Houghton Lake, Mich. ? One of these days we won’t have to go ice fishing ourselves. We’ll send the robots out into the cold and wind while we sit in a cozy room and watch everything happen on television.

The intermediate steps toward that goal are already here, as witnessed by the pager on Nick Poindexter’s jacket that had just gone off for the third time in 20 minutes.

“Flag!” he said. “There’s a flag somewhere.”

His eyes scanned the half-dozen holes that he and three friends had drilled on the ice a quarter-mile off the shoreline of Houghton Lake, and sure enough, a little red flag was waving above one of the holes.

Poindexter hustled to the spot, waited for the line to stop moving, lifted his rod out of the holder and set the hook. A few minutes later he slid a 22-inch northern pike out of the hole, removed the hook and dropped the undersized fish back into the water.

As he reeled in the fish, Poindexter nodded toward a black plastic box with a short silver antenna on the side of his tip-up. A little bigger than a pack of cards, it’s a radio transmitter that sends a signal to his pager when a fish takes the bait and starts pulling out line. It also flashes a little red light so anglers can see it at night.

“This thing is great,” said Poindexter, a Higgins Lake angler who makes ice-fishing trips around the state. “You know right away that you’ve got a bite. Without it, you see a flag and wonder how long it has been up.”

The device is called a Strike Sensor and sells for about $55 in many outdoors shops. It’s an American version of the electronic bite indicators that have been popular in Europe for 20 years, and it also works in summer for people who fish from a lake or riverbank.

Poindexter used his Strike Sensor in combination with an All Seasons tip-up, made by Hillbilly Tackle Co. in Wolverine.

This tip-up clamps to the side of a bucket or chair and allows an angler to use a rod and reel rather than pull in line hand-over-hand, as is done with traditional flat tip-ups.

Like conventional tip-ups, the Hillbilly tip-up has a flag that goes up when a fish takes the bait and pulls line from the reel. It also can be used in summer for bank fishing for catfish and other species where bottom-fishing with bait is the preferred tactic.

The Arctic Warrior is another tip-up that uses a fishing rod, and that model sits directly on the ice and doesn’t require a bucket to support it.

Both the Hillbilly and Arctic Warrior tip-ups sell for about $20.

The ice is safe for fishing on many lakes north of M-55, and early anglers are doing well on pike, perch, bluegills and walleyes.

“We really got some nice bluegills on Manistee Lake” in Kalkaska County, said Rudy Blanchard of Bowling Green, Ohio, a self-described ice-fishing fanatic who comes to Michigan most winter weekends.

“We were using wigglers, but some of the other guys I saw were getting them on red worms and wax worms.

“What I’m really waiting for is Lake St. Clair to freeze up. It’s only about an hour-and-a-half from my house, and we’ve really done well on walleyes there during early ice for the past couple of years.”