Spot Lock maiden voyage

I finished the installation of my Terrova yesterday and took it out today crappie fishing around the bridge. Wind was up but not terrible and I fish out of a 18’ Bass Buggy pontoon.

I did not have the heading sensor hooked up but I understand that it only is used for the jog feature.

I liked pretty much all of the features of this trolling motor but the spot lock would drift 4-5 feet either side of the anchor spot, so I had to be a little more careful anchoring near the pylons ( I ran into one the first try and scratched the head of the motor as it corrected to one side).

Also two or three times when I was completely under the bridge it jogged to the left about 4-5 feet and nearly ran me into the bridge pylon.
Is this because it lost touch with the GPS signal? I never noticed a weak signal strength on the hand held remote.

Any suggestions on making it more accurate?

I really enjoyed fishing with it today and ended up catching 5-6 nice crappie

Try the "boat scale" setting at -2 and go from there

Do you think it will work better holding spot when I get the heading sensor hooked up and calibrated?

Is there a manual that goes into any more detail about tweaking the settings? It is almost like the motor is just responding too slowly to the drifting off of spot. It will eventually spool up some speed and move me back on spot but it seems very slow to respond. I can actually keep myself on spot better with the remote doing it myself, but that is not what I bought this for!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jlpz6MdSHk

A bridge BLOCKS the GPS radio signals from the orbiting satellites. It can't be as accurate as when out in the open====common sense.

I thought so, but the remote showed that the gps signal was strong

I don’t spot lock under bridges. They can lose signal and go sort of crazy.

^^ This^^ is what happened a couple times and almost ran me into the concrete. I hairlipped the front of the TM head scuffing it against the pylon the first time I tried the spot lock and didn’t allow for the 4’ or so it can move off point

try resetting the compass if it lets you.

I have the garmin force and had to reset mine, I have to do a 360 while it calibrates and did it a lot slower than the first time. seemed to make it better for accuracy.

they all are going to drift 4-5' before they kick in to relocate so you just have to compensate for that.

I wired the heading sensor right before this cold weather hit so I hope to get out Monday or Tuesday and calibrate the sensor. Some of not most of my problems were user error until I figured out how it works. I am also going to settings and see if I can’t ramp up the response time to keep me closer to the anchor point. It wasn’t over-correcting, it was drifting off 6-7’ then re-anchoring itself in a new location that let me run into the bridge.

GPS is a satellite signal. Even though it may be receiving signal just fine, satellites work off of line of sight. I've never had much success locking under a bridge. A heading sensor may help, as it's a separate unit, specific to the task of positioning. The one inside the motor is a tiny part of the whole circuit. At least, that's what I was told by Minn Kota, when I called them about this same scenario.

Also, as you probably already know, make sure you're pointed into the wind when you lock.

Heading sensor is part of the whole program. I would use it