jackfish
Active Member
$360! That's almost 4 new scottys.
Scotty HP Digital Counters...They Keep Dying....
- Thread starter Sharphooks
- Start date
$360! That's almost 4 new scottys.
wildthing
Well-Known Member
need to set up the brake and if you drag bottom run bell's and it help's if you snag up not to keep going ... trust me got that tee shirt, as the base never let go but the fibreglass gunnel did ...
Fisher_dude
Crew Member
It wasn’t from letting it down. It was from hitting the button when it was so deep combined with the drag from so much line out. Both bases gave out in the same spot.
Agree -my analogue counters are more accurate than the digitals and rely on them primarily when fishing over rough ground.
salmonkiller01
Well-Known Member
I have had a good season, no counter fails amazingly. I have 2 spare and have not needed them. Riggers mounted on the boat all season, no covers
jackfish
Active Member
Seems like an invention waiting to happen...precise depth monitoring for deep fishing. Wireless technologies essentially are out of the question for such depths, as the signals don't penetrate water well. So it would need to be wired, or sonic. Since we have a rigger line already, wired could actually be feasible. But sonic would be really trick. Putting a sonic device on the ball, would require power. Battery wouldn't be a great solution, because the power needed to ping from that deep is relatively high. So...simplest could be a dedicated transponder aimed backwards from the boat, at the right angle to 'see' the ball? A $100 hummingbird could do the trick? I'm going to give it a try...
Alex_c
Well-Known Member
If adding to a Scotty you will need a servo or linear actuator with a mechanical quick release/override for dealing with the brake release for dropping the ball. If you’re not using a sounder with NMEA 0183 serial data output, a bare transducer will need a signal generator and amplifier on the tx side, and an amplifier and microcontroller to process the incoming signal on the rx side (plus the right algorithm to sync the outgoing pulse with the incoming signal, and interpret that signal into depth data). Not trivial from an engineering perspective.
It’s also probably better to track bottom and sample downrigger depth from the downriggers themselves This would mean adding your own counter, which would be easy with a hall effect sensor and magnet in the spool. Trying to use a sounder to track ball depth would result in very noisy and unreliable data depending on boat speed and current.
That being said probably cheaper/easier to hook up a small camera (Raspberry Pi Camera for example) pointed at the screen of a cheap sounder, and use a machine vision algorithm (train a neural network) to capture depth data. You still would need your own depth counter circuit in the downrigger, and would still need to solve the problem of the brake release for dropping gear.
Any solution to get a Scotty to track bottom would be expensive and over-engineered if you don’t already have a sounder that can output depth data over a NMEA 0183 serial interface. Even then, still over engineered. These are just my thoughts after thinking about it for a bit. I’m sure there are other ways, but overall I suspect they would not be worth the effort
ship happens
Crew Member
Most of you complain about not wanting to spend a couple hundred bucks on spare counters and lids lol
Tomfoolery
Active Member
Good counters or bad, you have to love the Scotty warranty and service. Just received my new set of digital counters with two manual counters and the retrofit template to install them. Those Ali Express $3 lenses in a rubber grommet should complete the retrofit.
That’s interesting and good to know. I might have give 2106 some more consideration
spring fever
Well-Known Member
Right now I have the glass lense in a gorilla tape sandwich until the end of season-thinking of a 3/8 neoprene base and an 1/8 top. What grommet are you thinking of?
Roberth
Crew Member
Can can almost say the same. Running 3 2106’s since they came out and just replaced my first digital counter. On sale at Harbour Chandler for $59. If anyone needs one
Tomfoolery
Active Member
I just figured I could probably find a rubber grommet down at Harbour Chandler or online that I could snugly fit a lense to. Maybe glue the edges to hold it in and so it would be watertight.
Something like this:
Tomfoolery
Active Member
I love my 2106's tbh. They have been flawless except for the counters. I only run 15's with them so they aren't under as much strain as the 20# balls. The quick retrieve is so nice for fishing deep! Often now when I bring my line up to check from 200 feet, I just leave it clipped in and let the rigger do all the work! It brings up the line faster than I can reel the slack in.
Aquaholic
Crew Member
Ditto. I leave the stopper in at the 20 foot mark for double stacking, even if I’m not, so I can take a rest to catch up to the downrigger when I reel my line in still clipped to the downrigger. Even with the bigger spool on a TR3, I have to focus and wind like crazy, but that 20 foot rest just before the end really comes in handy when down deep.
searun
Well-Known Member
Roger that, and it works flawlessly for the guys I know who have run it. No counter is going to be completely accurate nor flawless. I've been pretty lucky with the first gen digital counters - after 6 years one finally failed this season.
searun
Well-Known Member
Awesome advice - I too have learned from experience that it pays to test and adjust your brake to allow line to come off the spool easily of you hang on the bottom. Saves a lot of cannon balls tool. Usually able to stop the boat and back up to pull the ball free if its really stuck.
searun
Well-Known Member
Or simply glue in a clear plate on the underside of the lid - seems to work really well. If worried about water getting through, a little black sika flex will do the trick.
Aquaholic
Crew Member
Or If you glued it on top there wouldn't be a place for the water to pool.
virock
New Member
No it’s not only your bad luck they are just not very good period I have had a discussion with Scotty about them and they admitted that it was their engineering that decided to use a digital counter instead of the old style rotary counter so just keep on returning the digital counter every year I went trough 3 of them this season Cheers
