HDS5-Gen2 Shallow Water mode stopped working?

badcrc · Post by **badcrc** » Wed Jun 01, 2016 9:39 am

I finally got my Sonarhub and LSS-2 hooked up yesterday to my HDS-5 Gen2 (all latest updates on everything) and first time out everything was working great in "shallow water" mode in my lake. I docked for a bit and went back out and the structure pages just showed "STOPPED" and on the menu "stop sonar" was auto checked. I thought the LSS-2 wasn't working and messed around for over an hour until I changed from "shallow water" to "slow troll" and suddenly structurescan worked again. Every mode seemed to work (I didn't try deep water) except shallow water still stops the sonar and the screen still shows "STOPPED". Is something screwed up or did I change a setting that would make that one mode not work?

Bass hack · Post by **Bass hack** » Tue Jun 14, 2016 7:49 am

Did you try pressing where it says 'stopped?' there is a function that freezes the screen.

badcrc · Post by **badcrc** » Wed Jun 15, 2016 2:22 am

Bass hack wrote:Did you try pressing where it says 'stopped?' there is a function that freezes the screen.

Actually I did. It just auto-checks the box again within 2-3 seconds. I never did figure this out. I emailed Lowrance tech support about it and they said I have to stop the 83/200 before I can pick shallow water again. But that doesn't make sense to me since it was on shallow water the first time I used it and I kept switching back and forth from structure to sonar.

Honestly, I thought this would be easy to use stuff once I got the Sonarhub but it's a complete nightmare. I have a degree in computer science and I spent about 10 hours so far just driving around my lake with my nephew (who has an HDS-7 gen2 touch with Radar, Sirius, etc, no structurescan, on his boat) trying to figure out what we were looking at on the screen. My nephew's consensus was "that sucks, spending all that money for nothing". I'm just blown away that all of these guys I watch on youtube seem to be masters of this crap. I could write the software for these units, but figuring out how to operate my HDS-5 seems beyond me. I feel like I just wasted $550 on the lss-2 and Sonarhub, because no matter which frequency or mode I tried I couldn't even see a 20 foot log sticking up from the bottom 3 feet from the boat, and we drove by it 5 times in both directions. Even the chirp doesn't seem to be showing what it should...I know there's fish everywhere in the lake, I can see them. But I can't see a single arch on chirp.

I've had my boat out of the water for a week or so due to bad weather and I'm going to move the transducers around and hope that solves my problems. I did mention in another post that my boat is a Searay and has curves all over the place, including the transom, so the transducers aren't perfectly straight. When I first put them on I was in a hurry to get on the water and didn't really pay much attention to them being straight, I just tried to make them level and not interfere with each other. When I pulled my boat out and looked at it straight from behind the transducers were more angled to one side than I thought. Now I would think if that was the problem I would still see large objects like that log in the water when we drove by going one direction, but not the other direction, but we didn't see it either direction.

While I have my boat out I'm also thinking about replacing the worn out bushings on the swivel arm bracket, which on my 125hp Mercury requires removing the powerhead. This is a $1500+ job at the boat shop, and is just about a complete tear down of the motor, so I might be putting the Lowrance stuff on hold for a couple weeks (or forever if I can't get the motor back together