MarCum lx5 Pro's, Need sum expert advice on good operating tips...

[mr fishfry]

Hello ,,,I used other open water units before. But for ice fishing using the MarCum lx5, How do you zoom in on bottom hugging Walleyes. And need some good operating advice for the unit.And How do you set up to find those bottom hugging fish???Thank-You for your expert advice...Does this unit work over muddy bottoms?

[river-rat4]

mr fishfry,

I own one, but I think you may be best off to download the manual off of marcums HSOforum.

You don't have to own one to download info/manual...

[Surface Tension]

mr fishfry very good question! What I'm about to say will greatly increase what you are able to see below the ice and you won't find it in a manual. Do this and you'll unharness the MarCums capabilites. If folks are using a FL18 then do so in LP mode. FL8 users will need the suppression cable.

Go ahead and zoom if you like. Read your manual and get familiar with the LX5.

Get the LX5s ducer in the hole and turn it on. Increase the gain till you just start to see a yellow reading. What you first see is bottom. Note that depth reading though this whole process because it will change. Now increase the gain a hair till the bottom turns green. Right now your determining what type bottom content you have. If theres any weeds you might have noticed them show up as yellow, Now increase the gain till it just turns red, you don't want a thick red band at this time. Did the depth reading change yet, is so you have a soft bottom. If you depth didn't change you have a hard bottom. Now increase the gain again till you get a thicker red band. If the depth came up your on stucrture or you have a rock next to you. Leave the gain there and drop your lure down. Comfirm that structure or rock by letting your jig down till you see it just touch the top of the red band. Now let you line out till till you hit bottom. The difference if any is the dead zone. To get around that decrease the gain so your not reading near by objects. What your trying to do is use the least amount of gain as possible and still read bottom and your jig.

Now you know your bottom content but what about bottom hugging fish.

If you have the gain so the bottom reading is green then bottom hugging fish will turn the bottom red as they come in. You might or might not see a slight depth change. If you have your gain set so the bottom is reading a thin red band, fish coming through will thicken that red band.

.

[Deitz Dittrich]

As stated you can download the manual online...

IF I were you fishing over a muddy bottom this is what I would do. Hit the zoom button once.. This will put you in the 5' zoom mode. Hit the down button till you can just barely see the bottom on the left side of your screen. I would then hit the NBT button. This is Narrow beam Tranceducer, this will shrink your cone angle taking out the chance for a dead zone because of a drop off..

That should do it... let us know how it worked!

[RK]

Hiya -

Lots of good advice from Surface Tension and Deitz...

One trick to add to it is something old flasher guys learned long ago.... When you're looking for bottom-hugging fish, watch the *bottom* side of your bottom signal. When you're marking bottom, the bottom will be a band on your screen. For example, if you're in 12 feet of water, your flasher will show a band from, say, 12 feet to 13.5 feet. Watch the deeper side of that band - around 13.5. When that part of the band starts to flicker and widen, you may have a bottom-hugger coming in. It's also an 'early warning system' of sorts. Lots of fish on the edge of the cone will show up there first before they get picked up enough to show as a mark off the bottom.

Back when flashers didn't have nearly the degree of target separation today's units do, much less a zoom, watching the back edge of your bottom return was about the only way to spot tight-to-the-bottom fish. Worked on open water too. Picked off an awful lot of walleyes watching my the bottom edge of the bottom return on my old Lowrance 2330s

Cheers,

Rob Kimm

[SETDAHOOK]

New user, similar question...Why is it that then I try to "zoom" in on the bottom, I have to press the down button 6-7 times before anything shows up on the left side of the screen? Thanks.

[Paul Waldowski]

Because it is an adjustable zoom that allows you to zoom in on any part of the water column. It starts at the top. Every time you hit the down button it is moving the zoomed in zone down. The deeper the water, the more times you will need to hit the down button until it finds the bottom.

[nitroant]

O.K., so when you hit the zoom, it starts from the top down in either 5' or 10' segment (depending on the water range your in) instead of the bottom up? These tips are good to hear, so shorten my learning curve on it when I hopefully get to use it this weekend for the 1st time.

[Deitz Dittrich]

Yeppers.. hit it once and its a 5' zoom, hit the zoom twice and its a 10' zoom.. if while holding on to the up or down button you will see 2 yellow lines on the right and side ofyour sceeen.. it is showing you what the zoom area is!.. center your lure and wallah!!! you got it.!

[Hotspotter]

Rob:

Very good tip. Glad to know I wasn't the only one out there with a funny looking "T-shaped" chunk of wood with a transducer duct-taped to it. Those 2330's were tough! As RK mentioned, noticing the "flicker" of that bottom edge, and connecting that with the resultant strike was about the only heads-up a guy would get without zoom mode, SFL, and three-colors.

It still works today, but with your LX-5 in zoom mode with SFL turned on, there have been few bottom-huggers that I've missed. It's really cool to have a camera on a clear lake with bottom walleyes to see exactly what you thought you weren't missing however!

Joel

[RK]

Hiya -

Hehe - I had this goofy set-up with a round aluminum rod and a bunch of clamps for my transducer. Had to get a disc level and glue it to the top of a puck transducer with 5-minute epoxy so you could tell if your transducer was straight up and down... Built a shuttle for it out of plywood, with a motorcycle battery surrounded by styrofoam and wrapped in a towel (for when it spilled battery acid. Not if - when...). Then they started selling the blue Genz boxes... Yeah the 2330s were tough as nails. I still have two working ones. A year or so ago I had left my Marcum at the cabin and decided to go out one evening in St. Paul. Dusted off a blue box with a 2330 on it, hooked up a battery and went fishing. Still worked...

Really is amazing how much more you see when you watch both sides of the flasher signal though, even on a new unit. Can see fish coming in long before they 'show up' on the screen as a mark...

cheers,

Rob Kimm