GPS/Fishfinder Advice

[Bobkat]

My problem most of us have with fishfinders, is that they work great at low speed, but once you get going fasterm even the water. Plume and then the bottom contour washes out, and lots of static in the water column washes outmost fish presence unless it is a very big fish, etc. Is this the nature of every depth finder? Most of my buddies experience the same problem whether Lowrance, Hummingbird, Garmin or other less common brands are used. Is there any make or model that will overcome this?
I’ve also been told that the finder “hears” echoes fine at low speed but once on plane, the transducer is no longer parallel to the bottom. If this is true, would it be possible to hook up a switch between two transducers, each parallel to the bottom at different speeds. Or even two finders! Though they might interfere with each other.
Also a sort of poll - Hummingbird, Lowrance or Garmin? I get different opinions, though down here it seems more are going to hummingbird.

 

[Allen]

Bob, I have two depthfinders on my tritoon for that reason. The first is a little Hummingbird built into the dash. It works fine at speed, but other than that it's not a great fishfinder. The other I put on the Toon is a Lowrance with the total scan transducer. Those things are just fine at low speeds, but loses the bottom pretty easily when at speeds of 25 mph or greater.

Both have their transducers mounted on the same tube and run just fine together with no interference. I have heard of setups where two transducers are mounted and wired as you asked about, but have never seen the actual setup.

I have no real preference on make of fishfinders, the higher end models of each brand are all pretty nice. The only thing I will say is that if you are interested in downscan and sidescan technology, you can't get too big of a screen. My sidescan on a 7 inch Lowrance screen is smaller than I would ever replace it with in the future. Just too hard to pick out the finer details (pronounced fish) for me, and if you want to start splitting the screen to have mulitple things shown (map and sidescan for example), and you are again looking at pretty small screens for each.

 

[Fenced In]

I can read fish at 20 mph imo it’s all about ducer placement.

 

[MicLee]

I can read fish at 20 mph imo it’s all about ducer placement.

I had to add an in-hull ducer and split it in with a Y cable on my birds in order to get high speed readings, but now I can get readings up to about 50 mph.

 

[Slappy]

Has everything to do with transducer placement. Boats ride higher on plane, so the ducer needs to be mounted in an area with 'clean' water when moving at speed.