[TG] [TG11] Fishfinder tutorial

[BernieK]

I think there used to be a video tutorial on getting the most from your Raymarine Fishfinder (CP350,CP450?). It explained about setting manual gain, TVG etc
I think it was for Lighthouse 2 and the guy that made the tutorial could have been from Sydney, Australia. He may have been a moderator.
I think it was on the "old" forum and may have been a FAQ.
Does anyone know the details where (if available) it is located?

[Tom - Raymarine - Moderator]

Hello Bernie,

I don't know if there's another video, but I recorded some video for just such a tutorial here in Sydney. I don't remember ever releasing it though (I'm no screen icon, and the home-made cinematography from my mate holding a camera on a 6m boat 20nm out at Brown's Mountain, rolling beam-on to the swell, with 15 knots of wind noise and a chop slapping against the aluminium hull, was probably not as good as it sounds.) The horizon in the background would have made you sick watching it anyway, and I suspect we deleted the raw video.

Here's a 2-page quick guide that I made at about the same time though from the same info - have a read through this and let me know what questions come up. It runs through my preferred manual gain process for CP300/CP450C (for newer sounders, don't use manual: Auto does a much better job than any mere mortal can in Manual.)

Tom

[BernieK]

Thanks Tom
That doesn't sound like the one I remember, though its a good while ago and perhaps dementia is further advanced than i remember.
The quick guide will do the job anyway.
The reason is there is starting to be come conjecture as to chirp "scaring" fish. Certainly a couple of the mackerel pros up here are certain it scares off bait in shallow water. Me, I am not so sure, but want to be armed with all I can to test it out.
Then again, like all fishermen, the first thing you MUST do is find a reason you don't catch fish. If you have gadgets its a great fall back excuse. I obviously need more and better, improved (expensive) gadgets.....

[Tom - Raymarine - Moderator]

Some of the pros I've spoken to have said the opposite, that monotonic (non-Chirp) sounders are more likely to scare fish than Chirp ones. A traditional monotonic sounder will make a sounder that is short and sharp and is something certainly that a person would recognise as being definitely artificial, whereas a chirp sounder's ping will be longer in duration but will change both in volume and frequency throughout the ping and would therefore likely sound more natural or biological to a human (the word Chirp long-predates fishfinders and is an analogy to a bird's call.) I've no idea what would scare a fish however.

Rather than changing technology, the simplest thing you could do to reduce a possible effect there would be to reduce power output, but on CP450C you can also use non-Chirp mode as well (50kHz, 200kHz are non-Chirp equivalents of Low Chirp and High Chirp.) Personally I wouldn't turn off Chirp, but you could certainly experiment with the effect on bait.

Regards,
Tom