Thread: Tm260 or Tm185m

Two is always better than one unit - that would be a very good setup. From the people I have worked with, the general thought has been that the 1Kw units will work fine but you won't get full power/depth performance from them. What you will be doing is running in the mid to upper range of the transducer's output which is pretty good for resolution. What will offset any performance limitations to some extent is heavily oversizing your supply cables to the units to reduce voltage losses and having minimal connections or switches between the battery and the unit, with good separation of the cables positive and negative to minimise any chance of magnetic field interference. That was one of the things I did when I set up the ss270 in my boat after the initial install produced pretty poor performance (among other tweaks).

To be fair, while the chirp is good and you do get better definition (have used it fairly extensively on work sites looking for objects, obstructions and the like) it isn't what I would call a revolution. It's more of an evolution or a small step forwards. In conjunction with downscan, sidescan and multi-beam it's a part of a good package of tools but!