Wasted $200 on a fancy depth finder that couldn't handle silt

Bought a brand-name depth sounder thinking it'd help me avoid sandbars, but it went haywire as soon as the water got muddy. Anyone else had luck with cheaper units that actually read through heavy sediment?

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2 Comments

wade5583mo ago

Oh come on, is muddy water really that big of a deal? I've been running a cheap old Lowrance that was like $60 at a garage sale for years and it works fine in the muck. Maybe you just got a unit that was defective or something, not a whole model problem. Those Garmin Strikers are decent but they're not magic either, they still struggle when the silt gets thick enough.

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leo_campbell3mo ago

I've heard some folks swear by the old-school transom mount units for murky water since they read bottom hardness better than those fancy sonars. Might be worth trying one of the $80 Garmin Striker models, I've seen a few guides in Louisiana talk about using them in silt.

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