[treblesum81]

I experienced this last night: There was a heavy storm and rough seas so I was doing a dive to 100 feet, stopping and listening for any traffic on the hydrophone about every hour in my patrol area. This practice went on for about 6 hours of game time before I decided to jump in and have a listen for myself. What I found was that there was a large merchant vessel of some sort (never could get the hang of identifying prop sounds) on a 90* bearing and relatively close, the contact light turned on on the hydrophone station and the notepad lit up with the "unknown". When I pulled away from the sonar station though to start plotting an approach, I found that my sonar operated was reporting that there was no sound contact. I went back to the station just to be check, and sure enough, at 90* there was a loud and clear prop noise. So on a guess I made a guess that it really was a merchant and set that in the notepad and only then did my sonar guy start reporting the contact. As it turns out we were only about 3000y away from the ship, so we were well within the 10mi radius of the phones. Is this a common problem that I'll have to live with, or is there something specific about this incident that I'm either doing wrong, or is correctable. I would hate to have to run my patrols from the sonar station just so I don't miss anything. Also, I know rough seas can cause diminished phone sensitivity, but the contact was coming in very loud and very clear and the system was able to identify that it was at least there without any difficulty, so I really think it's got something to do with the sonar operator. Anyway, I'm running with TMO, RSRD, and PE 3_2 installed. Thanks, Greg