Lake Coeur d'Alene Blackrock bay exploration

[EliotBR (Eliot)]

Hi @btrue

@btrue

I was driving around hoping the the Ping 360 would find the shipwreck. We knew that it was rumored to be in the area, but didn’t know where. This is a good example of the value of a sidescan sonar since I spent an hour looking and didn’t find it, but it instantly slowed up on the sidescan on our first pass around the bay.

Do you know which properties of the sidescan help most with this? I’m curious if it’s primarily the extra range (or some other feature), or if you expect the Ping360 would be similarly effective if you mounted it at an angle (or set a downward vehicle pitch angle), like is discussed in the Bottom Visibility section of our Understanding and Using Scanning Sonars guide.

@btrue

Here’s a old video from last summer

Thanks for sharing the video. Always interesting to see what’s going on under the water in various places, and fun to see fish and whatever odd objects you happen to come across

@btrue

It’s great that this a helpful community, but I also think it gets fatiguing to check in every day and see that almost all of the new posts are just people asking for help, and new videos are rarely added.

From my end, it’s definitely interesting and exciting when people share progress on the projects they’re working on, or dives they’ve piloted, but the support side of things can also be interesting to help people solve issues, and hopefully enable them to do cool projects and dives that they then may choose to share

On the “fatiguing” point, if you’re primarily interested in specific kinds of content you may want to try configuring notifications, which I’ve just added a section about doing in the “How to Use the Forums” post

@btrue

Also, I got the new Fathom Spool guard. It looks nice

Cool! As with all protection, hopefully you won’t need it, but it should do a good job of protecting the connector and slip ring if the tether reel does happen to fall over or get tripped on at some point

@btrue

I can’t install it now since one of the little M3 screws on the spool stripped out. They all were extremely tight and I was sure that another 1 or 2 would strip out too, but I got lucky.

I believe those are user-installed. Do you think it would help if we change the wording in the relevant section of the spool assembly guide to prevent others from having similar issues in future, or do you expect there’s some other issue with the screws themselves, or something unusual that happened when you installed the slip ring cap flange initially?

My main thoughts are along the lines of over-tightening of the screws or excessive application of thread lock (which we can recommend against), or potentially thermal expansion of the frame increasing friction by causing the inner screws to be under extra load. It may be helpful to undo the middle screws first, before undoing the outer self-tapping ones that go into the frame, although understandably that’s somewhat too late to try once the screw head is already stripped.