Vexilar Interference - What does it look like?

[Trouthunter]

Was out on a local lake catching white crappies yesterday when about 5:00 my NEW fl-18 started freaking out...a couple of other shacks had pulled up to within 30-40 feet or so of mine, but they had been there earlier in the day...

Low returns started appearing all over in the water column, with medium returns appearing to "rise" out of the depths and surface.

Tried using the interference reduction feature which seemed to help, but it would always seem to return to being virtually unusable. Adjusted the gain several times at each interference setting...no good.

My question is...what does "interference" look like, how is it caused, how far do you have to be from someone to get it, etc. I SHOULD have gone over to the other shacks to see what flashers they were using, but I was too busy icing fish...

BD

[Ed Carlson]

Interference from stray like frequency signals appear to be bars rotating counterclockwise around your dial display. The targets rising you described is likely cross frequency interference.

How close were the other flashers, were you on rock bottom/hard bottom, and how deep were you?

What type of Ducer are you using, a single beam or duel beam?

Also how far down into the water did you have your Ducer set?

[Minnetonka]

Sounds like interferance to me. I have also experianced this with people having flashers within 50 feet of me. You will also see interferance when someone is drilling a hole within 50 feet or so.

[Trouthunter]

Counter clockwise was the direction...but there were low returns all over the dial...making the flashing almost unusable. The thing is, it didnt start right away, but who knows, maybe they didnt turn on their flasher right away.

As far as the other conditions, I was using the dual beam ducer in 19 degree mode in 30 feet of water. The bottom was fairly hard, with little to no mud, mostly gravel.

I had the ducer set to right above the bottom of the hole, I wonder if moving the ducer up higher in the hole as well as setting the 9 degree cone would have helped.

[frozen toes]

Is there a difference between the 8 and 18? The reason I ask is because I fish with buddies who also have the F-8's and we fish as close as 3 feet and very rarely get interference. When we do we just hit the I.R. and we are good to go. I can't remember a time when it was so bad they were unusable.

[Ed Carlson]

Bingo...move it up and switch to the 9 and you would clean it up.

On the hard bottom they may have been bouncing signals off rock in all directions or they had a Ducer pointing off at a weird angle, hard to say?

Most of the time you should still be able to tune it out with the IR. With the duel beam you should easily be able to narrow the beam to eliminate the splatter from another unit near you.

[Deitz Dittrich]

As Ed says... Rock bottoms can be much more difficult and the deeper the water the more interfierence you can get from others. Remmeber they have numberous IR settings keep trying one should work unless there were a lot of units out there.

[Dan Thiem]

Deitz-

When you say numerous IR settings, do you mean by pushing the button more than once, you get a different chance at eliminating others?

[Ed Carlson]

Ya if you have the puck too far down it will pick up rick-o-shaying sound waves off the bottom of the ice as well as from the side. In a herd there may be several units pounding the bottom with X-thousand watts of sonar and the splatter bounces about like a thousand renegade pinballs.

Your best defense in this situation is trim up the cone by going to the 9 and just drop the puck far enough down to get a good reading. Then any interference left can easily be tuned out with the IR feature.

In the 9 degree mode you will need less gain and you can better concentrate on the strike zone below. The duel beam Ducer is an awesome tool.

[Ed Carlson]

Quote:

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Deitz-

When you say numerous IR settings, do you mean by pushing the button more than once, you get a different chance at eliminating others?

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Yup, you have separate/individual phase shifts on a IR scale.

Pressing in on the Gain knob cycles you through ten different IR setting to allow you to knock out interference from another close by depth sounder.

[gman2002]

how was the charge on the battery, that sounds like what mine does when the battery gets low

[Deitz Dittrich]

Dan-looks like I was already beat to the anslwer but will answer anyways.. Yes by hitting the IR butting I believe on the FL8 there is 7 different channels.. on the FL18 I believe there are 10 defferent settings...

Quote:

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Deitz-

When you say numerous IR settings, do you mean by pushing the button more than once, you get a different chance at eliminating others?

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[Trouthunter]

I wonder if someone had a Marcum or a different brand of flasher. Would that have mattered?

The battery was fully charged at the beginning of the day. This is my first flasher ever and my first day out with it. Needless to say I'm not a pro with it...yet.

Someone mentioned maybe micro organisms come out at night...i find that hard to believe?

BD

[Ed Carlson]

Micro organisms will show up and may be a pest at times. Yet you have the ability to tune them out by switching to the LP mode and adjusting the gain. The narrow beam under the LP mode will also help in conjunction with the wider range of gain setting to de-bug the readings when the critters are out and about.

Because the processor is very sensitive it will detect micro organisms. The symptoms you previously described are more in line with cross frequency interference/pollution then critter clutter.

[Hotspotter]

Trouthunter:

Can't say if you would/wouldn't have had the same problem with a different flasher. What I can tell you is that I've had both units now (FL-8 and LX-3), and so far, the interference I run into now with the Marcum is less annoying to my eye.

With both units you can tune out the interference for the most part. I think it has to do with the width of the "blips" I see on the Marcum compared to the Vex. On my LX-3, the signals are less "blocky" and don't take up much of the screen, thus making it a bit easier to take if you're having problems tuning out the interference. Just my experience. Also, both units have several levels of IR reduction.

Good luck, let us know what you come up with!

Joel

[efgh]

Sometimes you can elimate interference from other units by simply moving the transd. higher in the hole, next time you run into this, grab the cord above the trans. and lift slowly, when the trans. gets just a tad above the bottom of the hole a lot of times it will clear right up.