Sounds a bit odd, Steve231's older Lowrance was showing bottom detail @ 30kn.

mate i have a hds 10 and luv it, have had no probs with quality of pic at all.

compared to my navman the detail is a huge differance.

only prob was with my tranny and it ended up being the shape of my hull giving me grife.

put up some pics of what you are seeing?

I’m hoping it's just a tranny problem although I would have thought it would lose the bottom contour as well, what transducer are you guys using?

And very happy with the picture at speed or slow

a pic of my 10 compared to the navman

this is using a p70 wet box tranny 50/200 600w

Could be your transducer angle to the boat. Try trimming your motor up when sounding. If this improves your reading you'll know the transducer needs adjusting.

Take a note of the settings on your sounder  and compare them to what other users are doing on their sets. I'm sure there are a number of members who use the same models  would be more than happy to give advice.

you are getting interferance from your motor, mine does the same thing but i only use it as a chartplotter

For what it's worth, I've got  HDS8 with the 83/200 transducer and don't have any problems with clarity or detail, unless i'm in 150m of water off Exmouth !

There are a few settings you can adjust as Carnarvonite said. Check out your menu and let me know what options you have turned on or off and i'll see what I've got enabled on mine.

 transducer positioning and the shape of your hull can make a huge difference to the pic you recieve maybe if you have a fibreglass hull not ally try installing a in hull wet box tranny 1kw would be prefered or thru hull if you have an ali boat that will really sort out your probs oh and also there is a little section in your sonar menu that says installation go into that and make sure the right tranny you are using has been selected you will see there is a huge selection in there my unit is great and am very happy with it hope this helps ya

I've got a HDS 10 too and am still not 100% sold on mine. I've only used it twice but sometimes it reads really nicely and other times it doesn't look all that flash. I've got the same transducer (transom mount 200/50 600W) and am still mucking around with settings. I contemplated the 1kw but was told that the standard tranny was going to be good to 300m, and the in hull P79 600W didn't have water temp, which I wanted.
When I had it out at the barges in 105m it started nicely then got worse as the day went on. Still got a bit of adjusting to do, and getting familiar with the settings.

strange you say that tim... the hds7 i put into dads blackfin does the same - still love it to bits compared to all other units ive tried just sometime it dosnt wanna show me some detail.... weird

majority of time tho i restart it and up she goes fine =)

try it in full manual mode guys, i found it worked alot better,

origanly in manual mode, i had the surface clutter and nosie tured off(recomended by a crayfisherman) but i found these 2 settings were better set to medium, from there just ajust your sens for a good pic,not to clear though as you lose detail(again recomended)

also in the pallete, i found (from memory)13 or 14 was best for me, the one with the blue background.

only prob in manual is you are ajusting it all the time, usally when your on the move anyway.

yer tim, water temp was a concern for me too, but my navman has it and i did not have a choice as it was terrible with the transom mount tranny

cheers ron

cheers for that, I started fiddling with the surface clutter and noise today but really need to just go for a day out playing with settings. I don't think that colour pallete should make a difference, and it's a pity thre isn't a gain/sensitivity knob like the Furunos.

hds units will read in over 1000m

Pretty sure you will find it is the transducer, and maybe some electrical interference as well.

When there is a chop and I am going into it, even at 10 knots, my Raymarine with transom mount struggles as bubbles get trapped under the hull and out the back, but at 25 knots, it is sweet, as there are no more bubbles. It has gotten heaps better after I have played with the tranny, and also moved the tranducer cable away from the other wires in the  wiring harness to minimise electrical interference, which was a transient problem.

Now shows fish up on the barges in 110m no problem. I have seen plenty of photos of HDS10's working really well, so dotn throw the baby out with the bathwater....

Forget the sounder settings and play with the tranny (angle, depth) and shield you tranny wire, then go back to the sounder settings. These things are so smart these days they should all give a pretty good reading in  full auto, and then you can tweek from there.

i have the hds 5 and hate it unfortunatly. the only thing it does do is pick up bottom hat high speed. i dont find the detail to be there 90 % of the time , sometimes it takes 2 minutes to warm up and start reading, and worst of all its tempremental in the way that any little bump in the tinny whilst moving it shuts itself down .... and before you ask yes its wired properly and yeas i have set it up properly. i think ill stick to humminbord for shallow and furuno for deep water stuff

That interference may also be from the Navman transducer.  Run the HDS without the Navman turned on and see if that helps.  Im not sure if the Navman is a combo or not but if it is dont think that having it in chart plotter mode that the transducer wont be running because I think they do in the background.  So leave it unpowered and see how the HDS performs.

Cheers

Thanks for all of the positive feed back so far, it’s interesting to see im not the only one with this issue so hopefully if I can resolve it may benefit others with the same unit.

Sorry I should have stated earlier that the HDS was the only sounder/plotter on the boat so interference from another transducer is out of the question (the new rig has the Navman) I have relocated the transducer, adjusted angle and depth of transducer and even relocated the tranny cable over the deck of the boat and moved it around while on the move to no avail and yes I set the transducer type in the setup menu, also have spent plenty of time adjusting noise rejection, surface clarity, and scroll speed as well as a number of fishing mode selections.

I think I will try the 1kw in hull transducer for what its worth and will report my findings although I think the output of the unit is quite low so I don’t know if it will achieve anything