POWER COUPLE

better detail.” ¶ Recent years have seen a shift toward wider-beam transducers projecting acoustic energy across a wide swath of water column or ocean floor, delivering greater macro-level awareness of what’s below the keel. “The problem is that these transducers take the fish finder’s transmitted energy and spread it out with their wide beams,” Kunz says. “Users get weaker returns because the energy is spread out. The DI-FFAMP makes up for the wide beam by putting more power into the water.” ¶ Additionally, certain fish species don’t have air bladders and, as a result, tend to look a lot like the water column itself when viewed with a standard fish finder. “You need a higher-powered fish finder to see them,” Kunz says. ¶ This same power also helps anglers serious about deep-drop fishing, with swordfish and snowy grouper examples of species that are easier to target and identify with a TZtouch3 that’s amplified by a DI-FFAMP. ¶ As noted, a TZtouch3 MFD can either transmit over fixed, continuous-wave frequencies (50/200 kHz), or it can chirp its transmissions (sending a sweep of frequencies over a longer time period than a fixed-frequency transducer, and thus putting more power into the water and yielding higher-resolution sonar imagery). ¶ At a certain depth, somewhere around 2,000 feet below the transducer, a TZtouch3 will switch from chirping to a continuous-wave signal, Kunz says. “If you want to chirp in deep water, a DIFFAMP will allow you to do that,” he adds. ¶ Cooler still, Deep Impact amplifiers also are designed to be controlled and leveraged by any onboard and networked TZtouch3 or TZtouch2 that’s running version 7 (or higher) software. This means an owner can upgrade to a TZtouch3 and DI-FFAMP at the helm, and view and control the Deep Impact’s bolstered imagery from a flybridge- or cockpit-installed