I can't speak for any of the brands you mention as I have only Shimanos. If my Garmin says I'm sitting in 60 feet of water and when I drop a line straight down and the reel says 60 feet +/- a foot or so, that's good enough for me.

 

Any type or diameter of line can be accurate on any linecounter reel. It has to do with the spool bring filled properly and calibrated. I have a bunch of daiwa sealines that I swap 18 lb leadcore, 10 lb power pro and 65 lb power pro on. In walleye crankbait trolling it's important that they read accurately. As with any kind of fishing. Here's how to calibrate.

1. Spool up as you normally would till reel is about 1/16 inch shi of full spool. Do not cut line off filler spool.

2. Measure 100 from an anchor point. I use a downrigger release on my mail box. Make a mark or place a object to mark your 100 ft.

3. Clip line to anchor point, zero the counter and walk with reel out to 100 ft mark. If it's less than 100 ft on counter, you have too much line on reel and take some off. If it's more than 100 ft, then wind more onto the reel. Repeat process until your lc reel has 100 ft displayed.

 

Any type or diameter of line can be accurate on any linecounter reel. It has to do with the spool bring filled properly and calibrated. I have a bunch of daiwa sealines that I swap 18 lb leadcore, 10 lb power pro and 65 lb power pro on. In walleye crankbait trolling it's important that they read accurately. As with any kind of fishing. Here's how to calibrate.



1. Spool up as you normally would till reel is about 1/16 inch shi of full spool. Do not cut line off filler spool.



2. Measure 100 from an anchor point. I use a downrigger release on my mail box. Make a mark or place a object to mark your 100 ft.



3. Clip line to anchor point, zero the counter and walk with reel out to 100 ft mark. If it's less than 100 ft on counter, you have too much line on reel and take some off. If it's more than 100 ft, then wind more onto the reel. Repeat process until your lc reel has 100 ft displayed.

Great tip! I always try to keep mine full, but I never thought of calibrating them like that. I use a mix of brands / models of lc reels, and they all read a little different. This sounds like a fun 6-pack project.


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The reels in your troll pattern being accurate to each other is more important than the reel being accurate out the rod tip, you can always figure what you need to do to get get a reading on the counter to be 100 out the tip. Counters have been around a long time, my 30+ year old Diawa mooching reels had them, they were calibrated to 17 lb mono, said so on the paperwork. They weren't spot on and never will be, as the line goes out the spool gets smaller, but the counter is reading spool rotations as being identical always. Same problem with downriggers. The larger the line, the more room it takes on the spool per rotation. The proof is right on the side of our reels, the line capacity chart. For a trolling, or anchored pattern with a 45 deg. angle, A squared + B squared = C squared, C squared always being line out to get a certain depth. (The triangle's hypotenuse). Depth and setback from the rod will always be identical at a 45 deg. pattern.
Salmon & Steelhead Journal did a comparison of the line counters at the time, maybe 10 years ago, or so. They found discrepancies than and documented them in the article. The person that said line size doesn't matter hasn't spent enough time around fishing gear, to know diddly.

 

The Daiwa ICV 15 is preset to use 300 yds of 20 lb. Samurai Braid.

You can run different size lines but you will need to reprogram the reel. It explains how to do that in the instruction manual that comes with the reel.

Lucky Duck has a nice video on You Tube showing how to calibrate the reel.

 

I've looked at the manual and I didn't see anything about calibration.


As for the Lucky Duck video......the video from several years ago??? It's very misleading. One minute they are talking in feet and the next they are talking in yards. Maybe just a slip of the tongue, but still misleading.

 

It's only accurate at one point for different line size. If you had 100# line it would take more revolutions to get a certain amount of line off vrs 1#. The diameter of the spool changes as the line comes off. The counter is only counting the revolutions.

 

That is correct for a mechanical line counter. The digital LC reels (like the Daiwa ICV's) have you go through a calibration procedure as Richter pointed out. I think they are smart enough (based on the calibration procedure) to understand the variable spool diameter as line is taken off the reel.

During the calibration procedure, there are a couple of different lengths where you let the reel know that you are at that distance. As Richter also noted LuckyDuck's tutorial on this is very nice.

 

Some very nice tips here.
Thanks for taking the time to post them.

 

It was good talking to you in the Diawa booth.....

The ICV you can change the calibration. It's been a while but I'm sure it's on the web somewhere.


My Lexa 100's are dead on with 10 pound big game, filled to 200yds I think.


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It was good talking to you in the Diawa booth.....

The ICV you can change the calibration. It's been a while but I'm sure it's on the web somewhere.


My Lexa 100's are dead on with 10 pound big game, filled to 200yds I think. So that line diameter is what you would need in braid to right.


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Most reproducible line counter I’ve EVER used...

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Definitely reliable if it doesn’t slip. Some people super glue I guess


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Consider also, if you have two identical reels with identical line, but one is more full than the other, there will be a bit of a difference.

If a spool of line is 3" diameter, then it is about 9.425" circumference, so 9.425" per revolution. If the spool is only 2.75" diameter full, then its only ~8.64" circumference. Thats a big difference.

 

IMHO no reel/line combination is going to be dead-on accurate. They are all fairly close indicators.

Unless you are jigging in still water, you will not 'know' exactly where your lure is located in the water column... (troll speed, current, lure drag... the list goes on) I would suggest you check your reels to see how 'close' it might be to the indicator and call it good. Otherwise you are spending your time picking the fly do out of the pepper ---

But then this is only my opinion and I have lots of honey dues waiting before I can devote more time to fishing... yet here I am on the internet, instead of working on that list... Sigh!!!

StreamFixer

 

But then this is only my opinion and I have lots of honey dues waiting before I can devote more time to fishing... yet here I am on the internet, instead of working on that list... Sigh!!!

StreamFixer

At 4:30 in the morning? Honey do lists are for much later in the day!

I just use my line counter as a guide and not an absolute value of where I'm at. Guess it all depends what your line counter reel is for. If for accuracy, I'd follow the calibration method previously mentioned in the thread. Good luck with the reel and better luck with the honey do's at 4:30 in the morning!