Rage through hull depth finder performance
 

Rage owners, do your through the hull depth finders work only when off plane or also when on plane?

Mine works only off plane, and even then sometimes it doesn't work that great. Mine is glued just under my motor.

never works

Mine in my Heat never works either...

good for 10 mph, thats it

Good under 30MPH

Mine is worthless above 25mph in my Heat and even when it seems to be working I dont put much trust in it.

Depthfinder transducers do not work well in shoot through applications on cored hulls, and ours are. Mine is erratic too.
The coring attenuates the outgoing and incoming signal.
One thing I have noticed is (and on other boats I've owned) hard bottoms return a better signal than sandy or muddy bottoms.
There is a fix for this if you want to get into it.........
You can remove the coring below your transducer, until you get to the fiberglass laminate. Then epoxy the transducer directly to the fiberglass. If you do this, make sure the coring is glassed or epoxied all the way around the transducer, so water can't get into your coring. You should see a huge improvement in depthfinder performance.
Several bass boats I've owned in the past have a small area in the rear of the pad that isn't cored. Sometimes as small as 2" x 2". I just glassed in a puck style transducer there and they would work at all speeds, even up to 80/90, not that I was looking at them at that speed.
The alternative is a transom mount, but they look awful, and are susceptible to impact damage from lake debris.
Regards,
Steve

Thanks Steve and all. I had no idea that the Rage was a cored hull. That explains it. The shoot through the hull transducer works fairly good in my old bass boat up to about 2/3 throttle then I get a lot of air.

Depthfinder performance is critical on fishing boats, and that is why most of those manufacturers make some provisions to accomodate their customers in this area. I guess it must not be a high priority for perfomance boat manufacturers, because very few of them have functional depthfinders.
Given the high cost of high performance propellers and drives, and the low water levels on a lot of our lakes, maybe (????) some smart :lolhit: company would look into how the fishing boat companies do it ;).
Best Regards,
Steve