Lowrance Elite 5 Gold GPS/Fishfinder Combo Unit

[TyeeTanic]

Hello fellow fish warriors!!

Just got a Lowrance Elite 5 Gold fishfinder installed and used it for the first time on Friday. I used the "Fish ID" and "Fish Alarm" settings to fish Salmon and Steelhead at a total water depth of 120 - 150 feet.

The unit went crazy over certain areas, indicating there were 30 fish on the screen at any given time over a troll of 1000 - 1500 feet travel. That obviously made me excited. We caught a few fish in the area, but was suprised after going through "so many fish" we didn't get more.

So, I switched the "Fish ID" off and saw a lot of little dots on the screen, not too much that looked like fish arches. I still don't know what to make out of what I was seeing.

Anyhow, after doing some reading I am confused as to whether I should continue to fish with "Auto Sensitivity" and "Fish ID" or whether to go for a manual setup. If I go manual what would be the optimal settings.

I tried to google this, and after 4 hours I have given up on trying to find anything helpful.

So, for manual settings what I really need to know is for fishing in 120 - 150 feet of water, trying to pick up fish at a level of 40 - 80 feet, should I use the 83 kHz transducer or the 200 kHz transducer? Secondly what is a good setup technique to help me resolve the sonar image into more distinctive fish arches?? Right now, trying to manually judge what a fish looks like on the cluttered screen is almost impossible.

I tried to adjust the sensitivity (starting from zero) to pick up the secondary echo at double the water depth. This didn't seem to work as I wasn't able to pick up the second echo. I don't know if it was because the water was a bit choppy, or whether it is because the unit is too powerful (500W RMS, 4000W PTP).

Any general guidance as to how to optimize the performance of this unit would be greatly appreciated.

[ray koziatek]

Yes to manual settings and 83hrz......................

I feel yer pain of a 300page manual and a fishfinder with more options than the Queen mary will ever use..get familure with the basic sonar operations thats 95% of what you will use ..it really ant too bad when ya focus on what ya need and not what the unit can do.

1 manual sens.

2 manual depth

3manual filters

4chart speed high

5.overlay data speed,temp

6 transducer more straight down than forward..i know what the book says.....

[daker1979]

Yes to what Ray says.... also the downscan feature you have is different looking than most graphs..... it's a learning curve.

This was brought up before viewtopic.php?f=3&t=24902

There are dozens of video's out there for structure scan by lowrance check them out to help you interpret your graph

[TyeeTanic]

Thanks Ray.

In terms of setting sensitivity, I went out on Sunday afternoon and got out to 150 ft of water cover.

Took the sensitivity right down and then brought it up looking for the second echo at 300 ft and took

it all the way up to 100% without seeing the second echo.

It was really choppy out there, wavers were +/- 1 meter, and in my 20 footer, I was going up and down,

thankfully not sideways! I'm not sure if I was doing something wrong, or whether the waves were killing

the technique!

Also, my unit has color line - enhances the color difference between hard returns (lake bottom) and soft returns (fish).

What should I do here, take it up to maximum???

The problem with the Lowrance fish finder is it has a million options, but the user manual doesn't have enough paper for

me to even wipe my butt with - they did a crap job putting the manual together - so I'm sitting here trying to figure out everything.

Anyhow, I'll try your advice and do the following:

Run at 83kHz.

Set to max refresh rate (chart speed)

Adjust my sensitivity in 150 feet water cover until I get the second echo at 300 feet.

Set level to 10 - 200 feet.

Set colorline until I get good color difference between fish and hard objects.

My boat comes out of the water in about a week for a service, so I'll check the transducer position then.

[TyeeTanic]

Thanks daker!

I'll try finding youtube videos on lowrance structure scan - but is this the dsi unit you are talking about? I have a 83kHz/200kHz dual transducer sonar fishfinder (Elite 5 Gold) - so I get the regular cartoonish looking images.

Will the structure scan videos be applicable to my unit?

[daker1979]

Thanks daker!

I'll try finding youtube videos on lowrance structure scan - but is this the dsi unit you are talking about? I have a 83kHz/200kHz dual transducer sonar fishfinder (Elite 5 Gold) - so I get the regular cartoonish looking images.

Will the structure scan videos be applicable to my unit?

Oops, my bad .....I thought I read DSI.......anyways Ray's right! stay away from Fish- Id's and a lot of the auto modes

[TyeeTanic]

Hey Guys,

I tuned my fishfinder today and it seemed to be giving some better readings particularly if I used the dual view showing both the 83khz and 200 khz transducers.

However, there are two settings I'm unsure of. The one is Noise Rejection and the other is Surface Clarity. I can set either of these to Off, Low, Medium or High. They are like a filter to remove noise. Should I just turn them off or should I keep them on medium or something. At the bassboat forum, one guy says they should be set to medium, but I'm not so sure.

Thanks.

[ray koziatek]

if ya can shut em off ...............menu scroll down to sonar settigs >(right pad) go to surface clarity - enter- then low med high will show up (and off) highlite what ya want and enter (ent),,,yea turn off ( top and bottom) clarity..shallow water the top can be on (bass fishin) (shallow water 10 to 50 ft)................yes both filter of a sort shut em all off and give things a try...OK now ya got a few things figured oh manual depth setting helps tremundusly if yer fishin 90 fow water go to 100 ft manual depth then ya got yer whole screen to watch............like i started to say ya got a few buttons figured so ya can tinker when ye out there .................now for the easy part advanced settings noooooooooooooooooooooo not me ..

[TyeeTanic]

Thanks for all the help Ray!

[ Post made via BlackBerry ]