What's your standard to go down and do a hydrophone check

[vonCrandall]

Let's say you are traveling to your ordered patrol grid and have left 'friendly' territory. What is your protocol (or what was the official German protocol) for diving down every so often to do a hydrophone check to listen for possible merchants floating by or the occasional destroyer patrol?

Does it change when the weather is horrible topside and you just stay down and listen?

I'm trying to gauge how often I should stop and drop to 35-40m and listen.

[THE_MASK]

I let the game do it automatically.
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=174400&highlight=automated+scripts

[Tiny]

I do it every 4th hour or so...I just feel that it's part of the game experience.

[Bilge_Rat]

If you dive every hour, you can pick up every ship that comes within hydrophone range of your boat. However, this can be very time consuming. When in the patrol zone, I dive 3-4 times a day: 1 hour before sunrise and sunset and 1-2 times during the day, depending on the weather.


As far as the official KM protocol, you have to remember that Hydrophones in the SH series are way better than the RL counterparts. Yes, under ideal sound conditions, you might be able to pick up a convoy 30-40 km away, as in the game, but not each time every time. Also, it would take much longer than 2 minutes for a good sonar operator to pick up faint contacts against the background sea noise. On a clear day, the lookouts would normally spot ships on the horizon before the sonar operator would hear them, so regular hydrophone checks would tend to happen under low visibility conditions.