Old Transducers Brought Back to Useful

[catalinajack]

When we acquired our boat it had two Standard Horizon depth sounders, one each at the two helms, separate transducers. The one on the lower helm did not work. Upper helm did work and still worked seven years later but the LCD display had become unreadable. I had installed a full suite of new electronics, including a forward scanning transducer, a useless feature, IMO, so I have had a reliable sounder all along.

I happened to come across an article on Rod Collins marinehowto.com website talking about repurposing an existing 50-200hz transducer. So, I took a chance and bought a new Raymarine head unit. The Standard Horizon sending wire from the transducer plugged into its head unit using an RCA connector but the new Raymarine employs spades. I purchased a female RCA pigtail to make the connection to the transducer. Now I have a working, second sounder on the upper helm with a large display and here I thought those old Standard Horizon transducers had become useless.

Before doing the final install on the upper helm I plugged in the Raymarine to the lower helm transducer lead. Yup, it works also. That old Standard Horizon head unit was faulty, but not the transducer so now I have a working sounder at the lower helm also. On the rare occasions that I pilot from the lower helm I control and view the MFD on a tablet through an app.

Just thought I would share a good experience.

 

[psneeld]

Used to be very common to adapt transducers to different head units on commercial boats not wanting to lose time and pay for haulouts.


Not sure how easy it is any more, but sure feels good when it works.... nice job!

 

[RT Firefly]

Greetings,
Mr. c. Timely topic. I'm installing a new Humminbird GPS/sonar on our northern boat. (2 stations). Long story short, the store I bought from misinformed me of ethernet hookups. I had already installed the transducer from the lesser model that did NOT have ethernet capabilities. Bought an upscale model and while the transducers appeared physically similar, the "innards" are different.


I now have to remove the original 'ducer and install the one compatible with the upscale unit. As Mr. ps notes, it isn't as simple as it once was...

 

[jgwinks]

Pretty much all the transducers are made by Airmar so they're mostly compatible. The only real difference is some are 200mHz and some are 50mHz. As long as the frequencies match, you can usually make any display work with any transducer with an adapter or just cut and splice the wires. I've done it several times. Comes in real handy if your new system came with a ducer that's smaller than the old one. Making the hole bigger is easy, smaller not so much. And as said above you don't have to haul out if you can reuse the old one. The last sounder I bought actually came with instructions on how to connect to other ducers.

 

[Fish53]

Pretty much all the transducers are made by Airmar so they're mostly compatible. The only real difference is some are 200mHz and some are 50mHz. As long as the frequencies match, you can usually make any display work with any transducer with an adapter or just cut and splice the wires. I've done it several times. Comes in real handy if your new system came with a ducer that's smaller than the old one. Making the hole bigger is easy, smaller not so much. And as said above you don't have to haul out if you can reuse the old one. The last sounder I bought actually came with instructions on how to connect to other ducers.

The majority of transducers members here will see are 50/200 khz dual frequency. You can get a single frequency but why would you want to unless that was all the display unit would handle? Most are 300 to 600watts, some may have opted for 1000watts. 8 and 10 pin adapters are okay but even though it's done splicing coaxial cable is most likely going to introduce noise. If you're not fishing and just want depth for navigational purposes a tiny amount of noise won't matter much, probably won't matter much for recreational fishing either. It's a good idea at haulout to clean the transmitting surface and apply transducer antifoulant. I like to polish the surface with rouge, but I'm odd anyway.

 

[sbman]

If you are buying a new transducer, you can get Airmar's 'Mix N Match' which includes a standard Airmar connector on the transducer cable and then the cable going to the device is a separate part number that is specific to the brand of head unit you are plugging it into, making it easy to have any brand you want to use for display. You are limited by the power and frequency of the transducer you select of course.

 

[dhays]

That is interesting….

Just hauled the boat to have a new transducer installed. Trouble shooting finally narrowed it down to a bad transducer. Expensive to replace and running the new cable is going to be hell. However, I’m looking forward to having depth readings again.