eagle cuda transducer

[prescott56]

Afternoon,
After trouble with my depth sounder, and still not trusting it. i am thinking of buying a cheap and chearful fishfinder as a backup. the very expensive swindlers over here have an eagle cuda for 140 euros, but with a tramsom mounted transducer, he tells me it is ok to epoxy the transcducer on the inside of teh hull and i will only lose about 30% of depth sounding.

any one done this?
regards
Roy

 

[Rivers & creeks]

Got one and tried through the hull with a big loss of definition. Put it in the water and it's perfect. It's very helpful to see the change in gradient of the sea floor.

 

[Bodach na mara]

Lots of previous posts on this but as the search facility is rubbish they are hard to find.

Yes, the "transom" transducer CAN be mounted in-hull. Various methods have been successful. I used a blodge of silicon sealant myself. To find a good place, you need a temporary acoustic bond to the hull and for this, a poly bag of water is often suggested. I found this a bit of a fouter and used a dollop of wallpaper paste instead. It is easy to clean off before bonding.

I did not like the epoxy bonding idea often touted as it may be difficult to get a clean dry hull inner surface and it is permanent if it does bond.

 

[Alltnaha]

I have fixed my transom tranducer ( Garmin ) in a half way manner - rather than epoxy into the hull due to being scared of a permanent cock up I epoxied in a cut to hull shape plastic mug , screwed the transducer into it and put cooking oil in - works perfectly , no loss of definition.

John

 

[BrianH]

When I bought my boat it came with a Lowrance combined GPS and fishfinder unit (M56S Map). Its transducer was a transom mounting type that had been internally epoxied to the bilge just forward of the cabin/cockpit bulkhead with easy cable run to the display in the wheelhouse. It was clearly a cheapo retrofit as forward in the forecabin was the normal through-hull, embedded VDO transducer, sans any display.

However, the Lowrance grey scale display was hardly readable, so dim had its super-twist screen become and so I bought an Eagle Cuda fishfinder ($70 from a US on-line discount chandler) - I already had a Garmin plotter - and, lo and behold, the original power/signal cable from the already installed transducer plugged straight into the new unit. It immediately worked perfectly.

Even the manual has identical text and formatting from the Lowrance manual's fishfinder section.

So Eagle is clearly the down-market label for Lowrance and, yes, the identical transducer can be mounted in the bilge. There may be attenuation over direct water immersion but I've never noticed.

One negative point is that there is no depth offset to vary between below keel or actual water depth (I prefer the latter) and as there seems a -1 meter error from actual water depth I have to read as below keel. But for only $70 ...

 

[Refueler]

Yes - Eagle is connected to Lowrance.

 

[BrianH]

What I forgot to mention is that even the base that the display clips into was the same - I could clip the Eagle fishfinder straight into the Lowrance GPS/Fishfinder base. The molding is identical.

Fishfinders are an alternative to stupidly expensive depth meters if there is enough mounting space. They are better and cheaper - mainly because the US has so many runabout anglers such that Eagle Cuda units are stacked in supermarkets at give-away prices.