Fish Finder Flasher FAQ's

Fish Finder Flasher FAQ's
By Iain Loveman

How do you read a flasher ? Although a flasher may appear to be quite intimidating they are quite easy to read. It's all about colors and
if your color blind Vexilar has solved that problem as well. First, look at the bottom left of the flasher, this indicates your bottom depth and everything inside the cone to the surface.

Red is your center, orange surrounds it and green indicates the outer edge.

Pretty simple stuff, ok, now it gets interesting.

Now, look to the right at "Your Next Meal", in this area your looking at fish, your lure, bait fish and other stuff. Redder is a bigger surface area, orange is less and green is the smallest.

Here is the tricky part. Your going to have to experiment and get some experience with your flasher.

Let's say you get a reading on the edge, you might think its a bass but it could be a giant "gator" getting ready to strike or you see one directly below just hanging there and you can't get it to bite.

Then it hits you, you just added some split shot.

My advice would be if you can get out and do some icefishing take the unit with you. Everything is a lot calmer, your bottom will stay the same, there is a lot less debris and its a lot more fun than putting your transducer in a bucket of water.

Now for some techie stuff

How does a flasher work?

There a 3 main parts to a fish finder, flasher, depth finder (you say tomato, I say tomatoe). Your unit comes with a transmitter, receiver and a display.

The transmitter is your power, in most cases more is better but if your fishing in 8 or 10 feet of water with a massive amount of seaweed, it won't make much difference.

When we talk about resolution, we actually mean target separation or the ability to separate one fish from another or the bottom.

This is accomplished thru the transmitter or more correctly the transmitter pulse width (Got to love this techie stuff) or just how long the transmit pulse lasts. The shorter the pulse the better the separation.

The deeper you go the wider the separation.

When you talk about receivers you actually mean receiver sensitivity which is the ability to pick up that pulse coming from your transmitter. It only makes sense that the higher the receiver sensitivity the better. Think about an open umbrella on a windy day and I think you'll get my drift.

This is all great but in the end "what do I see ?"

Now, your talking display resolution. The higher the display resolution the more detail will be displayed.

Your display is made up of a whole bunch of lines and just how small a line the unit can draw on the display is important.

The Vexilar Fl-18 can draw 525 individual lines and when you are on the 20' scale each line represents less than a 1/2 inch and as the range increases your display resolution decreases.