Thread: Lowrance troubles

An example of what I meant about interpreting my sonar, while I was unsuccessfully fishing Monday I noticed a series of small dots on the display at 50' in 63' of water. With my sonar set to auto my first thought was that crappie being generally around 14" my sonar should return a small echo at 50' seeing fish that size that far from the transducer. The question is would I know not having an under water camera on my boat? I would not know, my instink was to drop a spoon and see if I caught anything. I will readily admit that it is difficult to jig up crappie that deep with out live bait but I don't like using live bait. I actually began catching crappie at 50'. I did not catch a lot but enough for it to be a learning experience. I think I even posted a pic of the first fish because I got excited. I never considered going to manual mode and turning up the sensitivity although that would have been an option I am just not used to doing it. I suppose I could have told my sonar to zoom to the last 20' of the water table and increase the sensitivity to get a better look but I was happy with what it was showing me even though I was still on auto. In the summer I will increase the sensitivity just to see the depth of the thermocline and then back to auto but most of the time I can see it on auto. It would be easy to think that those results are just with that specific unit but I have two HDS-5's on that boat one at the helm and one at the trolling motor and one HDS-5 on the trolling motor of the pontoon boat and a hummingbird 889 at the helm and get the same results from all 4 units. It is not that I am any better at reading my sonar but more of that is what I am used to doing because when I first started using sonar on my boats they did not have the logic chips available today so only option was figuring out wat the sonar was telling me. I guess now I am just to lazy to learn all the capabilities of the new stuff.

Crappie wrangle, u my friend, are a prime example of what makes this site so great.

Thanks for the compliment. Truthfully I just plain like to fish. I like it so much that I make most of my own gear. I pour my own lead head hooks, make my own spoons, I also get unpainted crank baits from China and paint and assemble them myself. I also build my own custom fishing rods. I suppose the rod building is kind of its own hobby that pays for itself as I have sold several hundred rods over the years. (I don't compete with Walmart) I messed up and let my fishing buddy see a 9' ultralight 1 piece bait casting rod that I recently made for myself and now I have to make him one too . When I disassembled my aluminum crappie boat to re-carpet it he came over and helped me with getting the bigger pieces aligned for the rivets while I was putting it back together so I guess he earned one I mostly fish lake Texoma and while there are a few other crappie fisherman here most never post so I guess I pretty much dominate the Texoma page. Texoma crappie fisherman a very secretive so this web site makes me feel like I belong.

Well the 6.0 update has messed my depth finder up, locks up on the first page. Now I got to try to go back to what I had. I hope this works.

You might check with Lowrance and see if they will warranty their update.

Originally Posted by Countryboy N.C.

Well the 6.0 update has messed my depth finder up, locks up on the first page. Now I got to try to go back to what I had. I hope this works.

Here are Lowrance software versions ...

ftp://software.lowrance.com

It is recommended to not load an older version than the unit came with ...

Rickie

Thanks for the info, I think I have it fixed now, reloaded the newest update, still would not leave the first screen, tried the hard reset, still the same, After the reset it would work till you turned it off but when you turned it on again it would not leave first screen again. Finally done a screen calibrate, and now it is working, turned it on 5 or 6 times now and has worked every time.

NBNC I think we have the same type of DF. What update did you use? Thanks