Most pleasure boaters use their vessels for cruising, but the next most common usage is recreational fishing. Rose Point’s Coastal Explorer helps boaters safely cruise from place to place, and now with Rose Point’s Fish Finder, boaters will be able to use their computer to help them catch fish as well.

The new sounder add-on consists of two components: hardware and software. The hardware portion, a “black box” sounder, is a small interface box that connects to power, the transducer, and to the computer via Ethernet. The software portion of the product consists of additional screen views and controls which can be used to turn your computer into a full-featured Fish Finder.

Jeff Hummel of Rose Point Navigation Systems noted that many boaters want to have an entirely PC-based system. Rose Point has only had some of the components of a full system in the past, including radar and chart plotting. Now, with the Fish Finder, Rose Point can offer all of the key elements desired by their customers: chart plotting, radar, and Fish Finder. The company has been working on the Fish Finder for a while; some of the test customers have been using the system for more than a year. The goal has been to offer high-end features and performance without requiring the user to manipulate a lot of complicated controls. Rose Point has now achieved this and is very pleased with the results. A test customer indicated that the Fish Finder compared very favorably to products costing five times as much!

The hardware supports dual 50/200KHZ transducers up to 1 Kilowatt. Transducers from Airmar and Radarsonics are available. The interface box can be located near the transducers to eliminate loss of signal in the cabling. This opens the market to locations where the Fish Finder may be a long distance from the computer(s). The Fish Finder hardware has many built-in features that are only found on the most sophisticated devices, providing appeal to Fish Finder aficionados, whom know how to adjust the settings for maximum performance in various conditions.

The software includes all of the features that you would expect to find in a high-end stand-alone Fish Finder but also includes some new enhancements. One of the new features is auto-scaling of data in the Fish Finder window. When the range is changed the data already in the window resizes to match the new range, thus showing a smooth transition from range-to-range.

The Fish Finder add-on can be displayed within Coastal Explorer or on a separate screen dedicated to the Fish Finder.

For screen shots, please contact Jeff Hummel: Jeff@Rosepointnav.com.