So last night while fishing in 5 ft of extremely calm water over a large mud flat my sounder started acting crazy. It would not pick up the bottom consistently, kept flashing the depth at me and kept saying that the bottom was fish! I messed with it a whole bunch and finally backed everything up to the data card and restored factory settings - did nothing, still happened. Then I messed with the transducer making sure it was pointing down and cables were all firmly in place and again - still doing it.
Once we left the mud flat it started behaving normally again! Is it possible that the bottom was just so “Soft” that it was not getting picked up correctly? Anybody ever have anything similar happen?
I had the same thing on a Garmin 541S. It turned out to be a crack in the transducer. I found a new one on the net for about 80 bucks.
Hope this helps!
ZX
sonar is like radar in the water.
sends out a sound wave, wave hits something, and bounces back.
the return (ECHO) is what the unit reads.
silty mud in shallow water, can act like a stealth coating and absorb so much of the sonar signal, that it confuses the unit.
do you have any kind of signal strength adjustment?
what unit do you have?
www.teamcharlestonmarine.com
www.joinrfa.org
quote:
Originally posted by chris V
sonar is like radar in the water.
sends out a sound wave, wave hits something, and bounces back.
the return (ECHO) is what the unit reads.
silty mud in shallow water, can act like a stealth coating and absorb so much of the sonar signal, that it confuses the unit.
do you have any kind of signal strength adjustment?
what unit do you have?
www.teamcharlestonmarine.com
www.joinrfa.org
It’s a Garmin 542s I believe. It seems to be working fine now, was just over that mud flat. I have fished there many times and never had a problem before, but this was the first time I fished there (In the harbor) with the water and surf that calm, so everything kind of “settled”. I’m hoping that it’s just the bottom make-up somehow confused the unit.