I had a shoot-thru puck transducer installed in my boat a few weeks ago. My Lowrance X510C is behaving oddly, and I want to be sure it is the transducer before I rip it out and go with a transom mount.

The shoot-thru transducer was installed by a shop, and is mounted in the normal place for boats like mine, on a little square spot by the bilge pump (near where the old transducer was). That part of the hull is definitely touching the water at all speeds.

When I first put the boat in the water, the depth finder will read nothing but 60 feet or 2 feet. If I get the boat up to about 12 mph with the hull tilted up at an angle, I'll start to get an accurate reading. Sometimes it will then continue to read for the rest of the day in all conditions; other times it will only read when the boat is at that speed and angle. I think it reads better with a little water in the bilge.

Any ideas? I hate to pay to have another one installed ... the shop did warn me that shoot-thru mountings do not always have good results. My old depth finder, an Eagle Ultra II, also had a professional installation (by a different shop) and it had similar issues sometimes. I'm thinking it is my hull construction.

try resetting you 510c back to factory defaults before you do anything, sometimes it can just be the settings all out of whack

I've done the reset. And I tried the suggested settings posted in an earlier thread for the X510C. Both yield the same results. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't.

But it always takes getting the boat up at that angle to start it working the first time that day.

What's weird to me is that it may work the rest of the day like a charm (happened the first time I took it out) or it may only work at that angle, or with water in the bilge. The last outing, I let the baitwell overflow some into the inner hull to test it, and it read intermittently while sitting still, as long as there was water in the bilge. When I pumped the water out, it mostly stopped working.

Is it possible you have air bubbles in the epoxy?
If it works with water in the bilge area that may be the case.
I believe others have posted this before.
Good Luck

Yep -- I just did an Internet search and that diagnosis matches my symptoms.

Now I just need to convince the shop to knock it loose and install it right -- assuming it's possible to get it out of that epoxy they used.

I might be better off doing it myself to make sure I do it right.