installed transit mount transducer can really deliver a stunning picture as well but you will want to look at the real vision 3d transducers ross ted would like to know the rv100 sprays water on his engine how do i adjust lower it or raise it all right so i think what you see in ted is a rooster tail off of the transducer and this is something i have heard of before so this is the transom rv 100 there's the the cable bundle but there's the transom bracket uh what's happening in your case ross is you're getting water flow off the top of the transducer and it's probably literally bouncing off of this lip and it's shooting up and then it's uh yeah it's hitting your engine covers um in your case i would lower it just a little bit if you can um look at the inside of the bracket here it is a slotted bracket so you have a little bit of up down adjustability here and then this third hole is actually kind of the locking screw so you'd pull the top screw out and then you can move this up or down a little bit and then you'll re-sync the screw you'll want to seal the old screw hole back up so you don't get water in there but that'll allow you to drop that down just a little bit if that still continues to cause spray issues for you definitely get in touch with our tech support department they can give you a little bit of guidance on that i believe there are some third-party manufacturers that have come up with some little add-on things that you can screw onto the bracket that can help with that too nick nichols would like to know can you use a through hull on an aluminum boat uh yes you can so aluminum boats are kind of a special case because aluminum does not play nice with a bronze uh transducer you actually can get um bimetallic corrosion if you allow the aluminum hull and the bronze transducer to come and contact one another in fact you can get the same problem on a steel hulled boat as well the bronze and steel next to each other are really not a good combination you can get some really weird electrolysis going on and next thing you know you have a big hole in your boat and it's on the bottom of the bay so if you want to use a through-hole on an aluminum boat what do you use they actually use a stainless steel transducer on an aluminum boat the stainless steel transducers are non-conductive and that is what they suggest you could also use a plastic transducer almost many of these are available in plastic through hulls as well but often they will go with stainless on aluminum boats most of our first responder boats we do a lot of coast guard cutters now a lot of police boats they're almost all aluminum and they go with stainless steel transducers john thank you i will need a black box for the 1kw chirp transducer to work at its max potential with an axiom 12 inch pro rvx oh will i need a black box all right john um so an axiom pro rvx has a one kilowatt sonar built in so you actually would not need a black box so if you're buying a 1kw chirp transducer that will actually mate very nicely to an axiom pro rvx it can deliver 1kw of power it supports any two chirp bands so we can do chirp high chirp medium or chirp low and it can drive them but up to one kw of power output the as to what bands you want to go with on that it's going to depend a little bit on what the water depths are where you fish and maybe a little bit to do also with what type of fish you tend to go after but i would probably tend to steer you towards the medium and low band transducers if you're doing any kind of deep water fishing say anything anything deeper than 500 feet i'd probably go with a medium low setup and shuffany would like to know what is the most capable transducer well that is uh that's a good question so um there are a very very wide array of transducers available and let me show you what changes in a transducer so in this picture this is actually a cutaway of three different aramar transducers um and this is what is actually inside the body of any transducer whether it's a ray marine transducer or an air mar they are packed with these ceramic pucks and these ceramic pucks are what actually generate the beam and the sounds that come out of the transducer the transducer on the left is a fairly basic 1kw transducer it has eight elements in it i think is what it's got there um so you can see it has that one large element and then it has that smaller cluster of elements so one of them is dedicated to one band and the other is dedicated to another um when you go up to a higher quality transducer what you're actually getting are more ceramics inside the body of the transducer every time we add more ceramics we're increasing the sensitivity of the system and we're also better able to shape the beam so we offer transducers in our lineup all the way up to 3 kilowatts of power output which is actually it can handle more power than our most powerful sonar can deliver but the advantage they bring is they have um that 25 element set up there on the right i think it's uh i think it's a might be an r111 um but if you want to get in touch or leave a comment i can uh i can help you with some suggestions on what might be applicable but there are some some great transducer options out there uh admittedly though they do get very expensive the more capable they are um the more you're gonna pay for them i think we got time maybe for one more question because it looks like we're up against the hour here so last one of the night we'll go to raymond can you mark a waypoint in the side vision history that plots on the gps display map ah yes you can raymond uh let's pop back over onto the product camera for a second and i will show you that you can do it both in the side vision or the 3d or in any sonar channel for that matter uh let me see if i can get a split screen for you let's do chart and fish finder and we're going to see how cooperative the simulator is going to be for me but i think we can make this work so here is my chart display i'm going to change the sonar over here to side vision since that's what you asked about and if i want to drop a waypoint there's a couple ways i can do it but if i see like a big fish target come over i can just hit the waypoint button right here so you can see it's dropped a waypoint in my sidevision sonar and it should be here on the map as well there it is i had to zoom in a little bit just so i could see the separation between it but you can see once again if i oops i'm going to hit the button drop a waypoint there it is in my sonar there it is in the chart display um those waypoints also appear in the other types of sonar as well so i could for example in down vision same thing i can drop a waypoint it puts the flag in on the sonar and it drops it in the wake behind the boat uh we can also do it in 3d the cool thing about the 3d sonar is it will actually show us all the waypoints that are nearby that we have dropped so for example if i spin this around and look behind the boat there we go there's all those waypoints that we were just dropping in our wake so it makes it very very easy to go back and find those spots one other thing i forgot to mention is this button right here this is actually a pause feature you can freeze the sonar and you can go backwards in time this is kind of like a rewind button so if you want to go back and take a closer look maybe we want to actually go to that group of fish right there i can drop a waypoint in on it with my finger and now i have that one saved as a particular waypoint and that will also be reflected on my chart it's back here somewhere should be one of these that we dropped in so there's a lot of interaction between the charts and the fish finder all right i think that's where we're going to wrap it up for tonight so i want to thank you all for joining us once again i think this is our seventh episode so thank you very very much for turning out and like always i have a homework assignment for you if you like what you saw here tonight please recommend it to your friends do like subscribe to our channels pass this information along share it with other boaters in your community and again i will be waiting into all the comments and questions uh first thing tomorrow morning so if you didn't get your answer question or your question answered live uh i will uh be in there answering questions so feel free to post up uh whatever you like and uh you will be hearing from me very shortly so thanks for tuning out tonight and again we'll be back next thursday at 7 pm on youtube and facebook for raymarine live thank you and have a great night

Channel: Raymarine

Views: 6,038

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: c9EMpHHhMaY

Length: 67min 42sec (4062 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021