The Outdoor Line Forum

I ran into folks at both the Sportsman's Show and the Boat Show who had questions about their sonar images and how to read them. Here's a bunch of different sonar shots I've taken the last four or five years. Most of them show what setting I have my sonar on and you can see the music piped in thru the weather module. Sorry no chirp images just yet. Mostly 200 kHz shots here.

A king salmon gorging on candlefish

In Alaska we are required to release rockfish back to depth. This is a photo of a yelloweye rockfish being released at around 100 feet and swimming back to the bottom.

Swarm of silver salmon

The same school on the Structure Scan

Kings feeding on candlefish on the bottom

Very active silvers in shallow water

Sea bass on a small pinnacle

Small school of kings

Lone king salmon. We caught this one moments later.

Kings hugging the bottom

Hey Robbo,
Lee Andersen here, what transducer area you running?
One more question I remember back awhile you where talking about some real nice rain gear, not Sitka what was the name of the gear?
Thanks lee

Nice photos, they really show the progression of improvements to the resolution and imaging.

The top two shots are with an Airmar TM260 1 kw transducer set on 200 KHz and most of the bottom shots are from the standard Lowrance 50/200. You get a great picture with both but the 1 kw really cleans things up and give you a very clear picture especially in deep water.

I have a Lowrance HDS8 with the stock transducer. It's a few years old but I think it's decent.

One thing that perplexes me is what I call the "it's raining bait" screen. When I see this, it's strongly correlated with the rod going off (fishing for blackmouth), but I don't really understand what is going on down there to cause this. I am guessing it's a mess of bait right on the bottom that's causing some kind of sonar artifacts on the screen. My last finder (humminbird) actually did this too.

Site note: I can see structure, bait balls and fish arcs as normal. This is something different.

Any ideas what causes this? Cheap transducer?

The "raining bait," looks similar to what I see on my Lowrance HDS Gen 2 when another boat is nearby running their transducer on the same frequency. Just a guess, I'm not a pro with sonar imagery.

The first shot looks like your sensitivity might be a little high and the second one looks like noise from another nearby boat. Play with your sensitivity and noise rejection settings when you're fishing and you can get rid of this "raining bait" effect on your sonar screen. It's ok to have some of this going on though...just not as much as what you posted.

On my old Gen 2 with a 50/200 transducer I would usually run my sensitivity at around 76% but with the new Gen 3 and Airmar 1 KW transducer I now run at around 62-65% sensitivity. When I'm in a pack of boats I'll adjust the sensitivity and play with noise rejection to get rid of their sonar s. Noise rejection has low, medium, and high settings. Usually when you increase noise rejection you've got to jack up the sensitivity a bit to compensate for it. Once you get used to making these fine adjustments when you're out fishing it'll be super easy to quickly adjust your sonar settings to gain the best possible picture.

Sometimes I go days without adjusting anything and other times when I'm in and out of traffic over the course of a day I'm constantly fine tuning.

Thanks Rob!