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using a smartphone app to test rod sensitivity
Given the cold rainy weather I've had some time to fool around with testing rod sensitivity. I've found that how well a fishing rod relays a vibrating cell phone does not really amount to any sort of reliable relationship to how sensitive a rod is to a fish bite.
Other than a vibrating cell phone, I also tried using a jig saw in "slow mo" speed to bump jigs to test sensitivity. However I found that the longer I sat in the cold garage the worse results I got (cold / numb hands). The jig saw test did tell me two things. 1) light fluoro is more sensitive that light braid at least in short lengths and 2) solid plastic baits like BG Baby Shad have a "bounce" that inherently makes them more sensitive that feather jigs or hollow tube jigs when bit.
However I still needed a more objective test. Eventually I found a smart phone app for Andriod called Vibrometer. It's designed to detect earthquakes but it also seems to do a pretty good job detecting fish bites when balanced on a fishing rod set horizontally in a rod holder. To test I used about 2' of light braided line marked at one inch increments with a small swivel as a weight at one end and an even lighter piece of wire as a weight on the other end. By taping the line to the rod through the guides at different lengths and then carefully dropped the weights a specific distances while setting the "earthquake" alarm at various levels, I got good tests on a lot of different rods. The light wire dropping simulated a "peck". For this test I used the one richter scale alarm on the app. The relatively heavier swivel dropping simulated bites and I tested alarms 2-4. The app has a lot of options for tuning the alarms and it has a paid version where the more detailed graphs can be saved. Dropping the weights from the rod tip in a very even fashion still has it's inaccuracies but I simply tested each pole a few dozen times and did not keep any results unless they were repeated at least 3 times in a row. The length of the line needed to trigger the alarm determines the sensitivity of the rod. The shorter the drop, i.e. less force needed to reach the vibration alarm threshold, the more sensitive the pole.
Here are 2 two pics to give a better idea what the testing setup looks like.
Here are the results in a spreadsheet with some averages, sorted roughly by the most sensitive poles first. Some poles were not sensitive enough to test the the low and high ends.
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