MarCum Explained

[Surface Tension]

While fishing I came upon a dead time(imagine that ) and I thought I'd take a pic of my MarCum and describe a couple scenarios as to what I was reading. This may answer a few of the questions like, "how can I tell if I'm in soft or hard bottom" and "if Vex needs a suppression cable or Low Power mode in shallow water, with 1500 watts how well does MarCum perform in shallow water?"

The pic is of low quality for web purposes but if you look close you'll see an example of what great target separation the MarCum has and how it excels in shallow water.

I'm in 12' of water. You can see the weaker return in a broad yellow band which indicates a soft bottom. Above at 11' you see my 1/8 oz Go Devil, OK keep in mind I'm not using the zoom, look close you can see the separation of another blip. Thats the minnow head that I tipped the Go Devil with. We're talking a fraction of an inch but still the MarCum shows the separation of the Go Devil and the minnow head. Imagine those bottom hugging eyes or a school of suspended crappies and how that target separation might be useful. I have one last tip, note the bubble wrap the transducer was shipped with in the transducer tray. I use that wrap to protect my ducer when in transit.

I hope this helps to answer some of the questions about using a MarCum.

[gspman]

Good explanation. I kept my bubble wrap too. I treat the 'ducer as if it were as fragile as an egg.

[Hastings gal]

Thank you very much I appreciated your help on Burntside but the soft vs hard (yellow vs red) I did not know - I will try it out this weekend under our shack on URl. Thank you again. Keep Smiling.

[klbowe]

Could the yellow also indicate weeds or do they show up differntly ?

THX !

[Surface Tension]

klbowe, good question, to answer it we have talk about gain levels. We plop the ducer in the hole and fire up our flasher.

In this case I know the depth so I'm set at the 20' scale.

Time to set the gain, start at 0 and slowly increase the gain till we just start to read bottom, take note of the depth at the at time. Now again slowly increase the gain and see if the bottom comes up and look for targets above the bottom. Here I have a soft bottom and I increased the gain just a bit, the bottom came up when I started to read all the sediment on the bottom. Any weeds would start to show at this time and would look like a suspended target. If I increased the gain a little more those weeds would turn from targets to what would look like bottom. I'd verify this by reducing the gain back to 0 and start over. I did have a few weeds below me here but had the gain down so they didn't clutter my MarCum. Anyway its time to send my jig down and see whats up. The Go Devil was easily marked which is another reference I use when setting the gain. I turned the gain down a tad and then the separation of the jig and minnow showed. I now know I have a soft bottom, there are weeds 1' high and I know where my jig is in relation to all of that.

I'm also assured that any fish coming in will be marked because I can still read a minnow head.

[Surface Tension]

I have the same thread in the Ice forum. To keep all this info together lets continue any replies there.

http://www.fishingminnesota.com/forum/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=496584&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1&vc=1&PHPSESSID=

[Scenic]

Good demo there ST!