Fish Finders for Crappie Compared

Why Use a Fish Finder When Fishing for Crappie?

Crappie aren’t quite like other fish, not even bluegill, although their appearance is a bit similar. Crappie are more of a rounded shape, and they will stack up in vertical stacks on the fish finder display reading when they school. Here’s a few other key reasons to use a crappie fish finder:

Important Fish Finder Features for Crappie Fishing

Location & Timing

Crappie will head to shallow waters in freshwater lakes and rivers in springtime. This can have something to do with the water temperature, but it’s actually more likely because the crappie are fattening up in the pre-spawn season. During this feeding, they’ll bite at just about anything minnow-shaped.

In wintertime, crappie will be very lethargic and try to bury themselves in vegetation to hang out near feeder streams. The summer is their post-spawn period, and you’ll be able to find crappie on flats and in other places where there’s food.

Mounting Type

Fish finders can be mounted on a gimbal, which is a mount on a round joint that can be tilted for a better look at the screen. They can also be handheld for more portability, castable so that anglers can use them from the shore, or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, mounted flush in the dashboard of a boat.

Power Source

Transducer Features

The transducer is what sends out and receives sonar signals. They can send this signal out in a narrow beam or a wide beam, and the best fish finder transducers will have a dual-beam feature that enables them to send out both. Wider cones cover more of the water, but they may not send signals powerful enough to reach the bottom in really deep water. Narrow beams send stronger signals, but they’re more directed at a specific part of the water column. Dual-beam transducers let you scope out in wide mode and target crappie in narrow beam mode.

Display Screen

Gaining useful information from the display on a fish finder will only be possible if the screen has a high level of detail. Crappie are similar in size to some other fish, and you’re going to need plenty of detail to make sure you aren’t accidentally casting out to shad instead. You can see how much detail is in the display by the resolution, which is the number of pixels. More pixels equals more detail. Make sure to get a colored display to see clean fish arcs and a backlit device that you can use in low light.

Down Imaging vs. Side Imaging

Side imaging is a mode where the sonar signals are sent out to both sides of the boat. This enables the user to see wide swathes of the water column and search out places where crappie like to hide, like vegetation and structure. Down imaging sends sonar directly underneath the boat so the user can take a closer look at a particular place.

Performance Features

Additional features that can make a crappie fish finder even more useful are GPS, SD card storage, visibility features such as brightness, and an increased scanning rate. When transducers send out a signal, there follows a period where they are 'ringing' or reloading. Low-Q transducers ring less and therefore, can send more signals for higher detail.

Displays should be visible in broad daylight and at nighttime too. Having GPS and chartplotting built-in can help you navigate, and an SD card slot enables you to store information and load new maps onto the device.

Price & Warranty

To get every feature on a crappie fish finder, you’ll likely have to pay more. But there are plenty of good fish finders for crappie that come at a much lower price. Every fish finder we reviewed for this article has a warranty, but some are longer than others, and some have certain conditions attached as well. To get the most protection for your new fishing gear, make sure you understand precisely what the warranty covers before you buy.

1. Humminbird HELIX 7 CHIRP GPS G3

2. Deeper PRO+

All too often, castable fish finders underperform compared with other fishing electronics. That’s not the case with the Deeper PRO+, which has many of the most popular fishfinder features like dual-beam scanning and temperature and depth readings. It’s also built with some convenient additional features like built-in GPS that lets the user create bathymetric maps from the shore, which just isn't possible with more expensive and cumbersome fish finders.

If you haven’t used this castable fish finder to haul crappie out of the shade line in the summertime, post-spawn period, we highly suggest it. That’s probably the greatest benefit to the Deeper Pro+. For anglers who fish from the shore or smaller watercraft that don’t have room for a larger fish finder, this is the best device to search out crappie. The only possible issue is that this fish finder will only be as effective as your cell phone, and the screen will be the size of a smartphone since it displays all its findings via an app.

Charging this device takes about 2 hours, and it should last for 6 hours of fishing. It’s also effortless to use this castable fish finder when you're having trouble finding crappie ice fishing, although the battery won't last as long in cold conditions. This is also the most portable crappie fish finder around. Just be mindful that you don’t cast this fish finder into shallow water to avoid damaging it. For added confidence, the Deeper Pro+ is covered by one of the longest warranties on the market, a whopping 5 years.

3. ReelSonar iBobber Wireless

Another castable model, the ReelSonar Wireless, is convenient to have around because it can be used from the shore, and it can also function as a regular bobber would. That means there won’t be any fussing around taking it off the line before you can continue fishing. It also has a 10-hour battery life, which is plenty for fishing all day long. Just make sure your smartphone battery can also last that long. The app it uses to display information is more similar to a portable fish finder in that it uses fish icons and doesn’t look as much like traditional sonar, but it will still help you find those crappie.

Although it might not appeal to every angler, this fish finder is also compatible with wearable tech like an iWatch or Google Watch, which means you don’t necessarily have to have a smartphone lashed to your fishing rod. Bear in mind that the iBobber doesn’t work as effectively in very shallow water, so fishing in less than about 5 feet of water may give inaccurate readings.

If you like to fish with multiple lines in the water or go ice fishing for crappie and want to be able to keep an eye on all your lines at once, you can use the strike alarm on this fish finder an alert. It also registers depth, wind, and water temperature, plus you can use it to keep an eye on the weather. It’s not as sophisticated as the Deeper Pro+, but it also requires a much smaller investment. If you like to get very technical with your fish finder, you might want a different model. But if you just want to see where the fish are, the iBobber works great.

4. HawkEye FishTrax 1X

5. Humminbird HELIX 5 CHIRP GPS G2

6. Lowrance HOOK2 5

7. Raymarine Dragonfly Pro

Everything you need to trace underwater channels and find schools of crappie wherever they are is built into the Dragonfly Pro. One of the nicest details is the split-screen, which cuts the display in two horizontally rather than vertically, which is much more common in fish finders. If you’re using the built-in downscan or sidescan, having wider screens is just easier to use. Navigating through the menus is easy, even if there is no automatic mode. What Dragonfly calls wide-spectrum sonar is pretty much the same as what you get with low-Q. It’s really sharp, and the screen can be set to give crisp and colorful images.

You can mount this thing pretty much any way you want to. They’re RAM mount compatible, and there's a flush mounting kit available as well. The CHIRP DownVision is one of the best around and a great way to scope out a new area. You can also use their dual CHIRP to take a more targeted look at a particular part of the water column once you’ve found a target school or structure.

This unit can connect to WiFi to communicate with a smartphone or tablet. That WiFi connection also helps with the GPS navigation, which can give you your saved waypoints on the view straight ahead of you. If there’s one thing wrong with this unit, it's that the screen could be brighter, but unless you're in direct sunlight, you shouldn't have any problem seeing the display.

Tips for Finding & Identifying Crappie on a Fish Finder

Many anglers are anxious about purchasing electronics for crappie because they don’t know how to find crappie on a fish finder. Look for these qualities in the environment and your fish arcs to locate crappie on a fish finder display:

People Also Ask (FAQs)

Are there any special techniques for how to find crappie while ice fishing?

When the water is really cold, crappie are going to be in the few feet of water closest to the bottom. They may bury themselves in weeds, but they’re going to be moving slowly. Finding crappie ice fishing is pretty much the same, but make sure you’re moving your jig heads and minnows extremely slowly because these fish are not going to jump at bait like they do in the warmer months.

Where is the best place to find crappie ice fishing?

If you have the benefit of any charts or already have a map of the bottom of a frozen lake, try to find sharp changes in the bottom like drop-offs or dugouts. Crappie also like to hang out in the weeds if they can. There’s an increased mortality rate when you pull crappie out of more than about 40 feet of water, which is why we prefer to stay out of water that deep.

Is side imaging worth the extra money?

Is Humminbird better than Lowrance for crappie fish finders?

Humminbird may have the upper hand when it comes to higher-end crappie fish finders, but Lowrance offers lots of very similar tech, generally for a lower price. If you don’t need all the bells and whistles but want an easy-to-use 2D sonar fish finder with you, Lowrance is a good option. Humminbird does have sharper returns on their displays, though.

What fish finding technology is best for finding crappies?

Crappie, being panfish, are smaller overall than other targets like bass and walleye. They like to hide when the temperature is low, but they will bite at almost anything pre- and post-spawn. To find them where they are in any season, no fish finder technology is more important than a low-Q transducer that shows the bottom in great enough detail to make out crappie against weeds and structure.

Conclusion