It’s not too often that a single product introduction has the ability to change how everyone from tackle manufacturers to weekend anglers to seasoned pros see and approach a day of fishing, but in 2018 when Garmin unveiled the world’s first live-scanning sonar—LiveScope—that is exactly what happened!
Now instead of watching what had been in their transducer’s field of vision, anglers could see a live display of what was currently in front of them and see how fish reacted to varying presentations. It was now not only possible to determine varied sizes of fish on the electronics’ display, but anglers could even distinguish between species and seek out specific targets in real time. This truly revolutionized fishing as we know it today, so much so that some questioned whether this was even fair to the fish. Fortunately, the fish have no say in the matter and the results are undeniable as LiveScope has led to countless professional fishing tournament wins including three of the last four Bassmaster Classic Championships, and it has won numerous industry awards including ICAST’s Best of Show, NMEA’s Technology of the Year and Boating Industry’s Top Product, just to name a few.
In 2019, LiveScope made its way into the ice fishing scene with the introduction of the LiveScope Ice Fishing Bundle, and hardwater anglers couldn’t get their hands on it fast enough! Ice fishing electronics or flashers have always presented more of a real-time readout of what was going on below the angler’s feet than open-water models, but where traditional flashers displayed distinct color bars to represent fish, bait and structure, the Panoptix LiveScope display shows both a real time and far more realistic, almost video-game-like picture on the screen.
With the two markets of open and hard water live-scanning, real-time sonar covered by Garmin LiveScope, the next step was to set about improving on the technology; enter Garmin LiveScope Plus in 2022.
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