LPG 2000 wont read soft bottoms

My lpg 2000 wont read any part of a soft muddy bottom. Has anybody else had this problem with a graph and what was the problem??? It reads the hard and sandy bottoms at any speed, but as soon as I hit soft bottom it reads that the water is 600 feet deep.... Im panicing since 90% of what I like to do is troll, but I have no clue how deep water is or if there are any fish in the area....HELP.... Thanks for your time...

[REW]

Generally, this problem is caused by one of two problems.
a. The sensitivity, or receiver gain is set too low.
A soft bottom absorbs signal, and the gain of the depth finder needs to have quite a bit more gain to be able to reliably read the bottom. If you are running in auto mode, the gain, should increase automatically, if going over a soft bottom. If in manual mode, turn the gain to 100% and see if you can read the bottom ok.
Another thing to check, is to make sure that all of the units filters are turned off. Filters tend to cut down the available amblification of the unit. i.e surface filter, rf filter etc.

b. It is possible that you have a defective transducer. A transducer that is "weak" or on the "fritz" can work just fine on a hard bottom, but fail over a weak bottom, simply because it doesn't give a strong enough signal to the depth finder. You can quickly check for this by simply taping another transducer to a stick, and go back and forth between the transducer on your boat, and the test transducer. If you get a much stronger signal with the test transducer, the boats transducer is bad.
Obviously, the transducer can be taken off the boat and tested, but it is a big hassle , if it is not bad.

Take care
REW

[RickK]

REW, I read somewhere that transducers are fairly fragile things. A good impact can hurt or kill them.

[RK]

Hiya,
I have an LPG 2000, so maybe I can help...

Couple thoughts/questions:
Is your transdeucer shooting through the hull on a glass boat or mounted outside on an aluminum? From what I've been told, the LPG 2000 is kind of fussy about having a clean water stream - they don't like 'dirty' (turbulent) water caused by prop backwash or strakes on the hull interrupting the water flow over the x-deucer. I've never experienced this personally - mine shoots throught the hull and works fine. The only way I can get it to flake out in auto mode is running over a soft bottom in deep water at full speed and trimmed up as far as I can possibly go. At trolling speeds it's not a problem at all, so it makes me suspect it's an x-deucer location issue, or a blinky x-deucer altogether as REW suggests.

Have you tried running the unit in manual mode to see if you can keep it from spinning off into space? It might give you an idea of what the issue is.

Finally, I'd contact Gregg Walters at Hummingbird/techsonic Industries. He's their tech expert, and he's great about helping customers out with performance issues. Don't have his email address handy, but I think you should be able to get ahold of him through Hummingbird's website, or search the archives here for Zercom, LPG 2000 or something like that and his name will pop up in the threads.

Good luck getting your problem solved. Once you do you'll love the unit...

Cheers,
RK

[Hookmaster]

greg.walters@techsonic.com

This is the email address I have used to correspond with Greg.

Thanks for all your input guys, I called techsonic monday and they were extremly helpful. They are sending me a new transducer this week in the hope that this will fix the problem.. RK my transducer is mounted on the transom. The only other thing that might effect power output is that I have unit hooked up to my fuse box and not hooked up right to the battery. Could that make a difference? Its been hooked up like that for 3 years. Thanks for all your help again, and I know greg walters used to get on this site and answer quetions. So maybe he will see this....