January 10, 2022 — About 10 years ago, iXblue — a French tech company headquartered on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea — identified fisheries as a potential market and began asking fishermen what they wanted in a sonar.
“We found that fishermen want two things,” says Christophe Corbières, Fishery sales developer at iXblue. “They want to know the volume of the target shoal, and they want to be able to discriminate species.”
To that end, iXblue designed the Seapix sonar system, a pricey but top of the line tool for fishermen who want to have a good idea what they’re setting their nets on. The system begins with a Mills Cross transducer with 256 beams on each axis.
“It looks ahead and the side 120 degrees,” says Corbières. “We are using the same transducer geometry that astronomers use to listen to deep space, adapted for the sea.” iXblue made the transducer 48 centimeters in diameter, so it could fit the housing size of comparable transducers.