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Thread: MarkFish , using the MARK button on Furuno . review by Moose

  1. #16

    Re: MarkFish , using the MARK button on Furuno . review by Moose

    They have had the feature for a good long while - you just needed a Furuno GPS. Furuno is not in the business of helping others sell their GPS units so they probably never even considered making the output sentence in a standard NMEA format. Remember that the sounder in question is just a sounder too - not a combo like the lowrance unit. The Furuno combos can do it on their own but you do need the green.

    Where did you fish out of Ranmar ? I spent about 5 years teching for TMQ in Freo between about 1998-2002. You are certainly right about the importance of a good sounder for the market place over there. One of my first projects when I got there was sorting out the issues with the JRC JFC-130. We ended up having to fly the software development guy out from JRC and stick him on a boat so he could see the problem and write a patch so the sounder would show the flare on the reef edge.

  2. #17
    Ausfish Platinum Member
    Join Date
    Mar 2015
    Location
    Kalbarri, WA

    Re: MarkFish , using the MARK button on Furuno . review by Moose

    I worked out of Kalbarri, upper end of the Mid-west. last stop before Shark Bay. Worked from Dongara a bit in the whites last four years I fished after I went to a slightly bigger boat. I was certainly using your products--I still have a paid version of C-Plot on an old laptop, from which I manually transfer marks when I feel the need. Still had the NWU-53 running alongside, if one system ever went down I could just carry on. And had multiple GPS units feeding them or sitting idle, redundancy was very important to me.
    In the earlier days, Kalbarri was very different in method of setting pots to the ground further south. Did you ever hear anyone talk about setting on "dots" ? They were a form of interference which only showed up on 50kHz --probably pioneered up here by a few deep water fishermen , certainly using the old larger Furuno paper sounders. Seemed to differentiate well between barren ground and productive reef, particularly on the wider flat ground. You obviously needed a very clear picture to use these, and no use at speed. Millions of hectares of unproductive reef wide of here, with very small productive patches through it. As sounders became more advanced, we realised that this also coincided with getting good flare on bottom lock, (on 200khz.)so this made life much easier. I would run dual sounders, one on 50 and one on 200 on bottom lock, comparing. Along, of course with being able to use GPS to navigate straight to a tiny patch 20 miles or more offshore that was only the size of your house block. Then that Simrad I mentioned with true split screen capability gave me everything in one package.
    TMQ always had good gear.

  3. #18

    Re: MarkFish , using the MARK button on Furuno . review by Moose

    Heard the expression - no one from down south could ever explain it properly though - always half the battle and so much easier when you actually get taken out to see what is actually happening. Sounds like it could be similar to something we get on the east coast called "wonky holes". I never got further north than Greenhead and spent most of my time south of Cervantes - bit of a regret now that I am back over east. One day I will get back for a proper look.

    Had to love the days of the old school gear - didn't have all the flash features but the stuff was rock solid in comparison to a lot of the more modern equipment - very few "software" induced issues. The original (pre Navico) Simrad's were good gear, not necessarily the easiest to operate until you got a handle on them but very solid performers.

  4. #19
    Ausfish Platinum Member
    Join Date
    Mar 2015
    Location
    Kalbarri, WA

    Re: MarkFish , using the MARK button on Furuno . review by Moose

    We actually didn't have much to do with the C-zone fishermen, but, if we were ever socialising, they were always interested in the dots. Colour sounders actually made it a bit easier--stronger dots were red, then orange, yellow, in order of strength. Obviously rough conditions made it a lot harder, we went from fairing block to keel-mounted flush transducers, flirted with motor-driven drop-down units on s/s tubing, running down through a tube with a bush and top above the waterline inside the hull. Got sick of forgetting they were down and snagging ropes, and having to dive to pull the the bent leg out from underneath the hull. Taking away the obvious one of interference from passing vessels, there was one other thing that gave you anything like it--dolphins. If you were quartering slowly over some of those vast tracts of broken offshore ground, looking for the dots to show you where you had a chance, a sudden strong burst meant you should duck outside the wheelhouse, or yell to the deckie to check for dolphins--they obviously chatter at 50khz. As I mentioned, good dots always coincided with good spikes on bottom lock. This took out the guesswork when dealing with "false" dots or "fish" dots. Were they crayfish communicating, or just life that existed on the same reef that the crays preferred? It was interesting to note that, when the crays were migrating on their offshore run in the whites, you would see dots where they were, where you would normally see none.

  5. #20

    Re: MarkFish , using the MARK button on Furuno . review by Moose

    Cheers Ranmar. Definitely not wonky holes then. Would have been interesting to have a play with. Have you heard if any of the boys have tried Chirp and what the results were.

  6. #21
    Ausfish Platinum Member
    Join Date
    Mar 2015
    Location
    Kalbarri, WA

    Re: MarkFish , using the MARK button on Furuno . review by Moose

    No,haven't heard. But I still talk with some of the boys that stayed in, I'll ask. When I still had the 83/200/455/800 khz transducer on the elite-7 CHIRP, higher frequencies on that monochrome display showed some very interesting results in flat bottom that I knew contained occasional cracks, which was where the crays lived--difficult to differentiate on 200, hopeless on 50. Would have been interesting to set pots on, did hear a whisper from another amateur that it was working for him.. But I went to the HST-DFSBL as the 83/200 was very weak once you were out to 30 metres or more, just needed too much gain which resulted in too much noise.So I lost that function. I still actually pull pots certain times of the year, have an amateur licence. But nothing over 25 metres deep.

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