Is there a way to calibrate the ping2 echo sounder? I have had it running on bench in and out of water and to day in a new boat that has it internaly mounted (experimental) and confidence indicator reduces to a very low vale and consistantly depth reading of between 30 and 40 meters no matter where the ping is. Today as I was testing the boat and its systems for a period of a couple of seconds the ping read correctly as I pushed it out of the shore it read an increasing depth from 1-2.5m as it went out…then it reverted to low confidence and a 40m depth reading.
I have it internally wet mounted in silicon as many boats and kayaks have their transducers and it would be easy to point the finger at the installation but that doesn’t account for the briefest accurate reading I got.
What effects the confidence rating, and can you calibrate the ping2 or should it just work correctly out of the box?
Hi @andrewjamez -
Unfortunately, the ping2 is not possible to “calibrate” - it works correctly out of the box when installed and used as intended. The low confidence and inaccurate depth readings you are receiving are 100% due to the mounting of the unit within your kayak hull. It may function in shallow 1-2.5m depth because the signal return is strong enough in that depth to make it back to the transducer, but deeper than that point the reflected energy is too small and you receive a low-confidence, phantom reading of 40m.
The Ping2 firmware determines the confidence estimate based on the strength of the return echo from the bottom, relative to the ambient noise floor. This is averaged over pings, which are occurring at 5—30 Hz, and outliers are removed. Read more technical details here!
As some extra context, this thread discusses more about what the confidence indicates, and how it is determined.
As I understand it silicone is pretty good at absorbing/dampening vibrations, which intuitively seems like it would be disruptive for a device which creates vibrations and tries to measure their returns.