May be a dumb question....but I cut my transducer wire on my 859 Humminbird and wondered if anyone had ever tried to splice one and if they were successful? I will replace it, but was just wondering if it were possible to get it working till my new one arrives.

I would say no

It takes a very steady hand with a soldering iron, I've spliced quite a few successfully, use dual wall heat shrink to insulate each wire.

I wanted to shorten a transducer cable and asked Humminbird if it could be done. Naturally, they said to not do it, but I'm with Pat. The wires are soldered on the plug ends, so as long as you insure you don't get a cold solder joint and make sure the shields remain in tact, I don't see why it couldn't be done. I think the customer no-service guys tell you stuff just to get you off the phone so they won't have to deal with you.

thanks guys

Check YouTube. There are a couple of videos on doing this.

Cutting and Splicing SONAR Transducer Cables

If you have and are familiar with the use of a TDR scope you can do the splicing and will quickly understand how that without it, the results of blindly spicing the connection are at best, going to be poor. The resultant deficiencies will be easily seen on the sonar screens if you were to ever view two Sonars side by side. The transducer cable itself is a tuned circuit and a blindly soldered connection no matter how pretty it appears will attenuate the sonar transmit signal and cause false echos that are displayed but not really there.

But if you just want to see the bottom and get a few distorted echos, solder away.

Lou is right, I work on medical equipment for a living and have been taught way more than I cared to about ultrasound theory (pretty much the same as a sonar). you could splice it, but it may not work as designed. If youre ordering a new one it will work in a pinch I would imagine.

I'm calling BS, repaired way too many transducer cables with 100% success. It ain't rocket science.

You have a center conductor, *IF* I properly solder those together, there should be zero loss of signal. If that is sealed and the shielded outer section is properly soldered, and shielded tape inserted between the outer and inner layers, and then it's all sealed up correctly, there is NO reason why it should give any less than 100% of original performance. Never said it was easy, it takes the right tools, but it's far from impossible.

Where is Larry the cable guy when we need him?

With good soldering skills it should be very doable. if not, then cold solder joints will make you crazy. A cold solder joint here is not your friend.
These are not tuned circuits. Look at cables of different lengths and you will not see any type of tuning device.

If never using a TDR scope ( or knowing what one is) or having worked with complex RF signal frequencies, a repair tech might be unaware of how solder spliced connections can be perfectly soldered to the eye and pass any DC voltages, yet always are going to simultaneously be both good and bad for different frequencies....frequencies much needed by the sonar. The bad frequencies at the bad splice get reflected and will be mistaken as false echos and actual echos can get attenuated.

Having a good and continuous center conductor and fully sealed coaxial shielding splice is not difficult or hard to achieve by a trained certified soldering tech, but that does not make an RF connection proper.....yes, you will see a lake bottom, with reduced sensitivity and display a few but distorted representation view of fish and cover and that could be called "repaired" if that is good enough for your needs.

I'll splice a cable.
We can hook up a new and the repaired transducer. If you can tell the difference lunch is on me along with my public announcement if ignorance.

If you can't, well we can decide what to do.

I will tell you I won't be using a Home Depot solder gun and plumbers solder but I don't do it for a living either.