Transducer direction?

Which way do you mount your transducer and why?  I see some folks troll with their yaks, so it makes sense to point it back wards.  Then there are folks that sit and drift like in the ocean and I would tend to think that you would want the t'ducer pointing forward in the direction that you are fishing.  I doubt folks would cast backwards, because that was the direction the fishfinder is showing the fish? 

Makes me wonder if I should pick up an additional t'ducer and mount one in the front aiming back, and one in back aiming forward.  Then I could just plug in the one that best represents the direction I am actually fishing.

Am I nutz for thinking this?

Mr. Sayn,

If by "nutz" you mean "am I misunderstanding the importance of the direction of my transducer?", then yeah.. a little bit nutz.  Your transducer acts like a speaker, emmitting a pulse of sound and then measuring how long it takes for the sound to echo back.  That's it.

So what that means is that it really only measures how far away from the "speaker"  is an object.  But it can't measure direction.  The sound leaves the transducer, goes out in the shape of an expanding conical section of a sphere, hits an object (maybe the bottom of the lake), and then bounces back off in all directions including toward the transducer.  The time all this takes tells the FF how far away that object is from the center of the cone, but not left, right, forward, or aft.

So the short answer is that no, it doesn't matter which way you face the "front" of your transducer.. the read out is going to look just the same to you.  You do, however, want the BOTTOM of your transducer to face as straight down as you can, within reason.  That is, you don't want to be projecting that cone of sound off at 45 degrees cause then you'll be "seeing" the bottom at some measurement greater than it really is.  And you'd see fish that are "over there" instead of "right down there".

There's a little more insight into all this (how FF's work, in general) that I can offer if you want to see it but for now, I hope that helps.

Fishin-T

I only have 2 bits of advice for ya.. follow the instruction booklet and KISS..

Z

I have never really paid much attention to where the sonar signal actually shoots.  For some convoluted reason, I had it in my mind that the transducer shape through a cone signal down, and out in a particular direction dependant on which way it was pointing.  Guess I was reading too much into it, huh?   

Thanks for the "Transducer 101" lesson.