Erratic depth readings

[MercMan]

I have two fish finders in my boat. One is my main one, which is a Lowrance X-65. My secondary one is an Eagle cuda. Every once in a while each depth finder will start acting real strange and start reading unbelievably weird depths. They don't usually do it at the same time, but they both do it. All of a sudden it'll start going to 60 feet, then 120, then 480, then 600, etc. Sometimes the depth reading flashes on my X-65. Then after a period of time (varies) the depth finder will come out of it and be normal again for a while. Then it'll do it again. Does anyone know what causes this? It drives me nuts when I'm coming onto a hump or coming off of a hump and my depth finder goes into oblivion. Thanks.

[moving to equipment forum]

[This message has been edited by Rick (edited 07-12-2004).]

[Surface Tension]

Having the gain set to low will produce what you've described. One scenario is you turn the sounder on and set it over hard bottom, as you come to mud the sounder doesn't recognize the mud as bottom and then the auto depth starts looking to the next depth range and so on.

Turn your gain up till you start getting clutter in the water column.

[Guest]

It's an inherent problem with graphs, especially the less-expensive models.

They have to perform the function of "drawing" Icons on the screen and this is a slow process, expecially in the cheap models with tiny processors and slow refresh speeds.

Then you add the depth reading function along with the picture creation and it's too much to process in these units and it simply takes a "dump".

I hate to sound like a stuck record and others on this forum will disagree, but if you learn to read a flasher to see bottom content, e.g. hard, soft bottom and actually see the fish as lines (versus the cute little fish icons) or "hooks" and use a GPS with a plotter-mode you'll be using the exact set-up the experienced fisherman and pros use...

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Chells

[ChuckN]

It happened to mine too, at strange times. It's happened with almost all my Lowrance products. When it does happen, I turn it off and back on.

A main reason this happens is because you cannot run 2 graphs with the same frequency at the same time. They simply get confused with the sound waves going all at once. I don't know if that's the case in your boat...