Hey everyone, what are yalls experiences with a good fish finder in muddy water (chocolate milk color)?  Does it still give you meaningful data to work with?  Any thoughts are appreciated! 

I have noticed very little difference in the performance of Lowrance units no matter what the water color is.

40 minutes ago, Jig Man said:

I have noticed very little difference in the performance of Lowrance units no matter what the water color is.

That is very good to know, as I have a Lowrance coming in today!  Cannot wait to set it up

Water clarity has no effect on the performance of electronics.

 

22 minutes ago, sully420 said:

Water clarity has no effect on the performance of electronics.

Thank you. I had heard otherwise, so I wanted to see what yalls experience was with it. 

 

Does anyone know if you need to change settings if the water is muddy vs clear? @sully420  @Jig Man

 

I've got an auto tuning Lowrance coming in - will that take of my needs without needing to adjust settings? 

I like to get the boat over some structure i know is in the lake and just fine tune the setting from there. I might be wrong about muddy water but I've never noticed or head of any issues with sonar and muddy water. I guess if there was a lot of suspended particulate in the water you may have to turn the sensitivity dawn to block out that stuff.

On auto sensitivity the unit will probably self adjust, but you usually can't manually run as high of sensitivity settings in muddy or summer waters. Muddy water is nothing more than suspended soil particles, often clay, and in summer, both phytoplankton and zooplankton blooms act similarly. Most good units will pick all this stuff up, forcing you to back off sensitivity somewhat. In summer, you can even watch zooplankton rise in the water column as night sets in, to the point where your unit will often look like it's completely blacked out and you can't read anything. Pretty cool to see 

With the traditional sonar suspended particulates show up as clutter, like looking through a snow storm, you can read the depth but difficult to seperate fish from the background. What most anglers do is use the automatic power gain feature, the problem is lowering the gain removes the fish. 

To solve this problem today's sonar units incorporate a multiple frequency pulse called Chirp to increase signal strength and reduce background clutter so fish signal can be displayed.

Tom

 

13 hours ago, Jig Man said:

I have noticed very little difference in the performance of Lowrance units no matter what the water color is.

Ditto for Humminbird.

Thanks for the comments, guys.  I'm at least content with being able to get some readings and bottom structure if it's super muddy and those particulates are causing interfence.  Will look to lower sensitivity if things look too cloudy. 

20 hours ago, Riazuli said:

Thanks for the comments, guys.  I'm at least content with being able to get some readings and bottom structure if it's super muddy and those particulates are causing interfence.  Will look to lower sensitivity if things look too cloudy. 

Suspended soil particulates from rain run off isn't interference, it's called clutter.

Tom

4 hours ago, WRB said:

Suspended soil particulates from rain run off isn't interference, it's called clutter.

Tom

I'm new to fish finders (apart from using the deeper pro plus) - thank you for clarifying!