The Best Ice Fishing Sonar For UNDER $200?

What's up guys, Jay Siemens here. We're back in the shop. We are headed fishing today, but we got a little unboxing. We're doing a little, a little craft time with Jay. I kind of like doing these videos. It's just, it's something different. If I can help teach you guys, maybe save you guys a little bit of money or a little, a little hack along the way. I want to share that with you. I've been listening to your comments. I read all your comments after all the videos and on one of my recent videos, the sonar comparison, the live scope versus the sonar ball. I got so many comments about the Garmin Striker 4. I think even in, in previous videos, so many people were talking about Striker 4, Striker 4, Striker 4. I just thought, okay, if this many people are talking about it, it must be good. So I did a little Googling, I did a little searching and I was like, I wonder what they cost. They're on sale in Kenora. I found one for $170, regular 200 bucks. This isn't, doesn't come with a portable kit. This is just the unit. This is the Striker plus four. We're going to unbox it. We're going to see what all you get for $170 Canadian. We're going to try to build a portable kit because obviously I didn't buy the, the portable, the one that comes with the bag and the battery and everything. And then we're going to go and try to catch some fish with it. And I'll give my opinion on if, if this is potentially one of the best budget options, like this has color sonar, it's got GPS, it's got their auto mapping feature. Yeah. I don't even understand how they can do that all for $170. It's pretty ridiculous. But anyways, let's get to the action. I've already opened this box before. And so I kind of knew what to expect, but let's open it with you guys. Right on the top there, you have the unit, nice and small, like so light. All right, you guys ready for this? Just look like first impressions looking at it. It's super basic. It has just two ports on the back. I'm guessing that's one for power and one for, I mean, it says power, one for your power and one for your transducer. That's it. There's no spots for a card to get put in. So obviously you can't put in any map chips. You can't export. You can't export it via SD card. We've got power cord, the transducer, transducer bracket. I think this is what the fish finder attaches into. This is the base plate for it. Instructions, some screws. We don't need any of that. Most of this stuff that we're going to use for this build right now, you can pick up at Princess Auto. Princess Auto is your like one-stop shop for all sorts of little kind of projects like this. I've never really built a kit like this before. So this is my first shot at it. But first thing you're going to need is these card cases. I bought a three pack there last time I was there, not knowing I was going to do this project. I think it was like a three pack for 30 bucks. So we are going to mount the graph to the top of this and we're going to house the battery on the inside. And I will link this below if they still have it available. This foam matting, we're going to put this inside, kind of hold things in place. This is actually a little chunk cut off of what I use for ice camping. Once again, we'll be linked below, but yeah, we're going to cut a little chunk and that's going to act as a cushion for the battery and also kind of hold it in place. Next, some PVC tubing. This is going to be our transducer arm. So depending if you want to rig something for the boat, because the kit that we bought doesn't have an ice fishing transducer, you can get one. We're going to use an open water transducer, which still works through the ice. It just has a bit of a different angle. We have one little angle piece for the bottom. That's what the transducer is going to mount on to. Then you're going to want a battery. So there's two options as far as batteries go. You've got your lead acid and you've got your lithium. Dakota lithium, you've heard me talk about swapping them out and all my electronics. These are more expensive. It's an investment. This lead acid you're looking at about 20, 20 bucks Canadian. I think this one you're looking at like 80 or 90 bucks Canadian. This is the seven amp hour. This one is two pounds, two ounces. This one double that weight, three times that weight. I'm not sure. It's pretty heavy. So I would think that with this battery or if you have a 10 amp hour, you could run it. I don't even want to guess. Maybe I'll do a test yet, but it's going to run it for a very, very long time. I would think you could do a weekend camping trip sort of thing with one charge. Yeah, I think that's it. We've got a little bit of hardware. Yeah. Let's just, let's just get to it. All right. First thing we want to do is figure out how we're going to mount the graph on top. You've got this receiving end right here. I kind of want to put it right at the edge. I think I'll drill it through this plastic. You can, and then, and then the deal is when we're done you're going to be able to slide this bracket out. This will stay on the top the entire time. And then all the other pieces will get hit away on the inside for travel. So first thing we're going to do is let's click this together. So it just, it clicks in on the back. Super basic mechanism. It tilts. There's, there's no, there's no buttons. There's no knobs to tighten or loosen. It's just like when it's so light and small like this you just kind of, yeah, you force it like that. So right now with how this is set up I think that looks pretty good having it right on the edge of the case. You could still use the handle. I kind of want to make sure this doesn't affect the handle if I want to use the handle at some point. But other than that, I think we can start drilling some holes. As they say, drill twice, measure once. It's not the saying I know. All right, we got it lined up. So now we're dealing with the inside of this whole thing. We're going to need somewhere to pass the cord. So when they come up from behind the graph we need to make sure there's somewhere that they can pass through there. We're good. Everything's good. I should take this, I should take the screen off. That could have been bad. All right, so now as you can see, can you see my eyeball? As you can see, we've got a hole in it now. So that should work to pass the power cord through. So that's kind of how the battery's going to fit. Yeah, you could have a smaller case, but watch this. This is like the best part. You got the battery in the bottom and we're going to be able to slide that graph right on top there. And then you'll have room for some of the other cords and the other stuff down below there. So that's kind of how I'm planning it right there. Before I go any further, I'm going to take this foam mat. I'm going to trace it to the bottom of the compartment here. I'm going to cut out a little section where the battery's going to sit. That way it's going to, you know, favor the battery to stay in that position. I think it's pretty straightforward. This totally feels like Crafts time. Today on Crafts with Jay, I'm going to teach you how to trace. You can always cut more, you can't put it back on, so. Now I'm going to lay the battery in there and kind of just cut out a little spot for the battery. So we got that PVC tube that I mentioned before and we've got a shorter piece. This piece should be wider than the diameter of your hole. So if you're fishing with a 10 inch hole, that should be 12, 13 inches. If you normally just fish with an eight inch hole, make it 10 inches, whatever. But basically I thought this pole, how I cut it was going to be good for most of the winter around here. If you're on Lake Winnipeg and you're dealing with four feet of ice, you might need a longer pole or whatever. Or you get an ice fishing transducer, then you can just let it dangle down your hole. But this, the angle is pretty important. This doesn't self level like an ice fishing transducer does, right? To be able to adjust it, depending on your height, we're going to put holes all the way across here, every six inches. And we're going to put a hole in here and it's going to make essentially a T. So then wherever you want to adjust it, depending on how thick the ice is, you're going to set it. And the beauty of it too, is it's also going to self level because this is going to want to balance it. Even if it's a little crooked on the snow, it's going to always want to hang straight. And then your transducer will be straight because your transducer being straight is super important, especially when you're using like an open water transducer like that. So I just have a quick release wing nut and a bolt that we'll put through here. And then we're going to attach the transducer to the end. So time-lapse of me drilling a lot of holes. Okay, next step we got to do is we're going to put transducer on the bottom. We're going to pass the cord up through the middle. We'll probably stuff most of the cord in there just to keep it nice and clean. And then we're like almost ready to go fishing. All right. We've passed the transducer cord all the way through. Ooh, that's clean. Look how clean that is. That's nice. No cords. I mean, you could still lose a fish on that, I'm sure. But all right, when you tighten down any transducer, you kind of don't want to winch it down all the way because if you keep it a little bit loose, it gives you that ability to be able to turn it. I guess we're going to tighten this down a little bit here. All right, guys. Well, this is the transducer setup. I think the term janky would probably describe it, but just a little PVC tubing, a couple of wing nuts, a couple of bolts to make that little T-bar. But, you know, we're going to want to play with the angles a little bit. We can adjust this depending on the thickness of the ice. I just stuffed the rest of the cord in the end there. I can pull a little more out when I need. We're going to kind of plug things together here and see how this whole baby looks. All right, the unit is assembled. As I mentioned, this is the Garmin Striker 4+. It's what you guys kept telling me I needed to check out. In that last video, we used the sonar ball and I'm never going to speak down on another unit. I think the sonar ball has its pros and cons. With this battery pack, as mentioned, can last a very long time. So could this be the best option for $200, under $200? Very well could be. Yeah, we're going to pack this whole thing up. I'm going to show you how it all fits into the case and then we are going to hit the ice and I will give you guys some specs on the unit and we'll see if it lives up to the hype. Welcome back. We've got Sam. Sam's going to test this graph out. She's a bit of an ice fishing electronics aficionado and she's enjoyed Vexlar's over the years. She's enjoyed LiveScope and now she's going to enjoy our portable kit that we built in the shop. The goal today is walleye, maybe perch, whatever. I just want to see how this marks the lure, how this shows up. So we're going to drop this in the hole. That's pretty good. Let's see if it fires up. There you go. For now, we're just going to get Sam set up on probably traditional mode. I'm going to get a GoPro filming the screen yet so you can see what we're doing, but for now we're just going to get Sam fishing. The first thing I can say with any electronics is take it off the automatic modes. Try to put it on manual setting so you can dial it in perfectly. You don't want fish icons showing up on your screen. All right, today Sam is going to be fishing with, you guessed it, the Dinnerbell. Any jig and spoon, jig and minnow, whatever would work. Dinnerbell's just nice for calling in fish. All right, so we're going to just go into the menu there. We're going to go back. So these are the settings you get right off the start. You got traditional, flasher, split screen, quick draw. That's like your auto charting and then some settings and stuff. Right now we're going to go to flasher mode to give us a real time reading. We'll show you some of the other modes yet too, but nice color display. All right, we're going to put a little minnow tail on for Samantha. As far as adjusting gain goes, you kind of want to be able to see your lure and not too much extra. So your lure's showing up pretty big right now. We might want to turn the gain down a bit, but it looks like our angle of the transducer's pretty good. It's marking nicely. Let's look at the menu here just to see what options we got. So we got traditional mode. Let's take a look at that. That's a pretty clear way. I don't know if there's a way to add some sort of live bar on the side. I'll have to look into that in the settings a little bit. We've got different color schemes we can play with. It's got the water temp. It's got our voltage, 13.2 volts. Okay, now this is a bottom lock mode. There's a fish. Look at this. There's a fish. Yeah, just hold it there. Right, this is a good start. You catching him? No. Marked any? What are the ones up higher? I wouldn't worry about those. No. Do you want to look at this? What? Just look. It's gone. Oh, it's warming. Do you want me to turn it down? Oh, that was a nice mark. He came above you. Oh! What? I just had a bite. Really? Yes. And I missed it. Oh, he came up so fast. Tell the camera what you're doing. I was rubbing my eye and then I felt it. He's streaking up towards me. Ooh. I got one! Oh, that was so cool. It's a perch! Cool. That's pretty cool. You could see him streaking up from the bottom really well. There we go. Victory. And I kept my tail. What you got? We were teaching Sam the ways of the perch. Woo! Okay, we're keeping this guy. Fish fry tonight. Oh. Did he just eat it? Yes! You look so scared. I think it's another perch. Take your time. Perch fry tonight. Is he in the transducer? Ooh, that's a nice perch. The perch queen, Samantha. All right, that one's coming home with us. Two perch. They marked pretty good for a small fish. There was no problem. We got no interference issues right now. Obviously, this is the only graph we're using, but no random noise, I guess you could call it. No time it is. What time is it, Sam? ♪ Sam Cam, Sam Cam, it is time for ♪ Sam Cam. The Sam Cam is back! Ladies and gentlemen, she back by popular demand. What's the Sam Cam? Well, it's like just a GoPro on your chest, basically, but it's when Sam wears it, it's the Sam Cam. We got Sam Cam merch below if you're looking for it. A bunch of people are asking for Sam Cam merch, so it's there. There's stickers, there's T-shirts, there's sweaters. Channel your inner Sam Cam. Size up. Size up, says Sam. Well, this is nice. Sam's hosting the show today, so I just get to sit back, watch the Sam show play on my phone. I'm thoroughly impressed. I, like, just looking at this graph, I would compare it to the, I think it was the LC 522. I think that was the Lowrance back in the day that was the nice color palette with GPS and everything. This probably has a couple less features, but I remember those units being like between 500 and $700. That obviously, you could put map chips in this one. You can't put map chips in. I would say that's probably the biggest downfall, but if you just do some backcountry canoe kayak stuff, you can still do a little bit of mapping with the, I forget what they call it, the contour draw or whatever it is, map draw, something like that. It's their form of auto charting, but yeah, the portability of it's just amazing. I'm gonna try zooming in even more on the bottom. So now it's zooming in on the bottom 10 feet. You can see there's probably a rock there and you can see the lure right above. That's pretty nice. This green, obviously the hardest return is orange or yellow, whatever you want to call it. And then pink, purple, and then that blue is the lightest signal. I'm fairly certain. Okay, so I haven't really talked about the spot we're fishing too much. The focus is obviously the graph. We're fishing a plateau on a main lake hump. I think the top of it comes up to 16 or 19 feet. We're, yeah, a 27 foot ledge and then 28 foot and then it drops off into like 40 feet just over there. So I like the little plateaus before the drops. I don't really like the steep breaks because then you can't mark as well. Right now you can see we're probably on top of one boulder. We'll see if there's a dead zone. Now my lure's on the bottom, lifting, lifting, lifting. So there's maybe a little bit of a dead zone, maybe one rock there. You can kind of see the lure come through that rock. So it'll take a moment to mess around with the settings a little more, see what else we got going on. What's edge? What's A-scope? Ooh, there we go. This is way better. This is what I should have done sooner. So this is the, I think A-scope shows in it a different way. I actually don't know exactly how A-scope works. And then as well, I added that live bar on the side now and I should have played with the settings sooner. But now I have on the right is real time, what's going on. And then the left is the history of it. And that's pretty sweet. Fish finder features. Well, I kind of showed you a bunch of them. It's got bottom lock. So the traditional frequencies on this, 50, 77, 83, 200. So it does a dual beam. So it does multiple frequencies at once, which I think gives you a better image. Resolution, you got 272 by 480, 4.3 inch screen. Rugged design for every fishing environment. One foot contours and up to 2 million acres. So even though you can't put a chip in here, that's a lot of auto charting data. GPS, that's pretty much it for features. But yeah, I still can't get over how they can sell it for that cheap. We need fish. It's gonna turn on any second now, Sam. Yeah, Gary. They call me Gary. Two people have driven by looking for Gary. I ain't Gary. Well, it's four o'clock. They should start screaming. Grr, grr. Where do camels live? Fish. Look at that big mark, big mark coming up. Got him. Yes. Ooh, that fish is squirrely. Can you pull a trout on Zeus Road? This is a, oh boy. I think it's a pike or something. Oh my goodness. What do we have? That run was insane. Feels heavy. I think pike. I don't know. This fish is just squirrely. It could just be a medium-sized pike. Oh, I don't know. What do we have? I think the fish must be wrapped up or something. I don't know. Like why does it feel like it's 100 pounds right now? Maybe it's like hooked to the bottom of the ice. That was exactly it. Sometimes that line will hook on the bottom of the ice and it'll like make a little indent. And then that fish can pop off potentially. Ooh, that was a big head shake. What do we have? Those head shakes are so big. I do not like them at all. Oh, come on. Oh, I hate this. I hate this. No, no. Oh my goodness. Is he still on? Am I hooked on the ice? Oh, all I got is the tip up bait from outside. So what happened was that fish swam all the way over to the tip up, which isn't that far. It's like 20, 30 yards away. My goodness. I am crushed. Well, it marked beautifully on the graph. We'll play an instant replay of that fish coming up. That was perfect. Oh, let me cry for a bit. Oh, guys, what do you think that was? Do you think that was a big walleye? Do you think it was like a medium sized pike? The head shakes felt pretty wide like it could have been a pike. There's a chance it could have been a lake trout, I guess. It just, everything was good. You just came up and chowed it. It hurts. You would have landed that one. Everyone's going to roast me in the comments. I'm going to land that one. He's so finesse. What hurts the most is being so close and having so much to say and watching you swim away. Do you feel better now? Yeah, that helped. Here's a fish. Come on. Yes, he's going to eat. Oh, he's going to eat. Yeah, nice. Nice, Sam. I'm going to pull this. This is a walleye. Yeah, you're feeling it. It looks okay. This is a walleye. Sam cam's rolling. Oh, that's a decent sized fish. Yeah, just lift, don't reel anymore. Oh, that's a nice walleye. Yes. Nice. Yes. Oh, my goodness. All right, I'm going to, I'll grab the vlog cam here. Show me. Nice walleye for Samantha. There you go. It's been slow. Beautiful. All right. Gone. We did it. That was good. You could tell that fish just came in and wanted a chow. Yeah. Pressure's off now. I feel a little bit better about that. Oh, oh, oh. Here we go. Nice mark. Oh, that fish throttled you. It's getting dark. Look at that. Look at that face. This is bigger than I thought. Is it going to be a decent walleye? Nice walleye, they're getting bigger. Oh. Yes. Look at that. That's a nice chunky mama. All right, Sam, you grab it. Yes. What do you think? He's pretty. You think that graph works? They're getting bigger. Nice. All right, Sam, what do you think? Am I a decent guide? It was touch and go there for a minute. All right, buddy, let us go. Nice. Sam Cam's back. Maybe that's my good luck today. Yeah. That's what it is. Since this evening is wrapping up, what would be your thoughts on this? You've used LiveScope. You've used a flasher. Tough to compare it to a LiveScope. LiveScope's a little more interesting to watch fish interactions. But the couple of fish that I caught today, you could clearly see them rising from the bottom, which is pretty cool. Seems easy enough to use. And it only cost us like $170, which is what I like the most. I think you need to kind of take a couple of things into account when you're getting your graph. I think if you need mapping, if you want to get LakeMaster for Lake of the Woods, for the Great Lakes, wherever you are, then I think probably like a Helix 5 kit would be the best for year-round use. But then you're spending $500 to, I don't know exactly what it is, around $500, $600. If you're doing a lot of backcountry stuff or mapping just isn't that important to you, this is incredible for the price. There might be some other ones. I don't know. Like I said, I don't have any brand association with any electronics company. I like trying them all and playing around. And when I saw this on sale and I saw all your comments about, you've got to try the Shryker 4, I was like, OK, well, let's buy it. Let's see if the hype is real. And yeah, I'm impressed. I mean, all the technology is getting so good these days. And same thing with LiveScope. The price is probably going to drop in half in the next couple of years. So if you are getting into ice fishing and just you want a year-round graph as well, you can put on the back of your canoe, your kayak, your john boat. I mean, you're not really going to go wrong with this, I don't think. Well, I lost one really big one. And Sam just caught all the rest. That's a wrap. Thank you guys for watching. If you are fishing on the ice, do not forget to pick up your trash. Anyways, guys, that's it. We're headed home.