The Sitex ES502 black box sounder is designed to provide sonar data to a number of Sitex chartplotters, including the full ColorMax line, that are not equipped with an internal fish finder.
We reviewed the ES502 black box fishfinder with an Airmar P58 transducer connected to a Sitex Colormax 5E chartplotter set to show sounder data full screen with A-scope turned on.
 Sitex ES502 Black Box Sounder |
Pressing a soft key while on the chart page of the 5E or any other Sitex ColorMax chartplotter brings up additional soft key functions to select full or split screen sounder display pages.
Data from the black box was transferred to the Colormax 5E display via cabling. We found it neccesary to configure the ColorMax display unit before it would recognize the black box fishfinder.
This unit is capable of producing 500- or 1000-watts RMS of output depending on the transducer coupled to the unit.
The ES502 black box measures about 7-inches square and a tad over 2-inches high, it is splash resistant but not waterproof and must be mounted in a dry area.
This sounder has all the basic fishfinder functions plus a few more sophisticated features like 2x and 4x zoom, bottom lock, and shift. It also has two automatic gain setting as well as manual.
On The Water Performance
The Sitex ColorMax 5 screen shot shows the high frequency output from the ES502 just after passing over our ping pong ball targets.
Even the narrow beam width of the 200 kHz display had no trouble finding all three of our test targets. Although in our opinion they are oversized when compared to the actual target size. We achieved our best results with the ES502 by using manual range and gain settings.On the right side of the screen you can see the depth markings and the A-scope display. We’d have preferred the depth was mark