shallow water depth finder?????

[mox]

i have had 2 eagle depth finders and both would lock up in water less then 5 feet.i need one to work in as shallow as 2 feet. garmin's 160 says it is good to 6 inches any one have one?

[JB2C]

I use a Furuno RD-30 and it reads easily under 1' of water. It operates at 235Khz so doesn't interfere with the deep water sounder (as long as you have the transducers both installed correctly). I've always been amazed that most fishing boats do not install both a deep water and a shallow water sounder on their boats. Big 1Kw or 2Kw ducers work great in the stream, but sucks when you have to go through some skinny water. From most I've seen, you might as well not have a sounder on the boat in a shallow water situation. Just boat blind in shallow water and cross your fingers!

Added benefit of the Furuno is it displays a whole bunch of other useful info. But they are digital only depth, no contour screen. Are you looking for just digital depth, or a fish finder? If just digital depth, highly recc the RD-30. I also have a Furuno GP-32 display and I love 'em. Even have a backup unit in the closet. But they've been on the boat awhile now and still going strong. The GP-32 is advertised as a GPS, but I really use them both mostly for the information displays (and as the shallow water sounder, of course). Allows me to see lat/lon, TD's, time of day, water temp (very accurate), water temp graph, battery power, tripmeter, course, 1000 waypoints and routes (as a backup to the main chartplotter), arrival/anchor alarm, highway steering and speedometer screens, and a whole bunch of other info I don't recall right now. Nice thing is it's very customizable so you can set it to display exactly the info you want to get to easily (push one button to toggle thru all the info.).

Didn't mean to get so involved with this post! But if you just need a digital depth finder and not a fish finder, these Furuno units are hard to beat. Works better than any other shallow water sounder I've seen. And gives you a whole lot more than just depth. Nice thing is they aren't expensive. I bought the first unit new and seems like it was around $300. But the other two I bought used for around half that from people I knew.

JB

[timd]

I have the Garmin 140 and a 540s (with depth) on my flats boat. The depthfinder on the 140 reads to 1 foot on automatic, while the 540 will ONLY read that shallow if I manually adjust the gain down to about 30%. I use the 140 for depth and the 540s for chart only.

The 160 (color) is very similar to the 140 (gray scale). The 140 actually has better resolution (128x240) than the 160 (128x128). If you only need depth, the 140 is a bargain, albeit black and white in a color world.

[mox]

thanks tim and jb anyone else?

[dingbat]

I've always been amazed that most fishing boats do not install both a deep water and a shallow water sounder on their boats. Big 1Kw or 2Kw ducers work great in the stream, but sucks when you have to go through some skinny water. From most I've seen, you might as well not have a sounder on the boat in a shallow water situation. Just boat blind in shallow water and cross your fingers!

Mine sounder has no problems working in 3' of water. Any less than that I'd run aground anyhow

[marinerjoe]

Mox,

I just want to let you know that my DSM300 has shown bottom all the way to impact

In the Pagan river, there's section of mud bottom that shoals out to just about my draft, and my DSM was reading bottom all the way to inches. (I have an offset to account for keel, screws, and rudders)

It's probably overkill for your application, but it worked.

Joe

[conduffer]

I have the same unit, what transducer are you using. I can't get mine to work right in less that 3' of water, it just goes nuts, sometimes displays deep readings that are not there. I'm also getting "no data" alarm from time to time while the unit is totally power up. Have you seen this problem?

[marinerjoe]

conduffer - I replied to your other thread. I'm using a B256 transducer.