New Raymarine Axiom 3D sonar will blow your mind

As Raymarine recently proved with its impressive Axiom Multifunction Displays, there’s no substitute for on-water depth sounding. You can publish all the great fish arches and shows you like on simulated screens at boat shows, but when it comes to genuine sounding performance it's the real-life stuff that counts.

The crew of Raymarine’s UK-based test boat Raymariner were reminded of this very fact during some recent sea trials for its Axiom Multifunction Displays with RealVision 3D Sonar. Scanning the seabed, they came upon an interesting underwater target — the MV Margaret Smith, a coal dredger that capsized and sank near Yarmouth, UK, in 1978.

The wreck is part of the New Forest National Park and has become a popular feature for fishers and scuba divers. Known to locals as “The Maggie,” the ship is reputedly home to a wide array of fish species. It’s also a great structure for testing and calibrating sonar equipment, since it's a relatively young shipwreck that is well documented in both photo and video.

HOMING IN ON THE WRECK
Of course, anglers know one of the best places to locate fish is around bottom structure, as it provides shelter and protection to smaller fish and attracts food that larger fish feed on.

Structure can be natural objects like rocks, fallen trees, or underwater ledges. It can also be man-made objects that find their way into the water intentionally or unintentionally like, well, shipwrecks and artificial reefs.

Raymarine Axiom RealVision 3D sonar system has been designed to find these very things, with an array of exclusive tools for identifying bottom structures and the fish hiding within or thereabouts. The 3D sonar technology is easy to operate, too.

With a simple swipe of your finger across the screen, you can pan and tilt the 3D image to visualise the underwater seascape from any angle. This 3D imaging makes it simple to understand the size, depth and distances between objects, while the RealVision 3D image is gyro-stabilised using a transducer that measures the motion of the boat and automatically adjusts the ‘picture’.   

TWO DIFFERENT 3D MODES
RealVision 3D actually offers two different ways to visualise targets. The default setting is called Sphere Mode, which uses round spheres of uniform size to represent individual returns.

Sphere Mode helps make smaller targets (like bait and predators) look larger in the overall 3D presentation. This can be especially helpful when you’re looking for individual fish rather than large clusters or if you are looking at the display from a distance.

RealVision 3D can also render images in Point Mode, which uses tiny pinpoints to show each sonar return in 3D space.

While a lone contact will appear small in Point Mode, larger contacts and underwater structures will appear in very high resolution because the individual points will show the size and shape of these objects with extreme detail.

In either Point or Sphere mode you can control how colouring is applied to targets. When set to Depth mode, targets are coloured according to their depth in the water, using a rainbow scale that cycles every 50-feet.

In Intensity mode, targets are coloured according to the strength of their sonar return. Stronger returns are indicated by brighter colours.

RealVision 3D also offers five different target colour palettes to choose from, along with options for background colour and bottom colour, too.

THE TRANSDUCERS
RealVision 3D transducers are all-in-one solutions with 3D, DownVision, SideVision and High CHIRP elements plus a fast-response water temperature sensor. As touched on, they also contain a solid-state gyro sensor that counteracts vessel motion for improved image clarity.

When hunting for bottom structure, Axiom’s RealVision 3D sonar gives you several other powerful tools, too. In addition to 3D sonar, Axiom also has high-resolution CHIRP DownVision and CHIRP SideVision sonar built in. These options provide photo-like images of structures and fish, and allow you to see even more detail.

Axiom has a Conical High CHIRP sonar channel that is optimised for finding fish. You can view these channels individually, or at the same time on your Axiom multifunction display.

Raymarine has developed its Axiom 3D sounding technology to make finding and visualising underwater structures and wrecks easier than ever. That’s something that all boat-based anglers, divers and even cruisers will find captivating and, ultimately, beneficial to their fish finding and fish catching.

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