FCV587 - AF issue

[Anonymous]

Morning all

I recently purchased a FCV-587 and took it out on the water for the first time today.

Unit works fine (well, I assume it does, the water was cold and green, no bait).

The only problem is the ACCU-FISH. I had AF on (with it set to show fish size, using the box indicator) and it was showing a box and fish size, but no arch/blob that one usually associates with a solid sounder echo.

I'm wondering if anyone else has had this problem?

The link below is to a pic I took on the water, shows what I'm referring to, lots of AF hits, but no echos in the 'boxes'.
I had my old sounder running at the same time and it did not show any returns so I'm thinking that somehow AF is going off when there are no fish around.

Is this even possible?
If it is possible, is there a known fix?

If it makes any difference, the unit is mounted between the engines on a mono-hull and reads bottom fine.

Thanks in advance.

Benjie

Link: http://imgur.com/mXKyYj2

 

[Snips]

Benjie,
Thank you for posting a screen shot. From looking at all the gaps and noise in your display it looks like you have a water flow issue going over the face of the transducer. How is your transducer mounted and how fast were you going when you took at the screen shot?

Snips

 

[Anonymous]

Cheers for the quick response Snips.

We have a custom-made transducer mounting bracket, and we had moved the unit up for running at speed (I'm aware that this causes the water-flow issue). AF was "marking" fish even when we had the transducer fully submerged and showing a nice clear picture (unfortunately I wasn't able to get a photo of that).

Once we were back on dry land we had a fiddle with the unit and it appears that the installer had not set -587 to the transducer we were using (had it set to a P-66, where we are using the TM-260, I've forgotten the Furuno-specific codes for those).

We think that this is the cause of the problem, as the differing cone-angles of the units may have been causing AF to have a panic.

We've set the -587 to the TM-260 and we're going to see if this fixes it.

Thanks for the reply Snips, I've spent a long time reading posts on these forums and you're contributions are always most enlightening.

Also, shout out to J N Taylor (Aust Furuno reps) for helping us out as well, top flight!

Edit#1: Spelling