Depth sounder woes...

[Lola45]

First you should know that my understanding of all this electronics networking is very rudimentary. It all started when my DSM30 started working only intermittently. I'm not really using the fish finder capability, I just want accurate depth readings. When I am running the engine the sounder reads accurately sometimes and reads nothing at all at other times. Strangely enough, when I'm sailing the reading bounces from not working at all to giving me readings of 25 to 30 feet when I'm in over 100 feet of water. Tech support has suggested, since I don't need the fish finder, to bypass the DSM30, cut the end off the transducer cable and connect the black, blue and shield wires in to the ITC 5. I would lose the fish finder capability but would still get my depth reading through my I70's. This sounded like a pretty simple solution but I still hired a tech to do this. The tech got me a transducer cable extension, connected it to the transducer cable and wired it in to the ITC5. I think we both expected it to pop up on the I70 but somehow the i70 wouldn't recognize the p319 transducer. He called tech support and they said "Gee, it should work." Each time we tried the I70 transducer search there was no recognition of the depth transducer. The weekend is here so we disconected what we had done and reconnected the DSM30 and the depth worked perfectly...for 20 minutes and then back to nothing. I want to be heading south in a couple of weeks but not without a working depth sounder. Any ideas?