Humminbird 898 Transducer Problems

[hookorbullet]

Hoping someone can help. I recently purchased a Humminbird 898 combo plotter and transducer. I have had my boat out 3 times since installing the unit and have had troubles each and every time - sometimes the sounder works for half the day and other times it craps out after 5 minutes - like it did tonight. I have gone into the settings and adjusted them so that it is set for: saltwater deep, turned off auto depth and put it to 800 ft (even tried 200), Adjusted surface clutter to 7 as recommended by the Humminbird tech. Any advice or guidance would be appreciated!

 

[trophywife]

how is your positioning of the ducer? clean water? air bubbles under the boat passing by it can fak it up...

 

[hookorbullet]

I don't think that it is the location of the transducer or interference/air bubbles. Went out again last night and sounder worked great for the first 5 minutes - even read at high speed in depths around 200 feet and then it totally quit working again. Going to try and update the software today and see if that solves the problem

 

[scott craven]

Have you checked your electrical connections, sounds like intermittent power failure ?

 

[hookorbullet]

It turned out to be the transducer. After all the trouble shooting with the Humminbird techs it came down to either: a faulty power head or the transducer. I got lucky and had an old transducer from a model 565 which turned out to be compatible. Once I switched it out, everything worked just fine. So now on to dealing with the return of the transducer.

Thanks for all the advice and suggestions guys.

 

[mbowers]

I was going to suggest transducer after reading your symptoms as I had similar symptoms and replacing the transducer cured the problem. Humminbird shipped out a new transducer at no charge immediately and never asked for the defective one back. I also replaced a battery because I could never get more than 11.8V reading on the Humminbird: when the new battery also read 11.8V I went online and found there was a bug in the software and that model always reads 1.0 V low. Doh! At least I got two years use out of the first battery but probably could have got four..