Quinte Fishing

Can I use my portable fish finder that I have on my 14' aluminum for ice fishing and just point the transducer straight down the hole?

What kind of fish finder do you have dieseltech.

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Fred Fisher....

Fishy Fishy In The Bay, Bite This Line And Make My Day....

It is just a Lowrance X4

I'm not pretending to be an expert, but have just done the same with my HDS-5. Here's what I found from my research:

Make sure the transducer is level. Either attach to a stick and attach stick to bucket or use pipe insulation foam and cable ties to get it to float right. Make sure to fuse the positive side of the power cable coming from the battery. If your ff has the option, turn up the scroll speed. You'll need to play with the sensitivity/gain/ping speed to dial it in just right.

I set mine in a tackle bag that normally holds 4 plano boxes. With the existing RAM mount, I can adjust the way it angles quite a bit and still use the lid of the bag to shade the screen. Had the batteries already from my duck decoys. For the transducer, I used putty knives, cable ties and a bolt. Hope to try it out as soon as the ice gets thicker.

I know that there's a lot of flasher die hards out there, and likely for good reason. But for <$10, I converted my graph and that's enough for this amateur.

Here's a pic another guy had of his xducer:



My cable came out the other side, the putty knives are bolted on either side of the hinge point and the bolt torqued really tight. Then I adjusted the angle of the blades so when the cable was sandwiched between the blades, it would be above the center of gravity. Cable tied the blades together and then duct taped it all b/c you can never have enough duct tape!

I know guys that use the x4 on Ice and they seem to do the trick as far as water depth and showing you fish and structure. However they are a Liquid Crystal Display and real sever cold can damage that but if you fish in a hut you would be OK. I'm not sure if the sonar capabilities in that unit will display Real Time like a flasher but just try it. I would set the screen to scroll as fast as it can and run the grey scale mode. Pretender Fishing has some good pictures there for rigging up your transducer so give it a try and see how it works.

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Fred Fisher....

Fishy Fishy In The Bay, Bite This Line And Make My Day....

Thanks for the info guys. I'll rig something up for it this week and hopefully we'll have some decent ice again by the end of the week so I can try it out.

Not sure about the x4, but the hds series from lowrance has a couple of ice fishing options. First you can set the sonar to an ice fishing setting and also there is a flasher option built into the hds's. hope there is something similar in the x4 line.

Cheers,

Ben Clapp

I also have done just similar to my my HDS-5 Pretender Fishing, what cable ties you used? i used Releasable Cable Ties.

should work fine as long as you rig something up like some of the pics in this post. My take on it though is spend the $80 to get a proper iceducer so you dont have to worry about it being offcentre ect. Properly taken care of the iceducer will last for years so yes some upfront cost but very little in the long run.
Not familiar with the x4 but any lcd made in the last 10 yrs will have no problem with the cold. And again any more recent lcd will prob have an icefishing mode and will be realtime. You can go back and read threads on flash vs LCD if you want some are quite amusing but my experience has shown there is no difference in performance on equally priced modern units. i.e a $300 flasher will be no better than a $300 LCD and visa versa. They may have different features that are more attractive to some. i.e that $300 flasher will prob be easier on the battery and will have a bigger "screen" which is nice and the lcd will give you the option of using a round flasher screen or a traditional view that gives you history, and may even have GPS. To each his own, I run a LCD, HB 688, because I can use it on my boat in open water as well but I have used marcum, vex and HB flashers in the past and they were great too.

I just used regular cable ties. The ice ducer is nice, but I had 2 extra ducers lying around anyway, so it was a good deal for me to do it this way.

I use a 2' foot 1X2 stick with a 1/2" groove cut in the middle and nail in a clothespin just below the groove. I slip the transducer wire in the groove and clip it to the clothespin and place the stick across the hole and play around until transducer itself parallel to water surface.

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The fishin' nut ><>J

Be sure to increase "Scrool speed" in settings to max. It still won't be as instant as a flasher but it's best to have as fast of scroll as possible.