3 Portable Fishfinders for Ice Fishing
It’s time to gear up for ice fishing season with a new fishfinder. Garmin offers several great portable options depending on your budget, experience and needs.
STRIKER 5 Ice Fishing Bundle
Designed specifically for ice anglers, the STRIKER 5 Ice Fishing Bundle has everything you need to easily transition to a high-tech portable fishfinder. The STRIKER 5 with portable carrying case is perfect for ice fishing, or fishing from a dock during the summer months. If you’re used to using a flasher, you’ll love the STRIKER 5’s easy-to-read built-in flasher, and you’ll be able to mark GPS waypoints of all of your best fishing holes so you can return in the future.
It comes with a portable carrying case, rechargeable battery, smart charger, and GT8HW-IF high-wide CHIRP ice fishing transducer. If you want to take it in your kayak or boat during the summer, you can add ClearVü scanning sonar by purchasing the optional GT20 CHIRP transducer.
The STRIKER 5 Ice Bundle is available for purchase in a ready-to-fish package for $399.99.
echoMAP CHIRP: Build Your Ultimate Ice Fishing Bundle
The Garmin echoMAP CHIRP is the ultimate fishfinder/depthfinder for diehard ice anglers. The 4-inch and 5-inch echoMAP CHIRP sonar/chartplotter combos are compatible with the portable kit, which is sold separately and includes a rechargeable battery and smart charger.
One of the major features that separates the echoMAP CHIRP from the STRIKER series is that the echoMAP CHIRP offers Quickdraw Contours and built-in LakeVü HD mapping, which provides 1-foot contours on over 13,000 lakes. Quickdraw Contours allows anglers to find new spots that they never knew existed by mapping unmapped lakes or improve upon existing bodies of water from their boat before winter hits. You can even share the maps with your friends through Quickdraw Community on Garmin Connect.
While the echoMAP CHIRP series does not come packaged with an ice fishing transducer, you can purchase the GT8HW-IF separately.
echoMAP CHIRP + Panoptix
We’ll let you in on a little secret – if you don’t mind carrying around a larger battery, you can upgrade to a 7- or 9-inch echoMAP CHIRP combo unit and fish in real-time by adding a Panoptix PS30 transducer. Panoptix has changed the game throughout many areas of the fishing industry and ice fishing is no exception.
The potential that Panoptix has for the most serious ice anglers is phenomenal. With a wide 120° beam, you can view fish throughout a large portion of water column. See fish check out your bait, move away from it or eat it – all in real-time. You can learn a lot of about fish behavior from this amazing technology which will result in you catching more fish.
See Panoptix in action:
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