Thread: False reading on Lowrance Sonar

Originally Posted by POfisher

I have a HD5 and this exact thing happened to me last night. I was sitting over a crappie condo for about 3 hours anchored and not moving. I saw several bait balls come and go. Then I noticed my depth went from 19 feet to 4 feet for no reason. Then it went back to 19. I white line came across my screen at 4 feet, like the sonar was seeing a new bottom. At first I thought it was a thermo reading of some sort, then noticed this happened on and off. I tried turning off the unit and even reset it back to factory specs. Once it came back on reading 4 feet and once it came back on reading 19 feet.
I thought "great" I've got me a piece of crap for a sonar. Then after stewing a few mins... I noticed the very large amount of shad around my lights. I fine tuned my settings (changed to 83 mhz) and saw the very large bait ball under my boat. When that bait ball was gone, I read the bottom.

Sometimes, you just gotta think about what's actually going on before condemning the unit. Mine actually did what would be expected. It was seeing a wall of bait fish and was reporting back to me exactly what I had asked it to do.

Best of luck with yours!

Yep. You gotta read the screen right.

Here is what a bunch of bozo's look like.....

CP, you aint right.

.

I would say that our respective sonars has seen and reported the same thing. Large schools of bait fish or zoo plankton, either one or both. The zoo plankton attracts the bait fish and crappie.

Next time I'll requard that "false reading" as a good thing, and search to find it.