The Best Portable Fish Finders: Full Reviews and Buying Guide

Once the dominant name in GPS for your car, Garmin has shifted gears, branching out to include fishing electronics in its product lineup. For anglers on the move, especially those who fish from the bank or small boats that don’t allow traditional mounting options, their STRIKER Cast is ideal, competing with Deeper’s Start, Pro, and Pro+, but falling far behind the capabilities of the CHIRP 2

The STRIKER Cast is built around portability: it’s essentially a small, battery-powered transducer that links to your smartphone. Paired with a free app, it turns your smartphone into a powerful fishfinder.

And as you’d expect from a leader in GPS tech, Garmin’s STRIKER Cast promises full-features mapping and GPS location options.

The STRIKER Cast is game-changing tech for anglers on the move.

Let’s get into the details.

As with all castable fish finders, screen resolution, size, quality, and bright-light legibility are dependent on the specifics of your phone, so we can’t comment on that.

But as you’d expect from a company with decades of experience in the navigation business, the STRIKER Cast’s UI is simple, intuitive, and easy to navigate.

The heart of any fish finder is the transducer - and here there’s even more good news. The STRIKER Cast’s transducer is surprisingly capable given its size and battery life, offering a maximum depth of 150 feet. That doesn’t match the excellent Deeper Pro and Pro+, but then the supported frequencies drive those numbers as much as anything else. 

Those lower frequencies penetrate the water column more easily but sacrifice image quality and target separation. One hundred fifty feet is plenty deep for any situation where you’ll be using portable fish-finding tech, and there’s nothing to complain about here.

The higher frequencies offer better resolution and fish-finding performance, and I think you’ll be impressed by what the STRIKER Cast can do. In the real world, it’s not a head-to-head competitor with fish finders sporting a transom-mounted transducer - that’s just a fact that can’t be denied.

But for a castable, portable transducer, Garmin’s offering is plenty capable, and it will absolutely show you where the fish are, including reasonable (though unspecified) target separation.

As is the case with all of Garmin’s products, you’ll have access to Quickdraw Contours, allowing you to create - and share! - detailed bathymetric maps with 1-foot increments. That’s game-changing tech for many anglers and a huge selling point for the STRIKER Cast.

Fishing a lake, pond, river, or beach you don’t know? No sweat!

Just download an available map and fish with insider information. For fishermen new to an area, on vacation, or just seriously on the move, that’s a must-have option.

It’s clear that there’s a lot to like here, and unless you need the extra depth Deeper’s high-end models can offer or want a more traditional fish-finder-like product, the awesome mapping features of the Garmin will impress.

Maximum depth: 150’

Maximum range: 200’

Transducer beam angle: 22° x 63° @ 260 kHz and 9° x 14° @ 455 kHz

Frequency: 260 and 455 kHz

Target separation: ?

Compatibility: Android and iOS, but unspecified

Battery life: 10+ hours

Charging time: 1.5

PROS:

• Easy to use
• Uncomplicated UI
• Very inexpensive for the tech you get
• Excellent battery life and recharging rate
• Awesome mapping features, including shared maps

CONS:

• Depth can’t match Deeper’s high-end products

For anglers who want portability and performance, Deeper’s Pro and Pro+ are hard to beat.

The Pro series upgrades the standard Deeper transducer, extending both the depth and the maximum range. In practice, not many fishermen need a 330-foot connection to their castable fish finder, but keep in mind that all that extra power means strong signals at more reasonable distances.

That can be a meaningful improvement, especially if you've struggled with signal strength before.

The increased depth can be a game-changer for inshore anglers in certain scenarios, but honestly, if that’s your game, you probably own a boat and want a mounted unit instead.

The Pro+ includes features like GPS, detailed mapping options, fine-grained target separation, and kayak and ice fishing capabilities that give flashers and traditional fish finders a real run for their money. And while it doesn’t offer the pure performance that traditional alternatives bring to the table, the price to performance ratio is amazing, as is the real-world portability.

The bottom line: these Deeper products really do deliver the goods.

Let’s take a closer look.

The GPS system on the Pro+ enables sophisticated bathymetric mapping of the bottom, and whether you do that by casting this unit from shore or running it from an available after-market mount on your kayak, canoe, or Jon boat, you’ll quickly discover every hollow, point, hump, and brush pile in your local lake.

This is a clamp mount, allowing true portability for anglers who rent kayaks and canoes. That right there is game-changing.

Renting? A clamp-mounted fish finder like the Deeper Pro+ is perfect for you.

That can be the difference between catching or coming home empty-handed, and it’s pretty amazing in a tiny, portable device offered at this price. When paired with an optional app--Fish Deeper--the utility of your maps increases exponentially, and this is truly an amazing option for serious anglers.

The Deeper Pro and Pro+ aren’t dumbed-down fish finders, offering a UI that provides standard fishing electronic information. Offering just 1 inch of target specification, it can tell the difference between schools of bait and fish, providing the precision that serious anglers demand.

For ice fishing, where you need real portability as you move through a dozen or more holes, I’m completely won over by the Pro and Pro+. It’s just very, very easy to move, drop, read, and move again with the Pro and Pro+. 

That’s a big deal.

Lightweight, and without the need for a heavy 12v battery to lug around, the Pro and Pro+ are just killer for ice fishing. And since there’s no need for transducer cable, tangles are a thing of the past.

No hassles, just fishing.

I didn’t expect to like the Deeper Pro series as much as I do. It’s a game-changer relative to the expense of traditional fish finders, especially for small boat anglers.

Maximum depth: 260 feet

Maximum range: 330 feet

Transducer beam angle: 15 and 55 degrees

Frequency: 90 kHz and 290 kHz

Target separation: 1”

Compatibility: iOS 12.0 and Android 5.0 forward

Battery life: up to 6 hours

Charging time: 2 hours

PROS:

• Easy to use
• Uncomplicated interface makes the Pro and Pro+ easy to read and understand
• Very inexpensive for the tech you get
• Good battery life and recharging rate
• Awesome fishing tech for ice and small boats
• Excellent target separation

CONS:

• ???

ReelSonar’s iBobber is a lower-priced alternative to the more capable fish finders on our list, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a great option.

It has some issues that will trouble serious anglers, and we should start there.

ReelSonar doesn’t report the transducer beam angles, frequencies, or target separation, and in my experience, that’s typically because they don’t compete favorably with the competition. When those numbers impress, they’re typically placed front and center.

In the real world, while the iBobber promises to differentiate between big and small fish (15 inches over or under), its sonar sensitivity has a hard time seeing the difference between fish and background clutter. The result is that it almost always reports lots of “fish,” even when none are around.

Signal strength is typically weaker than reported as well, meaning that long casts will lead to spotty results.

A final issue with the iBobber is that after fully charging, the unit loses battery power even when not in use. I know this sounds strange, but it happens frequently enough that folks who make a longer drive to reach the water find that the iBobber has discharged substantially by the time they’re ready to fish.

That’s unfortunately common - not a one-off.

Its other features - temperature, GPS spot tagging, contour mapping, and weather - work fine, but not at the level of the pricier competition.

The bottom line: I’d spend two to three times more for better tech.

Check out our full review of Reel Sonar's iBobber Fish Finder

Maximum depth: 135 feet

Maximum range: 100 feet

Transducer beam angle: ?

Frequency: ?

Target separation: ?

Compatibility: iOS 10.0 and later operating systems and Android 4.3 or later that use Bluetooth Smart (4.0)

Battery life: 10+ hours

Charging time: 120 minutes

PROS:

• Easy to use
• Uncomplicated interface 
• Inexpensive

CONS:

• Poor real-world signal strength
• Sonar can’t tell the difference between fish and other objects
• Battery discharges quickly - and sometimes while not being used