Being a Lowrance person since 1980 when I bought my first sonar. The new HDS Live with "Live Sight" is a similar technology. I am thinking hard about it this upcoming season and I have an invitation with Andre to preview this new technology on his boat this summer.
I run Garmin stuff on my boats, and I really like it. I do have the newest generation of Livescope that the guy in the video is talking about with the 20 degree cone on the Bass fishing boat. You point your transducer, you see a fish out 40 feet, that's where you plop your lure. You really can see the fish swimming around, see sticks and cover and stuff, and watch your jig or lure come back to the boat through the water. You know what else you see?
99 out of those 100 fish on the screen couldn't care less about your lure, haha. Probably more. I mean, it is absolutely amazing how many fish are out there that just aren't interested. 6 practices a week during this past fall's high school bass fishing team season, and all of the fishing that we did this summer on that boat, I think I saw 1 fish actually take the bait on the screen in real time.
My 2 biggest takeaways from a season of using Livescope, are:
1. Don't let all of those fish on that screen trap you in that spot. Yeah, there's tons of fish there. But, if they're not biting after a few different presentations, you gotta move on. There might be more fish a couple of hundred feet away that do want to bite, and, you will never know it, because you are fooling around with all of those fish you can see "right there" who are never going to bite. There were times in the river in the fall the screen looked like an absolute aquarium, it was ridiculous. But, if you didn't have the screen, you would swear that there wasn't a fish left in the lake. Not a bump on your line, fish jump, nothing.
2. It is a very good tool to tell you where the fish aren't. Especially in places like the river where the visibility is 0 all of the time. If you drive up to a tree that's fallen into the river, and shine it all around and there's no fish there? There is no fish there. Go bark up a different tree.
There's lots of other details and things to talk about with respect to the system, but, those are the two main ones for us. I might add that the effective range of the thing is definitely way more suited to bass fishing than cold water fishing. Very often our rigger balls and especially lures, and definitely anything running on dipseys and planer boards would just be way out of range to see anything.
Really cool teaching device though. You tell the kids to always check for fish under cover and around structure, go find some, and be like "See? There they are. Now the trick is to get them to bite".
"Country Angler" - '93 Trophy 2002 - Cold water boat
"Strike Three" - '04 Triton SF21 - Warm water boat
"The Dumpster" - '90 Starcraft SF14 - Camping Boat
Livescope (Garmin) and Active Target (Lowrance) are 2 similars products that target the bass, crappie and walleyes community. The Panoptix (Garmin) and Livesight (Lowrance) are also "live" sonar and more suitable for the troller like we are.
More and more guys are using it to shoot on the lure at the downrigger. I tried it a bit last summer and I was able to look at the flasher and fish that were coming close. Those 2 are also better for jigging deep.
Yeah, we tried it (Livescope), but it didn't work jigging for Lakers on the bottom. They were already down about 70-80 feet though by the time we got around to giving it a shot. 2D traditional sonar worked great though, in conjunction with anchor lock (Garmin's name for their GPS anchor).
Indeed, another tool in the box.
We're getting better as the years go by, but, with a lot of this stuff, me and my boys are still a lot like a monkey with a gun. We know just enough to be dangerous.
"Country Angler" - '93 Trophy 2002 - Cold water boat
"Strike Three" - '04 Triton SF21 - Warm water boat
"The Dumpster" - '90 Starcraft SF14 - Camping Boat