Ice Fishing Flasher Tips

If you are like most you pulled out your ice fishing flasher this week and got it ready for the ice.  Again, like most you put your charger on your unit and are ready to hit the ice.  After all ice fishing flashers are fairly simple machines.  There are not a lot of working parts to worry about and for the most part are very reliable.  Here are a few issues you may encounter when preparing your electronics for the upcoming ice season.

Good old dead battery issue.  For the most part the batteries used to power most flashers are cheap and lose their life over time.  Depending on how you care for your battery this time will vary greatly.  I prefer to put a full charge on my batteries and then add a charge to the battery mid year while they are sitting on the shelf.  Just doing this will go a long way to adding life to the battery.

If you go to power your unit up and you get nothing, well odds are your battery is dead.  There is also a good chance that if your battery has been dead all summer, your battery is shot.  Also, if you have a MarCum unit that still has a DCS charger connected to it and your battery is dead, it is shot.  The best thing to do with any flasher is disconnect everything from it when you store the unit for the summer.  So, if you have a dead battery or one that will only take an 80% charge, I would look at investing in a new battery to start the year.

Test your transducer!  There is nothing more important to a flasher than your transducer.  Your flasher is only as good as the information it receives from the transducer.  Test your transducer on a hard floor by hanging the transducer about a foot off the floor and testing the return signal in air.  Your unit should get a nice return signal through the air.  This is also a good way to verify that your transducer is hanging straight.  Both are critical to flasher performance.  Over the years I have found that 90% of the problems with flashers are the result of a poor transducer.

So you finally get out ice fishing and are getting frustrated because you have to use to much Gain to see your jig.  You are getting tons of interference that you don't remember seeing in the past.  You can hardly see your jig once it get deeper than 10 feet.  Guess what, see the paragraph above, your transducer is shot!  I can't stress enough how important it is to protect your transducer.  I personally always carry an extra transducer and use padding to protect my transducers on long ice trips.

A bad transducer and poor battery are the two biggest flasher issues you will run into.  They result in nearly all the flasher questions I get.  Yes, there is the occasional technical issue but for the most part most of your problems will be related to your battery or transducer.  So, lets hear what other flasher problems you have.  Email me at Steil@meltel.net with some of your ice flasher issues, I just may be able to help.