Fishing Electronics and my personal pet peeve

[MarkAmerica]

I've been back to fishing as time permits for something like a year. I bought a 2005 Triton 21 TRx, mostly because it was a good price, and while some things needed some work and rehab, the boat was in running condition, and I figured I could finally get back to fishing after a more-or-less 20-year hiatus. At the time, the cost of a boat was daunting, in fact, impossible.  When I bought the boat, it came with an HDS 5(Gen1) in the dash, and another little unit at the bow, a Mark-5x, that relied on a transducer mounted on the trolling motor, the lead to which was broken.

I didn't have that much to burn on electronics since the purchase of the boat, so I looked around, read some things, and looked at some things. I wound up buying an elite ti2-9 and an elite ti2-7. I put the 7 in the dash. (It's probably the biggest you can flush-mount there.) I put the 9 at the bow. The two are networked via wi-fi(Lowrance limits the Elite Ti2s to two wifi'd units). I also got a good price on an older HDS 10(Gen 1) so I moved the HDS 5 up to the bow, figured I'd use it just for the nav/depth while I'm looking at the Ti2-9 side or downscan. So, the two old HDS ethernet'd together, the Elites wi-fi'd together, all connected to an NMEA2k network I installed, a GPS antennae to the right rear of the driver, an interface installed for my ETEC so I can get engine data on the 7 while running. Transducers on the boat: The original transducer that's glued into the hull that was connected to the HDS 5 when it was in-dash. It's a basic transducer. I add a 3-in-1 Active imaging transducer attached to the rear of the pad of the hull, what I did here was I installed a remote drain plug control over by the shifter, and I then bought one of those sternpads, and I basically cut a hole in it and trimmed it so it would fit on the back of the pad straddling the drain plug, then mounted the 3-in-1 straddling that hole, attached to the stern-pad. I was worried the water would be too turbulent there, but it turns out it seems to work okay. I don't *plan* on getting anywhere that I'm going to drag the bottom of the pad, or anything close to it, so I hope not to rip it off on anything.  I have another 3-in-1 mounted to the trolling motor(a 101lbs Minn Kota Fortrex) so the one 3-in-1 connects to the Ti2-7 at the console, and the other to the Ti2-9 at the bow. I can switch either unit to see either transducer via the wifi.
All in, everything I purchased, including the old HDS10, I'm in around 2200.00.

Now, Lowrance introduced a new Elite. It can use the new fancy transducer. IT IS NOT BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE to the Ti2 series. Here's my pet peeve:

I believe there is nothing that stops it from being backwards compatible to the Ti2s except that Lowrance doesn't want it to be.

Now in truth, my real pet peeve is that all of this gear is hyper-expensive for what it is. It really is. I'm looking for a solution. I don't like paying what I paid for this stuff, never mind what the higher-end stuff costs. I see the pricetag on the HDS 16 and just shake my head. Even the 12. Other brands, same thing. Unless I hit the lottery or something, I will NEVER have access to that kind of thing. NEVER. (Since I don't play the lottery, you can pretty much bank on NEVER.)

I'm looking for a solution, and I see a possibility. Maybe. Turns out, there's an item I ran across for which I see real potential. There's a company called Vexilar that makes a product called SonarPhone. They have a transducer you mount, and it has a controller that has a wi-fi interface. You install the app on your phone/iPad/tablet and wifi it to the transducer.  The app mates up with I-boating's nav app, et voila, you have a fish-finder and chart mapping on your phone. Turns out, you can buy an NMEA USB gateway from Yacht devices, get GPS data off your boat's GPS antenna, so, what I am playing with is the following idea: If I have a 12 inch iPad pro, wi-fi'd to the Vexilar Sonar, and USB'd to the boat's GPS antenna via the NMEA2k gateway, and I stick the iPad in the appropriate LifeProof case, I have a boat-able solution.

Of course, the shortfall in this is that the Vexilar Sonar is just a basic sonar, and their SonarPhone app only accommodates that sonar, so what I need is for Vexilar to make a better Sonar. *IF* Vexilar made a super-nifty HD-style sonar, and improved their App for Sidescan, Downscan, etc, then it would be possible to ditch all expensive proprietary systems. That's my dream. Want an upgrade? Buy a bigger iPad, or buy the newest super-duper-transducer. Want more displays? Just buy more iPads.

I don't feel like the marine electronics companies serve us as well as they should for the money. That's an opinion. I think they wring every dollar they can out of us, and then introduce the next version with limited/no backward compatibility. New sonar tech comes along, but you can't use it without upgrading your units. A company that did that for very long in the computing field will pay a price, and the rate of change there is much faster. At work, we have a few servers that have seen 4 or 5 generations of operating systems, and may see more yet.  Everything is very modular now. I can drop in a new video adapter, a new network adapter, a new sound device, attach a new monitor, install wi-fi, bluetooth, in some cases upgrade processing power, add memory and storage, and new peripherals to the extent they become available. I don't see a good reason why fishfinders and chartplotters and so on are any different.  We have water-proof, rugged tablets for deployment in places that are just as inhospitable to electronics on boats. It's time for this to change.

That's one man's opinion, of course.

Mark

[Oldfart9999]

I agree with some of what you said but I'll point out that the number of sonar units sold is nothing compared to computers, everything we want has to made to fit in a small box that is water and shockproof, try taking your tablet out in the rain all day. All that we ask the sonar units to do takes up computational space, in some cases large amounts. I bought 2 HOOK 9 inch models which are the low cost models and Lowrance is trying to make people happy by adding all the things we want, my only problem, if you read my posts, is the lack of reliability, testing and fixing before sending them out to the public.
Rodney

[MarkAmerica]

Rodney,
I work with technology every day. Some of the computers I work with are small and rugged and waterproof. The only hole in their waterproofing is when you have to plug them into something, or something into them, and that's just a matter of water-tight connectors. Your fishfinder/chartplotter is really just an all-in-one computer, waterproof, with a couple of specialized interfaces(NMEA and Sonar) and hopefully with waterproof connectors. It doesn't require a particularly fast processor, or a particularly large amount of operating RAM. From a technological standpoint, I can't point to anything about any of the big names that is particularly innovative or unique. The firmware they run isn't nearly as complex as something like Windows or Apple IOS, because the number of things that you can connect to it are limited, and the number of applications it can run are already built into the firmware. You can't add any apps to your unit.  So software complexity is low, but what it does have to be, as you mention, is reliable.

From a baseline analysis of the technology, however, there's nothing particularly novel about any of it except for the Sonars. Even that is still just a transducer sending return data which the application on your fishfinder displays in a way that you can interpret. We've been doing things like that with computer based oscilloscopes for a long time too.

If my iPad was slightly more waterproof, and had a way to hard-mount it, and had an interface for a sonar, what would I need? You see, if you take a look at vexilar's product SonarPhone, you'll notice it's a basic sonar, so they'd need to come with equivalents to downscan, sidescan, and Live imaging, but your phone/iPad can already connect to their Sonar wirelessly. Take a look. Download their demo on your phone.

https://www.vexilar.com/pages/sonarphone

I think if fishfinders/chartplotters go this way, in the end, it crushes all the high-end stuff, at least for recreational anglers/boaters.

That's my view, anyway.

Mark