Interesting convo, but sometimes I felt like I needed a protractor, slide rule, calculator and a translator! 😁 Paul isn't an electrical engineer but he sounded like one to me. So I'm gonna try to boil down the info – any mistakes are mine (sorry Paul!). More words than typical for the BB, but worth it.
Who is he and why make this thing?
> "I'm a hardcore fisherman but not a tournament angler, and kind of a tech guy. I have a computer science degree...a family-owned insurance business for 25 years, but I've always had my hand in tech and always liked to make things, play with things...try and make a better mousetrap.
> "I got first bass boat 11 years ago – I bought Ish Monroe's old boat. [Was it full of Ned rigs?? 🤣] I live about an hour from Kentucky Lake and started fishing hardcore. I was totally eaten up with it. One of the first things I bought, since we do a lot of ledge fishing...was an early adopter of GPS [lock] trolling motors. I had a MotorGuide Xi5, and for ledge fishing in open water it was a total revolution....
> "Panoptix [LiveScope] came out in 2017 and I thought it was very cool, but I was invested in Lowrance equipment. Then the LVS32 [Garmin transducer] came out, and I said 'Okay.' I bought that...immediately hit me that the transducer can't be on the trolling motor. It's like spotlighting deer with the headlights of your vehicle...made no sense at all.
> "I made my first motorized mount in 2018. To my knowledge, it was the 1st one that ever existed. It was on a separate shaft and...wireless remote control for it. I played with that for about a year, and never liked a couple things about it. [He went through the frustration of only having L and R buttons and the drawbacks of having shaft motors of various speeds.]
> "So it was obvious to me something else had to come about. Another thing was this separate mount. While it worked well, you had this whole other assembly you had to deal with so. So every time you stopped to fish, you had to put that out....
> "One big advantage of [a manual] mount over an electric mount is it gives you so much more control. I'm big on watching my bait and trying to find the edges of [structure]. The only way you can find edges is to pan across it. With an electronic mount that's tough. So I started to come up with better way to deal with that [several interim versions].
> "That led me down the road of this rotating foot control. Another issue was it was not easy to see where things are pointed...a separate shaft hanging over the front of your boat...how do you know right where it's firing. So that got me thinking about a display to show where it's facing.
> "6 months later I have a rotating foot control with an LED ring on it, and I worked to try to perfect that. It is slick as all get out. It's an absolute game changer – everyone who's tried it out is like [whoa].
> "Imagine going back to your computer, and instead of having a mouse you just have arrow keys. It's that a big a change. It's dramatic. I can't wait for people to get ahold of these things.
> "That's one half of this thing. The other half was the mounting of it – how it mounts to the trolling motor. It always made sense for it not to be on a separate shaft, but on the same shaft and be able to rotate independently.
> "[Also several interim versions and] now it's a 10-minute bolt-on. It goes on kind of like rifle scope rings – 2 pieces that go around the shaft, and it's pretty neat. It has a 15 rpm motor on it...so when turns, it moves. If you want to make small movements, you can move it half a degree. So it has a ton of control."
He also said it can get the compass heading from the boat, which he shows in a YT video, and can be programmed to mirror the direction of the trolling motor.
A fishing scenario
> "Let's say you're wanting to scan a stump or you a have a rocky outcrop. You want to look around that rock, and the rock is the size of your boat and 100' out in front of you. I want to see the sides of that rock, I want to know where the edges are – I don't want to know that it's just in my [FFS] cone.
> "My cone at 100' might be 20' wide and the rock might be 5' wide. With this, I can get on the foot control and ease it over til [the rock is] out of view [and do the same on the other side]. Then I can ease back to the middle and compass lock on the middle of the rock."
[He clarified later: "The cone width of the Garmin transducer at 90' is 31.74'. So at 90', an object can be shown on your screen that is over 30' away from your bait, which is also shown on the screen."]
> "...stump, brushpile, big boulder...if your [cast is] 10' away from it, you're not going to catch a fish. If you've got it on your screen at 80' or 100', that cone...is 18 or 20 degrees depending on whose [FFS] you're using. That rock can be on your screen and you think you're casting at it but you're 19' away from it. So it's imperative to accurately locate structure within the cone. And to me, no electric mount has done that til this product."
Makes me think – if you can be that far off a big rock, how 'bout a little ol' fish?
Had some Qs for him:
1. Is it designed to be in addition to a trolling motor foot pedal or could it replace it?
> "This is separate. It's not a trolling motor at all."
[He said he can't make it control the trolling motor.]
2. Can you program it to do custom things?
> "Yes. If you watch the video, you'll see that the Sweep Mode allows you to set the counterclockwise and clockwise sweep, and you can adjust the speed of the sweep. If you set it up to sweep a dock, you set one marker at one end of the dock, and the other marker at the other end of the dock, and it will sweep the dock no matter what your boat does.
> "With the push of a button, it will do a [Garmin] Perspective Mode offset. What that means is when you change FFS from forward view to Perspective view, you change where it is aiming. With my unit you can set where those aiming points are. [So each mode will have the same center point.]
3. So the coaxial shaft is a requirement?
> "Yes. It mounts on [over] the trolling motor shaft itself."
[The transducer mounts on that shaft, that goes over the troller shaft. Thanks to everyone who emailed me with an explanation of a coaxial shaft!]
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