Transducer for Vexilar flasher - Duel or Single beam?

[FOOLFERFSHN]

Looking to buy a flasher this year and I am curious to find out what kind of transducer you prefer to use. Single or duel beam? Does it really make a difference? I watched a guy kill a limit of lake trout at Flaming Gorge last year in no time using a Vexilar FL8. I don't see how I would ever drive so far to fish and not have one of my own.

Thanks,
Jeff
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[Kent]

The wider beam is nice if you want to be able to see the jigs on two different rods. My Vexilar has both and I use the narrow one the most often, but when I want to see the jigs on multiple rods the wider beam is extremely useful.
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[fairwayphilly]

I comes down to what kind of water you fish most often. If you are mac fishing at the gorge you would want the narrow beam because of the water depth. The wide beam is too large a picture, while fishing in water under about 20' the wide beam if preferable because with the narrow beam your sight picture is too small.
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[kastmaster]

A narrow beam is also helpful when you're fishing in weeds or in spots where there are a lot of branches. It cuts down on the interference and such. Another scenario where a narrow beam transducer (NBT) excels is in spots where there are steep drop-offs. It avoids what they call 'dead spots' in the sonar world. Here's an excerpt from the Vexilar site about dead spots:

" DEAD ZONE - Dead Zone is the area within the transducers cone of sound that is blind to you. The wider the beam angle the greater the possible dead zone. The sonar will mark bottom as the nearest distance it sees. If you are fishing over a slope it may see the high side of the slope, at the edge of the cone, and mark that as bottom. The fish that are hanging on the bottom in the center of the cone will be invisible to you because they are actually within the bottom signal on your depth finder. A narrower beam angle will reduce this effect. "

I have a Marcum LX-3 with a 20* xducer and this scenario happened to me last year at Yuba. I was fishing at 40' or so depth (or so I thought) when I noticed that my jig would go past the bottom mark and my line would not get slack. I moved around a little bit and confirmed my suspicions, a dead spot in my LX-3 since I was at a spot where it dropped off from 40' to 50' quickly. I moved back to my original spot and just let my jig drop to the bottom and started catching fish.

If you can get a unit with a dual-beam transducer, I'd go for it.
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