My Portable Fish Finder Setup

[maintenanceguy]

It's nothing fancy but I put this together a couple of weeks ago and just got it out on the water in the last few days. Thought I'd share. I have a nice sonar/chart plotter unit on our larger aluminum boat that we take out on salt water. I haven't ever had a sonar unit on our little 12' fresh water boat and I wanted one. I found a Garmin Striker 4+. The feature that I really liked is that it does "contour mapping". As you travel along, it makes a contour map of the bottom of the lake showing the depths like the elevations on a topo map.

The problems I had were (1) I didn't want it to stay on the boat when the boat is on it's rack behind the shop, (2) I didn't want to mess with battery cables and transducer cables running from the fish finder to the transom, and (3) I wanted to be able to use it from either seat in the boat.

So, I came up with this portable unit. The C-clamps let me attach the transducer to the gunnel on the side of the boat. The battery box just sits on the seat next to whoever is using it. The box also has enough room to do some cable management. The battery is a 12V6Ah lead acid battery that is used as the backup power for fire and burglar alarm systems. Simple, no frills, nothing fancy but it worked as well as I had expected.

And the contour mapping feature was pretty cool too. I now know what the bottom of our favorite lake looks like and I have a map that shows the elevations.

 

[maintenanceguy]

I got the fish finder on Amazon for $120. The box cost me $17. Battery was almost $30. The c-clamps came from Harbor Freight for $ 2 or $3 each. I already had the scrap metal I welded between the c-clamps. Total cost was around $170.

 

[Weldorthemagnificent]

That's a really nice setup!

Sent from my CLT-L04 using Tapatalk

 

[LDUBS]

That is a really clean set up. Gives portability without a lot of hassle.

I've said before that I think I use the lake bottom contours as much if not more than the fish finder sonar.