About AnglerTechCalc, and how these numbers are made

What this site is

AnglerTechCalc covers the electronics and the rigging on a fishing boat or a fishing kayak: fish finders, chartplotters, live sonar, transducers and mounts, trolling motors, batteries and charging, marine electrical systems, livewell and bilge plumbing, downriggers, kayak rigging and the safety equipment that goes with all of it.

Almost every question in that list has a computed answer that depends on the reader own numbers. How much thrust for a loaded boat, how long a battery holds a draw, what gauge a run needs, how wide a cone is at depth, how much rode at a given scope. So the site is built around calculators and around pages generated from the same formulas, rather than around opinion.

Three kinds of number, and why we label them

This subject mixes three kinds of figure that look identical on a page and are not equivalent. Getting them confused is how somebody ends up with a cable that runs warm or a boat loaded past what it should carry, so every table, every formula and every calculator field on this site declares which kind it is showing.

• A published figure. The AWG circular mil table. The marine voltage drop formula and its copper constant. The ABYC E-11 three and ten percent drop limits and the rule putting overcurrent protection within seven inches of the battery. The trigonometry of a sonar cone and of downrigger blowback. Peukert equation. A manufacturer own published maximum current draw. These do not move.
• A rule of thumb. Two pounds of thrust per hundred pounds of loaded boat. Fifty percent depth of discharge on lead acid. Seven to one anchor scope. A quarter to a third of line rating as strike drag. Seventy percent of a stated kayak capacity as usable load. Every one of these is taught everywhere, useful, and published by nobody.
• A figure off your own boat. The capacity plate. Your own motor published draw. Your own transducer cone angle. Your own measured cable run. We do not supply these and we cannot override them.

What we refuse to publish

Where no published figure exists, we return nothing rather than estimating one. Two cases come up constantly and both are deliberate:

• We publish no ampacity indexed by wire gauge. ABYC E-11 ampacity depends on the conductor insulation temperature rating, on whether the run passes through an engine space, and on how many current carrying conductors are bundled together. A single number by gauge alone would be wrong for most installations, and wrong in the direction that overheats a cable. Our wire pages size conductors by voltage drop and tell you plainly to check E-11 for the other half.
• We publish no knot strength percentage. Retained strength depends on the line, the number of wraps, lubrication and how the knot was seated, and published tests of the same knot disagree with each other by wide margins. One number would be inventing a specification.

The same rule runs through the product data. A specification the manufacturer does not publish shows as "not published" on our spec sheets rather than being filled in from a neighbouring model or a forum post.

How the product research works

Our catalog holds 278 products. Every one of them was found through the Amazon Product API, and every ASIN had its returned title read against the product the page claims it is before it was added. Prices, images and availability come from the API rather than being typed by hand, which is how a catalog avoids quietly drifting out of date.

Picks are researched from manufacturer specification sheets, published engineering figures and the recurring themes in verified owner reviews. We do not test equipment in person and we never claim to. Any site claiming hands-on testing of forty fish finders is telling you a story. What we can do honestly is read every published figure, compare them properly, and be explicit about which numbers are which.

What we deliberately leave out of the catalog

Several categories in this niche are dominated by unbranded sellers, and in most of them we catalogue none of it. A lithium battery whose management board is the only thing between a cell fault and a fire, a breaker protecting a battery cable, a bracket holding a two thousand dollar motor to the bow at highway speed, and an inflatable life jacket are all parts whose failure has a consequence nobody can walk away from. Where the search results are entirely unbranded, we say so on the page and link a scoped search rather than pretending we found something we would recommend.

How we make money

Through the Amazon Associates programme. When a reader buys something through a link here we earn a commission at no extra cost to them. It does not change which product we recommend, and the clearest evidence of that is how often these pages tell somebody to buy the cheaper thing or to skip an item entirely. Every expert tier on the site carries a section saying who should not buy it. See our affiliate disclosure for the full detail.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, we want to know, and specifically we want to know which published source says otherwise. Get in touch and we will fix it and say what changed.