Helix ice interference

I’ve owned a lot of different locators mainly vex, marcum and bird. I have always been able to sort out interference on my past units. Right now I have a marcum lx6s and I bought a helix 5 ice to share my lake chips from my helix units in my boat. If I go fishing alone the unit is good. If anyone comes near me, it becomes useless with interference. It doesn’t matter if I am at 83khz or 200khz, what the sensitivity is at, where the transducer is in the hole or compared to other transducers. I am also manually setting the depth. Forget fishing in my shanty with friends. If the noise filter is anything less than high 3 it’s even more useless. Once in a while using vexilars or Marcums IR it will clear up the helix a little bit, but it is still hands down by far the most frustrating unit I’ve owned. Im a bird fan, might be going back to an ice 55. Any ideas?

On red last year, my brother brought his Helix 5 and he spent over an hour fiddling with the settings to get it to play nice with my 28 and my fathers 55. Once I decided to drop my Helix down also, it was impossible to tune anything out and I had to put it away for the weekend.

Great unit for GPS and alright for sonar for the occasional fisher. By no means is it a great replacement to a traditional flasher, IMO.

It’s a bummer. Humminbird customer service says due to the design you have to stay 6-10 feet away from other brands when using this locator. Pretty useless in a shack. For sale.

I didn’t want to spend the money on di as this is a dedicated ice unit and I have 9s on my boat. Wouldn’t it have been smart for hunminbird to make an advertised ice unit be a little more effective? The exact answer I have from customer support is to stay 6-10 feet away from any other brand locator. So fishing in a house or portable is out of the question. Straight from the horse’s mouth. Below is their exact quote.

“As all of the previous representative stated, if there are multiple units operating in the same area, you will experience sonar to sonar crosstalk. We recommend keeping the units at least 6-10 feet apart.”

I don’t have that problem with my marcum, never did with a vex or ice 45.

Might be apples to oranges, but i had my best luck with my Lowrance 520C by not turning the surface or interference rejections up too high. The higher up i turned the filters the more i had to turn sensitivity up, which resulted in problems. Keeping the sensitivity low gave me pretty good luck, and actually had others nearby complain that my Lowrance was knocking their units out while I was fine.

Might just be something to try before returning it.

With that said my LX7 does a very good job of reducing clutter, and it’s more simple to adjust the interference rejection.

Tucker

When fishing in our permanent house which is an old pop up camper and usually in 12-16 FOW we cant use a single locator, the holes are not close enough to share one. We can fish my Marcum LX6s or my old LC3tc any Vex and any traditional Humminbird Ice unit (35, 45, 55). We do get interference on these units, but we are able to quickly sort it out using one locators IR settings. I am familiar with Humminbird products and I have tried every possible setting combination I could think of on the Helix 5 ICE. What it comes down to is this is not a unit I would recommend for ice fishing. Buy one of Humminbird ICE 35, 45 or 55 or buy a Helix for the boat. I love my Helix 9s in my boat, they are great. But the “ICE Helix” is garbage and useful for a GPS but that is about it if you want to fish with friends.

I am going to make a video showing the interference and comparing it with other locators when the weather cooperates again unless the thing sells before that.