Fish-Hawk.Net

I would like to try ice fishing using a flasher this year, but budget constraints being what they are... a new one is out of the question.

However, I can fix just about anything electronic.

If you have an older flasher, or a flasher that is broken, I would be happy to take it off your hands at a reasonable price!

Ottawa area preferred, although I will be around Kingston, Guelph and Midland over the holiday season.

Thanks!!!

Thanks To Yannik (Fisherguy33) for the broken Marcum unit!!!!!

After investing about 40 hours learning how flashers worked by poking away at it on my lab bench, I managed to rebuild most of the drive circuitry inside the unit (call it a strange hobby) and am happy to say the flasher is now working again!!!

A couple things I learned about these flashers that may help others get the most out of theirs:
1) The power consumption of this "spinning LED display" type almost doubles when you have the display turned up brightly with lots of details showing. Keeping the sensitivity turned down lower so there is less clutter could therefore nearly double your battery life!
2) The unit has some special circuitry to absorb the energy created if you run it with the transducer unplugged, but the circuitry doesn't like it!!! So don't run a unit without a transducer plugged in, it really stresses the unit.

A couple things I learned that may help others diagnose what turned out to be a faulty (intermittent shorted) transformer:

1) The transducer sometimes clicks, but sometimes doesn't. When it does click it seemed weak. I replaced it, sadly a waste of money since it wasn't bad.
2) The unit uses more energy than it should, about 70% more than normal, so it would run down the battery faster than normal.
3) The drive circuitry was getting hot (nearly 80 degrees). It was noticeable even outside the unit when sitting inside, that something was getting warm.
4) The unit, when it did work a bit, tended to have sensitivity that varied a lot, to the point where sometimes you couldn't even see the bottom, but other times the screen was filled with clutter.

Lots of fun fixing this, but hopefully will be even more fun to fish with it now!!!

That's awesome!! Glad you got it working, hope you enjoy it.

Now you can expect a large influx of "Hey, can you fix this??!!??" inquiries!!

Soo you did some more tweaking n testing i see ...have you been back to the river to try it briefly?
Great news though, should help you out drastically..

Tight Lines, Jalen

I only tried it in 13 feet of water near my house, didn't do any "real" fishing with it. Fingers crossed I can get out and explore some new spots on Sunday.

grats on getting it working again, i wouldnt dare taking my vex apart!

Cyber wrote:That's awesome!! Glad you got it working, hope you enjoy it.

Now you can expect a large influx of "Hey, can you fix this??!!??" inquiries!!

OK I'll bite lol. I was talking to my neighbour last night and he just happened to mention a problem he was having with his sonar unit. Not sure which one but it's not a flasher. The unit seems to work fine up to 30 ft. but any deeper than that and the screen goes totally blank. My first thought was loss of power, but I guess it could just as easily be a switch as it changes depth ranges. Any thoughts Scarkner?

Cheers

Well, the switch was also worn out on the Marcum flasher too, so most of the time it wouldn't properly select the depth range.

Old sage advice: "Try wiggling it"

scarkner wrote:Well, the switch was also worn out on the Marcum flasher too, so most of the time it wouldn't properly select the depth range.

Old sage advice: "Try wiggling it"

Wiggle! I spin em 20 times lol. But yea I hear you about manual switches. Unfortunately most are sealed now and hard to service.When our avionics shop shut down a couple years back I made sure there was bottle of Stabilant 22 in my tool box. Excellent stuff used in the audio field.

Cheers

Glad you got her working and thanks for the updates on the fix progress although I admit 98% of it was jibberish to me. lol. It served me well, but I think I'm a Hummingbird guy from here on out. Thanks for the venison, jam, and relish. Something delicious for something broken sounds like a deal only the Leafs would make but if you have a working flasher then everybody's happy!

Enjoy the new toy.
Yannick