2 Different brands of sonar on 1 battery?

TinBoats.net

Help Support TinBoats.net:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

bigchromedog

Member
Joined
Jul 28, 2011
Messages
19
Reaction score
0
I have a lowrance depth/fish finder as my main unit on my boat. If I want to add a smaller unit to the front, will it have to be a lowrance as to not cause interference or problems if I have them both on one 12v battery? Honestly, only one would be ran at a time, depending on where I am fishing, lol. Or can I go with any brand? Thanks in advance.
 
You can run both off 1 battery, no problem, 1 power source is not an interference issue, and they do not draw much amperage. I would only be concerned with the sonar signal interference but everyone does it and I have never heard of a problem running 2 at one time so I guess that is no concern either.
Tim
 
You can run whatever brand you want. If your battery is large enough (standard G24) you should have no problem supporting both units at the same time.

The trick, like mentioned above, is to make sure you don't overlap the two sonar sources - this can be done by making sure you use different frequencies (83Khz in the front, 200Khz in the back), or by allowing enough distance between them provided you're fishing relatively shallow water.

So - an 83Khz sonar cone has an angle of roughly 60deg, which if using a rough guesstimation on size, is about a 1:1 ratio - thus if you're fishing in 8' deep water, your cone area beneath you will be about 8' around in a circle. SO! If you've got a transducer in the front of a 14' boat at the same 83KHz signal, it will also have a cone about 8' around at the front of the boat, leaving you with an overlap in the coverage areas - this is where you'll see the interference as the sonar's not sure where the extra signal is coming from. Changing to the 200KHz signal will change both the cone angle (about 20deg) narrowing the coverage area, as well as changing the return frequency to the transducer so this will cut down on cross talk.


Hope this helps!
 
Yes, thank you. That is what I was wondering. My one unit in the back (14' boat) is a 200 kHz Skimmer transducer and the one for the front (trolling motor) I was considering a dual-beam 200/77 kHz sonar. I have a small 12v 7amp battery I will run them both off of to not get any intereference from the trolling motor battery.
 
wihil said:
...The trick, like mentioned above, is to make sure you don't overlap the two sonar sources - this can be done by making sure you use different frequencies (83Khz in the front, 200Khz in the back), or by allowing enough distance between them provided you're fishing relatively shallow water.
Well...maybe its different for a Lowrance...but my understanding, at least for HBird's anyway, is that a transducer always pings at all frequencies it is capable of...so if it's an 83/200 dual beam transducer, it's always pinging at 83 AND 200. The selection of frequencies on the head unit is only a choice of which frequency to display. I think the only way to eliminate sonar cross-talk on a small boat, where 2 transducers are relatively close to each other, is to turn one of the units off.
 
Never had a Hbird, so I couldn't tell you on that front. Seems odd that they'd be banging away on both frequencies, though. That's a lot of wasted power through the transducer/crystal. Still, everyone does it differently.
 
Ya, I doubt they would ever be on at the same time. I would of went with just one at the back but when I do get up front, I find myself turning around constantly.
 

Latest posts

Top