Fish finder interference

I finally got my $49 basspro shops Eagle Cuda 168 fishfinder installed and on its maiden voyage everything seemed to work fine at first.  About five minutes in I started seeing a lot of random noise (vertical streaks) and a few minutes after that the whole thing would start reading 300+ ft and start flashing.  We were still on our way out to the fishing grounds so I fell back to futz with the fishfinder, eventually it started working fine again.  Fine that is, until I caught up with Jim and Naoaki and it started happening again.

I realized that I might be getting some interference from Jim's $350 raymarine color fish finder.  I asked him to turn it off, and sure enought my screen went back to normal.  He turned it on and mine started to go whacky again.

Anyway, has anyone else experienced this sort of interference from someone elses fishfinder? 

The main differences between Jim's raymarine and my eagle..

Mine is cheap, single beam, grayscale, and mounted to shoot through my hull.
Jim's is expensive, dual beam, in color, and mounted in the water where his rudder would be.

Brian

Brian where and how was the fishing?

Oh yeah, I meant to put up a report... I'll do that soon.  But briefly, we fished the Sonoma Coast  between Gleason Beach and Salmon Creek Reef.  We trolled for salmon, found one small bait ball with birds working it, switched to moohing for nada.  Paddled out to Salmon Creek Reef for some small rockfish then headed in shallow and worked the rocks between Salmon Creek Beach and back to Gleason's.  About 7 miles of paddling and we manged to each catch about 2-3 lings and plenty of black rockfish.  Largest ling was a blue 10 lber, a few that went 6-8 and a lot of underlings.   Okay, that was pretty much a full report, I think Jim and Naoaki have some pictures of the fish so we'll put those in the real report.


Brian

Thanks Brian heard of any buttes?

What beam was he shooting?  If he had his wide beam on, this is probably what was mucking up your unit.  Next time you are fishing together ask him to only have his narrow beam shooting.

I think this will help....

MolBasser

I find it fairly rare that interference doesn't occur when fishing near someone else with a fishfinder.  Maybe that is just because I tend to fish with the same people frequently and our fish finders aren't very compatable.  The interference that I have experienced doesn't mess up my display enough to be anything more than annoying though.

Thanks.

I believe he probably had both beams working, I'll try to get him to use his single narrow beam next time we go out together (if he can figure out how to set that up).   Not having a dual beam myself, I didn't even know turning one beam off was an option.

I think I'm going to have Jim run interference at the Elk tournament, paddling near the others to mess up their fishfinder signals while I paddle away from him and catch the mother of the ling I caught last year.  Actuaally, last year I didn't even have a fishfinder during Elk so  I may have to turn mine off this year and zen my way to another big fish.   

Brian

Yup.  It happens for sure.

-Allen