01-12-2011, 06:19 PM
Fish finder. Flashers really are old technology. They also wear out. The recommendation from one manufacturer is replace the brushes every two years and the motor every five. Does anyone change out their electronic ignition and replace it with a distributor cap, rotor, and points? Fish finders are "real time". You just gotta quit looking at the center of the screen, and TURN OFF the fish id feature. Look at the right side of the screen. Lowrance units have a feature called "FasTrack", that should be turned on. It is the same information, displayed the same way as the "Showdown" flasher, but not nearly as wide, or as many pixels. I wish Lowrance would make the width of the "FasTrack" adjustable. I still prefer a graph over the Showdown.
Flashers have limited ranges and zooms. You can look at any part of the water column with a good graph. And if a fish swims by while you are looking away from your flasher, you will never know about it. With a graph, you have a record of what happened for the last 20 seconds or so. I've caught many fish by raising or lowering my offering to fish that came by at a different depth while I wasn't paying attention.
The choice is yours, but don't buy into the idea that flashers are real time and graphs are not. Flashers used to be better at handling the cold, but TFT screens don't freeze like LCDs were said to. Both will work on a boat too. I've never figured out why people think one is for ice fishin', and the other is for fishin' out of a boat.
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Flashers have limited ranges and zooms. You can look at any part of the water column with a good graph. And if a fish swims by while you are looking away from your flasher, you will never know about it. With a graph, you have a record of what happened for the last 20 seconds or so. I've caught many fish by raising or lowering my offering to fish that came by at a different depth while I wasn't paying attention.
The choice is yours, but don't buy into the idea that flashers are real time and graphs are not. Flashers used to be better at handling the cold, but TFT screens don't freeze like LCDs were said to. Both will work on a boat too. I've never figured out why people think one is for ice fishin', and the other is for fishin' out of a boat.
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