Raytheon L265 Fishfinder

[Jerry]

I had a problem with my Raytheon L265 Fishfinder and sent it to the company
for repair. They performed the repair, tested it and said it was good as
new. I just took it out yesterday for the first time and it is not working
properly. Here are a few of the symptoms:

1) You see a normal screen with a school of fish and suddenly everything
disappears and comes back again on its own with a somewhat different screen.

2) I am sitting motionless in 30 feet of water and suddenly the screen goes
fluey and now I am sitting in 2.5 feet of water in the middle of a bay.

3) When I had it in the driveway I had the transducer submersed in a 5
gallon bucket of water and turned it on. I could hear the transducer
clicking to the speed of the chart movement on the display and it changed
tempo erraticly as the depth jumped all over the place.

Could I possibly just have a bad transducer at this point or is the
fishfinder kaput?

If anyone has experienced this problem and can shed some light on what I
should do please reply to me either here or email me at
[email protected].

Thanks in advance!

Jerry

 

[Larry]

Could I possibly just have a bad transducer at this point or is the
fishfinder kaput?

The trouble with automatic ranging, high powered fishfinders at very high
gains is they hear THEMSELVES, way too much. The ping bounces off the
bottom and reflects back. The sonar hears the first ping, great!
However, the ping also bounces off the hull, back to the bottom, and the
sonar hears the reflection...second ping. Sometimes they'll even hear a
third or fourth if the bottom is close, like 20' or less.....giving it
multiple targets to screw up the computer setting the power and
ranging.....

Try setting the ranging to manual and 3 times too deep from the real
bottom and have a look at the screen. You'll see more than one bottom
line on the chart, maybe even more than one fish, too! Large fish, like
a bottlenosed dolphin looking for lunch, will also confuse it if they
swim under the boat. They're so big they LOOK like the bottom to the
poor computer, not a fish....

The other problem with fishing spots is those other idiots also pinging
the bottom on your same frequency at your same repetition rate.
Obviously, they are less of a fisherman than you. So, they follow you to
find the fishing spots, pinging madly trying to see what you see. Their
pings sound just like your pings! What's a computer to do? It just goes
crazy switching ranges, ping power output, rep rates that follow the
ranges and pulse widths.

The tech on the bench, of course, doesn't have this problem....(c;

How hard is the bottom you fish over. Rocks make the multiple
reflections worse because they send back such a strong reflection the
boat reflection is strong and the pings bounce all over the place.

Engine noise and bubbles under the hull also make it go crazy from all
the noise and intermittent bottom sensing.

Take control of the GAIN, the receiver sensitivity, manually and lower it
until you can just see the bottom reliably....ONCE. The problem will
probably go away. Your receiver is working too GOOD!

 

[Jerry]

Thanks Larry for the very informative feedback but the problem goes further
than that and maybe I didn't explain myself clearly enough. If I'm watching
the screen scrolling by with fish or not, all of a sudden the display ends
with a dark vertical black line and just a clear empty screen following it.
I can stay clear for a 1/4" width or a 1" width up to a full screen width
before I see another dark vertical line followed by the normal display of
the bottom and fish if there are any. It has gotten so bad that I'm now
getting a 1/2" of display, a vertical line followed by a 1/2" of blank
screen, a vertical line, then another 1/2" of display, then a vertical line
followed by a 1/2" of blank screen, a vertical line, and this may go on
repeatedly forever. Sometimes if I shut it off and wait awhile it may work
okay for a minute or so and then it starts to act up again.

Jerry

 

[Larry]

Thanks Larry for the very informative feedback but the problem goes
further than that and maybe I didn't explain myself clearly enough.
If I'm watching the screen scrolling by with fish or not, all of a
sudden the display ends with a dark vertical black line and just a
clear empty screen following it. I can stay clear for a 1/4" width or
a 1" width up to a full screen width before I see another dark
vertical line followed by the normal display of the bottom and fish if
there are any. It has gotten so bad that I'm now getting a 1/2" of
display, a vertical line followed by a 1/2" of blank screen, a
vertical line, then another 1/2" of display, then a vertical line
followed by a 1/2" of blank screen, a vertical line, and this may go
on repeatedly forever. Sometimes if I shut it off and wait awhile it
may work okay for a minute or so and then it starts to act up again.

Now that sounds like the heat from the sun is expanding the LCD screen
enough so that the rubber conductors along the edges isn't making proper
contact. The service center probably wouldn't find it because where they
tested it it was air conditioned and cool, not nearly too hot to touch.

Is the display unit sitting out where the sun shines on it, like in an
open boat? LCD means Liquid Crystal Display. The crystal part is very
tiny particles suspended in a gel-like material like one of those squishy
insoles from Dr Scholl's. The problem with LCD is it MELTS! If you get
the display too hot, it will just turn BLACK because the reflective
crystals have melted and can't reflect light. As soon as you cool it
down, they'll start working again, unless it has really gone way too far
hot, which destroys them. The no-current, very high voltage the LCD
display works from is conducted to the glass carrier you're looking
through to extremely fine, nearly transparent conductors painted onto the
display surface in a very fine grid pattern. Where two of these
conductors cross, if we put high voltage between the conductors, the
crystals in the display are lined up so light passes through. Color
displays just have more layers. It's very complex. To connect the glass
to the box, a rubber tube holds the display glass in a holder. Buried in
the rubber tube from side to side across the round part, are thousands of
tiny conductive particles insulated from each other along the length of
the tube. The contacts in the frame touch one side of the tube, the
contacts in the glass touch the other. Obviously, if any water gets into
there, that isn't going to happen. Alignment is also a problem the tight
carrier is supposed to solve. Perhaps yours has come loose so it can
misalign in the heat when the glass expands at a different rate than the
frame. You probably can't see it from the outside.

Call the service center and exactly describe what is happening to the LCD
display and at what temperature/humidity conditions. I think you have a
defective or misaligned display. The sonar part is probably fine.....you
just can't see it.

 

[Larry]

Thanks Larry for the very informative feedback but the problem goes
further than that and maybe I didn't explain myself clearly enough.
If I'm watching the screen scrolling by with fish or not, all of a
sudden the display ends with a dark vertical black line and just a
clear empty screen following it. I can stay clear for a 1/4" width or
a 1" width up to a full screen width before I see another dark
vertical line followed by the normal display of the bottom and fish if
there are any. It has gotten so bad that I'm now getting a 1/2" of
display, a vertical line followed by a 1/2" of blank screen, a
vertical line, then another 1/2" of display, then a vertical line
followed by a 1/2" of blank screen, a vertical line, and this may go
on repeatedly forever. Sometimes if I shut it off and wait awhile it
may work okay for a minute or so and then it starts to act up again.

Another thought came to mind. The display is stored in a memory IC for
the display. It is being written in order from top to bottom along the
right side of the display as you look at it, then on each time the
display moves, those little jerks they all do, that line and all the
lines before it are jogged one line to the left, making room for the next
line. If that memory chip, or the driver to it, is overheating, it will
also make a moving blank or black vertical section for as long as it's
blanked out.

Tell the factory to HEAT this unit up when you send it back to them.
They'll have a heat box to try to create the overheat condition I think
you have. They may simply choose to replace the whole unit, rather than
attempt a repair at all, saving the company more money in technician
labor costs than the unit costs them to buy from China or wherever the
slaves make them. Garmin, Eagle and the others do it all the time on
difficult, intermittent problems.

 

[Jerry]

That last explanation most closely resembles what is happenning and I would
say that is probably the problem except for one thing. This problem was
also occurring while I was night fishing and I wasn't in the land of the
midnight sun either.

I'm curious about one more thing that you might have an answer for. With
the transducer submerged in a 5 gallon bucket of water, when I turned on the
unit, I can hear a clicking sound coming from the transducer. The frequency
in which it clicks is in sync with the movement of the display from right to
left. When I first turn it on, the clicks occur at roughly 2 times per
second and then suddenly changes to a guesstimate of 40 times per second
sounding a lot like a cricket. When it is clicking at 2 times per second
the screen seems to look okay but the intermittent vertical black line and
the erratic display seems to happen when it starts clicking at the 40 times
per second. The unit operates at 200/50 kHz so I know I'm not hearing the
sound of either of those frequencies as they are well above the audible
level of all living animals with the possible exception of bats. My
question is, should the transducer be making an audible clicking noise at
all? Could there be an arc going on inside the transducer as that is what
it sounds like?

I'm really dissapointed with Raytheon as I already sent it back once and had
to pay for the repair. It's now acting up the same way again and I know
they won't replace it because they've already refused to the first time and
insisted on a repair only. I just ordered a Garmin 250C Fishfinder but
would like to salvage and sell this one if possible or scrap it if it isn't.

Jerry

 

[Larry]

Could there be an arc going on inside the transducer as that is what
it sounds like?

You are listening to a pulse of supersonic sound you cannot hear that has
a peak power in the KILOWATT range. The click you hear is this godawful
power actually moving the bucket. You'll also hear it clicking if you
get near the transducer while the sonar is on. This is normal. It's
very powerful, that little crystal transducer.

You should see the transducers in the huge array that covers the bulb on
the bow of a submarine! Each transducer is about 5' long and the face
where the MEGAWATTS come out is about 8X8 inches of special rubber.
Hundreds of scanned transducers are in a special fluid behind a rubber
shield you see on the boats. Their transducers, normally, just LISTEN,
so as not to give away their position.

By the way, the sonar operators on the subs can hear your pinging a LONG
LONG way from you out in the ocean....(c; They have filters on 90 and
200 Khz and the other sonar ping frequencies used because the noise from
all of them can be deafening to the passive sonar.....

Speaking of the clicking, the AN/SQQ-14 (Squeaky Fourteen) Navy sonar has
a "click" that's so LOUD it will kill a diver in the water, and probably
whatever marine life has ears, too. Inside any ship nearby where it's
being used, everyone aboard has no trouble hearing the loud screeching it
does. Seeing the fish with that much power is no problem at all!....(c;

 

[Jerry]

VERY interesting!

Jerry

You are listening to a pulse of supersonic sound you cannot hear that has
a peak power in the KILOWATT range. The click you hear is this godawful
power actually moving the bucket. You'll also hear it clicking if you
get near the transducer while the sonar is on. This is normal. It's
very powerful, that little crystal transducer.

You should see the transducers in the huge array that covers the bulb on
the bow of a submarine! Each transducer is about 5' long and the face
where the MEGAWATTS come out is about 8X8 inches of special rubber.
Hundreds of scanned transducers are in a special fluid behind a rubber
shield you see on the boats. Their transducers, normally, just LISTEN,
so as not to give away their position.

By the way, the sonar operators on the subs can hear your pinging a LONG
LONG way from you out in the ocean....(c; They have filters on 90 and
200 Khz and the other sonar ping frequencies used because the noise from
all of them can be deafening to the passive sonar.....

Speaking of the clicking, the AN/SQQ-14 (Squeaky Fourteen) Navy sonar has
a "click" that's so LOUD it will kill a diver in the water, and probably
whatever marine life has ears, too. Inside any ship nearby where it's
being used, everyone aboard has no trouble hearing the loud screeching it
does. Seeing the fish with that much power is no problem at all!....(c;