A commercial-grade bottom profiler
for the serious sportfisherman or diver.
WATCH OUT FOR WASSPS!
New Zealand sonar manufacturer ENL (Electronic Navigation Limited) made a deal that will see Furuno distributing its Wide Angle Sonar Seafloor Profiler (WASSP) throughout the United States. The WASSP rolls seven fishing tools into one: a multibeam sonar, a single-beam sonar, a single-beam fishfinder, a multibeam fishfinder, a 3-D bottom profiler, a 2-D bottom contouring system, and a sidescan sonar.
It uses two separate transducers. One, the transmit transducer, produces a broad fan-shaped beam of sonar energy 120 degrees wide, floodlighting a broad swath of the seabed down to about 650 feet deep and nearly 2,300 feet wide. The second, a receive transducer, is effectively more than 100 highly directional transducers in one, breaking the returning echoes down to measure the depth and hardness of the seabed at over 100 different points with every sonar “ping”—700 points per second.
The Windows-based software in WASSP’s dedicated marine PC then analyzes the results and displays up to four different views of the seabed and the water above it on its monitor. At the same time, it saves the data and combines real-time and saved data to build its own detailed 3-D image of the seabed.
Furuno
(360) 834-9300.
This article originally appeared in the August 2011 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
