Take a look at the photos below. Notice how there are intermittent "black spots" is the readings? My Humminbird 768 that I purchased in Feb just started doing this a couple of weeks ago and the response I'm getting from their customer service dept. is that its a software issue and that it will be fixed by their new firmware thats being release in a couple of weeks. I'm not buying their answer.

I guess I don't understand why, if its a software issue, did it just start happening? My theory is that the transducer is bad. To me it looks like the wide beam is returning fine but the narrow beam is not.

Has anyone seen this before or have any suggestions? I reset the unit to factory settings and took it out and I'm still seeing this issue. I've checked the connections and they seem fine. These screen shots were taken while sitting dead in the water - no motors were running.


Thanks.

Only way to tell for sure is try the unit on another boat and/or try another transducer on your boat. I've never seen this before.
If you're sitting still and the depth is jumping the 4.950 code will fix it. I just don't know what those hard black targets are.

Thanks for the reply. I don't know anyone that has a similar unit so thats not really an option for me. In this case, the depth may have been slightly jumping but not very much. I remember it being windy but not much as far as waves. Regardless, I get this same image sitting in perfectly still water and when I'm driving.

I didn't mention it previously but I've had this unit sitting right on top of structure that I know is directly below me and the screen shows nothing except when the "black areas" area visible. In the example images, it illustrates that also. The only returns above the bottom are in the "black area".

I understand the idea behind the wait see approach but man on my end its frustrating. Especially since we've really been wanting to do some striper fishing.

It doesn;t have to be another 768 - just about any Humminbird will have the same dual beam tranducer to test on. IF you can find someone with another 700, 500, Matrix, 300 Series unit it will just snap in place and you can quickly test.

UPDATE...

The firmware was never released and I started having another issue with this unit so I called HB back. They had me send the unit in and determined that it was the transducer that had gone bad. I replaced my existing ducer and headed to the lake to test it out. At first it worked great but then I realized that they never fixed the second issue which caused the unit to just shut off whenever it was bumped or the boat hit a wave.


Its been a frustrating ordeal but they just received the unit again and hopefully this time they will fix it and I can move on.

Probably all you needed to do was spread the pins a little on power cable normally resolves the intermittent or jolt power lose problem.