Whenever I jump into a mission I always slow down to minimal speed to prevent detection and stay on a fixed course for a while. Reeling in the towed array to 1/3rd of it's length, as this shortens the time it takes to straighten after a turn and prevents drooping too deep or dragging over the sea floor. It doesn't suffer sensitivity as much. Whatever length is needed for it to not scratch the sea floor.
Then I start listening on sonar, using first broadband on both short-term and medium-term waterfall for obvious near contacts on all arrrays. But not mark them yet. I write those down into a table on paper with columnheaders of sonar type, true bearing, pre-calculate what mirror bearing that would be if found on the towed array, classify as strong/weak/biological, and leave a column for contactID to be filled in later. Then repeating with narrowband recording all the frequencies I find on those bearings, and any new contacts likewise. On the TA I make sure to not record the mirror-duplicates as new ones: mirror bearings have the same angle to your course/bow as the other one, it's just on the opposite side. Or if you grab your calculator:2 x own course, subtract true bearing from it, add or subtract 360 as needed to it to get it within 0-360. The result is the true bearing of the mirrored contact.
Bow and Hull frequencies you can mark right away for assigning contact IDs. I hold off from marking TA contacts until after a turn, to avoid false positives as the mirror contacts.
If frequencies of different contacts overlap then I slowly scan from left to right across them. One of them will be faded out on the left of that bearing, and the other on the right of it. Though sometimes you have 3 or more and it gets complicated, but generally not impossible. Usually you can distinguish the shapes of the jiggly lines as the bearing pointer is changed and note where the signal is strongest. Or use the edges where the jiggly line is faded completely and take the middle of it.The contacts may have only a few or 1 degrees between them, but the shape of the line makes them distinguishable from each other. If they peak on the same bearing, so be it for now. Bearing drift will take care of that in the future.
For the above it is important that you have your monitor or graphicscard settings adjusted for brightness/contrast/gamma, or adding a line for software adjustment of the gammasetting in the dangereouswaters.ini. Look in this download for a screenshot how to detect the fainest of signals:
SC-HQ TACMAN by timmyg00 See more about the dangerouswaters.ini file here:
http://www.commanders-academy.com/fo...php/t-179.html
If their bearings drift already you may even see intensity shifting across the bearing over time. I would also make a note of probable bearing drift direction for help with future TMA.
Then I start plotting all of those bearings on a circular graph on paper. Plotting the bearings from the bow and hull as unique bearings, but linking the 2 mirrored TA bearings together by a thin connecting line. Then I start looking for groupings. Bow, hull and TA bearings (and potentially active intercepts or ESM on that bearing collected in the mean time) together suggests there is a contact there ready for marking and "mastering". But only if the frequencies do not contradict. Depending on if you play stock this may help with filtering frequencies:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/down...o=file&id=3403
otherwise you may just have to make do with a table of narrowband frequencies, or scan through the frequency library filter.
If I find those bow or hull contacts near non-matching TA contacts as above, or grouped TA contacts that can be a true contact over a mirrored contact, I start looking at how far I can turn to clearly separate those contacts in bearing on the temporary assumption they are mirrors. (keeping in mind the baffles of each sensor) The mirror bearings should move twice as much as your turn, in the same direction, from their old positions. Unless that flips them across your course/TA line, so try to avoid getting them near it. They might have moved a bit on their own if there is some drift in them over time.
After I determined the best change in course to separate the TA bearings from all others I make the turn. As the turn is in progress the TA bearings drift quite a bit so I don't really take that as a sign, other then marking the significant drifters as possible mirrors. And after the turn verify the old known bearings on narrowband to see which changed for sure. Culling those bearings from the table I made previously, and mark the correct bearing to assign an ID. I don't care about assigning trackers yet until I know the full picture.
Once I have identified the mirrors from the true contacts I start matching frequencies at those bearings with all the available sensors. If they correspond then I merge them into a master contact. But be mindful that faint contacts may not show the higher frequencies, and also not show all the deamon lines (to verify). Then decide which are the interesting ones to track. And assign TA tracker to them and if possible (due to signal strenghte or baffles) either bow or hull array tracker.
The TA does indeed give a different bearing from the bow or hull sonar if the contact is on your beam. The further the TA is streamed the bigger the difference. Also, it is larger as the contact gets near. Bearings to far away contacts are almost parallel and not very usefull. It is an often used method to triangulate the position of the contact. But it takes up sparse trackers that may be needed for other contacts in dense environments.