Semi permanent Sonar sensor mount

[aulrich]

I have a portable sonar it's old and the suction cup that holds it is shot(Not that it ever worked well). I was trying to think of ways of attaching it to my car topper so that can be relitively easy to remove.

First though was to silicon it to the bottom (shooting it through the bottom of the boat), it would stay in place the week I would be using it and then I can pull it off easy enough.

[sheephunter]

Unless you have a fiberglass boat I doubt that your transducer will shoot through the hull. Even if it is, you need to get a tight seal to the bottom of the hull with no air between. You can buy replacement suction cups.

[aulrich]

I have another idea, should be able to epoxy a rare earth magnet to where the suction cup was. If it does not stick enough to just the aluminum (don't ask me why they don't need ferrous metal to stick at all) I could just put a steel washer on the inside of the boat, that should be plenty strong enough to hold it on.

I'll still try to shoot through the hull if it can go through 3' of ice

[sheephunter]

I've never heard of one shooting through an aluminium hull. Lots of fibreglass boats have shoot-though hull transducers but I've never heard of one in an aluminium boat and from what I know, it's impossible. Ice has very different characteristics than metal. Some people drill a hole through large aluminium hulls and actually have the transducer on the bottom of the hull and the cable running through the hull.

Not sure how the magnet will work either as there isn't much metal in a transducer and the transducer needs to be at a specific angle to work properly.

Here's what Lowrance says about shot-thru-hull transducers.

Shoot-thru-hull transducers are epoxied directly to the inside of fiberglass boat hulls. The sound is transmitted and received through the hull of the boat - but at the cost of some loss of sonar performance. (You won't be able to "see" as deep with a shoot-thru-hull transducer as one that's mounted on the transom.) The hull has to be made of solid fiberglass. Don't attempt to shoot through aluminum, wood, or steel hulls. Sound can't pass through air, so if there's any wood, metal, or foam reinforcement, it must be removed from the inside of the hull before installing the transducer. Another disadvantage of the shoot-thru-hull transducer is it can't be adjusted for the best fish arches. Although there are disadvantages to a shoot-thru-hull transducer, the advantages are considerable. One, it can't be knocked off by a stump or rock since it's protected inside the hull. Two, since there is nothing protruding into the water flow, it generally works quite well at high speed if it is mounted where a clean laminar flow of water passes over the hull. Three, it can't be fouled by marine growth.

[-NDN-]

those strikemaster handhelds are supposedly able to shoot through a Hull, so who knows.

[JohninAB]

You can buy a rod type thing that the tranducer mounts too and then you clamp it to your boat. Easy to put on and take off or build your own and use a pair of vice grips to attach to the boat. That is what I do with mine out at camp. Works fine and is a very easy install uninstall.