585 Problem

A

Anonymous

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They sure aren't making it easy to get set up in this forum!

I am having a problem with my 585.

Sunday I was out on the local river and it seems my Furuno 585 has lost its marbles. Was working fine Satuday. Today worked as always has before up until I made turn around at idle. From that point on it hasn't worked correctly.

The set up is a Furuno 585 networked to a Garmin 4212 series. I don't bottom fish much at all - but this what was already on the boat.

I am not proficient with this unit since I mostly use it for depth and temperature for trolling or local cruising.

What I see is that the bottom read will start to scroll and then blank out. The depths in water I know is about 8' will range anywhere from 1200' to 4.5' and then will give me correct readings then give me "--------" then a second of correct readings and then back to "-------". I was always able to read depth at speeds of 30 mph or so - now nothing at all.

Originally I thought the transducer might have something on it - weeds or trash or something - but it looks fine (I trailer). I lifted the back of the console and the plugs are tight on both power and for the transducer. I tried rebooting 50 times - but powering the unit on and off and by cutting the power to it altogether and restaring - nada.

I will get an intermittent read every so often and the bottom view starts to scroll -but it gets about 10% of the way across then blanks. The depth hash marks on the side remain.

Was in 50k since I was in The Keys. Tried going to 200k. No change. I did get it to sort of work in dual mode. But that gives me intermittent reads - literally a flash of correct depth and then back to either "--------" or wild numbers in the 1000s down to 4 feet.

Temperature read is present and appears to be unaffected.

At idle it seems to begin working, but then starts to lose its marbles again after about 5 minutes.

I posted this on The Hull Truth, but thought I'd put here. I didn't know this forum existed when I originally posted to THT.

ANY ideas? Thank you!
 
Justfish,
Thank you for using the Furuno forum. The FCV-585 has been a great sounder for us but let me ask a couple of questions to see if we can figure out what is going on. It sounds like you are in a Auto Range mode, does this happen if you are in a manual range? Do you have a screen shot of the sounder when this is happening you can send us?

Snips
 
Thank you for the prompt reply.

This is even more confusing now. Friday I was out - all set with a test transducer and had some lubricants for the connections at the unit end. The unit seemed to work without a hitch - except that regularly where the bottom read is, a rectangle devoid of all color or bottom data will appear and scroll across and disappear.

I tested in 50k, 200k and dual mode and they all gave me a read. Was able to read a 35kts as well.

Got no funky 1200 foot readings in 5 feet of water like the last time out.

I believe I am in auto mode but I will go out and check that now.

I did take some pictures with my phone of that rectangle. Not sure how to get them off my iPhone and to you.

My issue now of course is that I don't feel I can trust the unit.

Perhaps cycling power wasn't enough last time? Maybe it needed to be off for a longer period in order for all of the capacitors to lose charge and thus whatever got scrambled to reset to default?
 
Justfish,
The rectangle you are seeing is a normal part of the Auto Range function. I will try and explain what is happening. The default ranges on the 585 are 15,30,60,120ft etc now let's say your headed out and the bottom is getting deeper. The Auto Range is tracking the bottom and is programmed to shift the sounders range when the bottom is approminately at 80% of the displayed range, so if the sounder was on 15ft range and you started to go deeper than 12ft the Auto Range jumps to the next range which 30ft. But when it does this it leaves a blank area because it wasn't processing any sounding info past the previous 15ft range. You can use the 585's demo mode (demo 1) to watch this happen. By the way, you will only see the blank rectangle when the range shifts deeper. Hope this helps.

Snips
 
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