So I went to a lake this weekend, and this was the first time using my EM+ 95sv on it. DownVu and 2D sonar seem perfectly normal, but my side scan images concerned me. I am concerned I have a transducer gone flaky on me. It is supposed to start raining tomorrow and then for a few days so after that I will go to my main lake to see what I see. Or could the lake structure cause this? I'll explain more on the lake structure later.
Look at these images and notice the streaked lines, which are very apparently on the left side scan, but do also show up sometime on the right side scan. In one image I think I lowered the power level, thus why the image got darker.
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And look at these. I'm thinking these are sand ripples, but look at how jagged they are:
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Now, the very vast majority of the portions (of this lake) that I travelled are between 0.5 to 3.0 meters, and the rocks are very very rough, with sharp edges. Is there any chance the transducer is simply receiving a lot of echos that bounce and split off the rocks, thus 'loud but not clean' returns (to use those words), or does this look like a transducer gone bad? I got the thing for Christmas so hopefully the warranty applies; a quick google search shows 1 year.
Seems like the more you zoomed out the worse it got. I set the power levels on the side scan to "auto low" but it didn't seem to matter. Maybe I should have used the manual power settings.