I inherited a fairly new Lowrance 334 Locator. It is not a current model, but it is only a couple of years old and my Dad used it very little as he was in treatment for cancer last summer and didn't fish very much, only about two weeks in Canada last season. I do know thought that he used it in the same places as I did last week and I don;t believe he had any problems with the unit.

Here is my problem. I was fishing on my favorite Lake Trout lake in Ontario last week and this lake has lots of water well over 100 feet. I wanted to fish the edges of some of the drop-offs where the bottom will go from maybe 75 to well over 100 and back up and such. Everything was going along fine until I would get into about 110' and then the locator would loose the bottom. If I would get back into shallow water, like less than 30' then it would recapture the bottom only to loose it again once I went deep again.

I went into my local Scheels store the other day and the fishing dept. manager said he thought it might be a bad transducer, but not sure. I asked him if there was anyway of checking before shelling out the cash for a new transducer and he told me there wasn't. And, of course, without getting into 100' of water again, I would not know if the unit is working correctly or not.

Anybody got any ideas. Is it a bad transducer, do I have it mounted incorrectly or in the wrong spot, is there anyway to test the transducer before buying a new one, and is there anyway to be sure I have the problem fixed. I hope to go back up to Ontario in August and want to be certain I have the problem fixed before I get up there again.

Thanks everyone!

I'd check the mounting of the transducer. Look at the angle that it's shooting while it's in the water, not while it's on the trailer. Also there might be some turbulence from rivets, prop wash, etc to consider.

there have been issue in other post on here with the lms-334's and lms-520's one thought i can give you is that try to turn your ping speed up to 100% and your sensitivity on manual and turn up to 100% also..

If you were in auto setting it should have found the correct depth scale and sensitivity level. Still to be sure you'll want to adjust those manually. Chances are you have a bad ducer. Typical symptom of a bad ducer is it'll read the depth in shallow water, as you increase the depth the bottom readout is weak. You definitely won't mark fish or any other details. Even though its out of warranty I'd contact Lowrance because this issue is too common.

Surface tension is right for what you mentioned as the problem. I have an employee that had the same problem with his 332. I water down to 60' he was fine, deeper than that it would be all srewed up. He would go back up to the shallows and it would pickup again.

We took the transducer of and it had a big scratch on it, once it was replaced it worked good.