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***Tom - Raymarine - Moderator***

In an ideal world, what exactly is it that you'd like to see, how would you like the screen image set up? The Element is designed to be a simpler system than the Axiom and higher ranges and it's not intended that it will do everything that these high-end systems will do, but I'd like to see how close we can get to that ideal.

Quote:will the targets on the screen, when I am only showing the top 100ft of water in 600ft of water, be accurate or anything else to worry about?

Yes, the auto gain setup should do a good job of showing fish targets clearly even if the bottom is not visible within that manual depth range. You may want to use a slightly lower auto gain bias (e.g. Auto -10%) if there's a little clutter on screen, since the system will be trying to use a gain level sufficient to find the bottom echo which of course it won't be able to do.

Quote:When trolling for salmon what is the optimal scroll rate for the screen? I believe in have it set at 50% currently. Also what about the max ping rate when fishing in deeper water but only displaying the top 100ft?

Scroll-rate is very much a personal preference, trading the length of history you have on-screen against the image detail. Personally I prefer a faster scroll rather than slower in order to give truer and clearer target representation.
On ping-rate though, there's generally only 1 reason that I see that you'd want to reduce ping-rate and that is to remove first-echo or second-echo interference, which brings me to:

Quote:Also on the attached pictures how do i get rid of the blue mass in center of screen that follows bottom?

If you have something that looks a bit like a thermocline, bait or plankton mass in the water column but which tracks the bottom, it may well be first-echo or second-echo interference. In your instance, when you are using a manual range that is shallower than the true water depth then first echo interference is a strong possibility. See here for more details. A strong clue that you have 1EI or 2EI is if the band in the water column shifts up or down or weakens/strengthens significantly when you change range, as in your attached images. The spiky, broken appearance of the trace is also characteristic: you are seeing first-echo interference.

A good way to remove it is to slightly reduce the ping-rate so as to break the synchronisation between the return times of successive pings. Use the highest ping-rate that you can that removes the interference. The fastest way to find the right ping-rate that will do this is to drop the ping-rate a lot (e.g. start at maybe 10 pings/second) and then increase until the interference comes back, then drop back 1-2 pings. The specific value you use will depend on the manual range scale and current depth so for best results you should change it to match changing conditions, so you need a fast method to do so.

Looking at your screenshots, I'd also like to suggest that you try one of the different colour palettes. That Classic White colour palette is popular because the white background stands out well in sunlight, but I personally am not a fan of that colour palette because any clutter there is tends to really stand out from the background (dark blue), which makes the image look more cluttered than it really is and tends to lead people to drop the gain level too much. I recommend the Sunburst colour palette instead, which still has a white background but which uses a pale yellow for weak targets (clutter) which therefore won't stand out against the background.

Tom