A liitle confused...

[Anonymous]

I'm confused on a few issues...I'll be going hunting all day tomarrow and want a little feed back on how to aproach these issues.
1. Irom Mask vs SmartFind-- is one "more sensitive" in terms of penetration depth? If so, which is better.
2. Faint whispers???-- i'm not sure what this means... a repeatable faint signal, signal that you hear 6 out of 10 passes with the coil, or something else????
3. Sensitivity(semi-auto vs manual)-- can you describe what "unstable" sounds like and should the setting be moved 1 or 2 down or more like 5 to 7???
I know a lot of this I'm just gonna have to learn on my own (thats part of the fun of this hobby for me)but it gets durn frustrating to dig 12", 14", even 24" holes and find nothing, I mean NOTHING in the soil brought out of the hole. I can't learn from those kinds of experiences cause i don't know what made the signal(yes, in most cases it was a repeatable signal)to begin with.I'm pretty fare at pinpointing, also on a few occasions i caved in the sides to a diameter equal to the search coil and still nothing. Any advice would be appreciated
Thanx steve

 

[Anonymous]

Here are some answers, I hope...
1. I don't think that you will get any better depth or sensativity in either iron mask or smartfind modes. If you use iron mask mode, you will find that it is a very quick, easy way to remove most of the discrimination.
2. Faint whispers... Most folks crank their gain up to 7 or 8, so there aren't any faint whispers. If you reduce your gain to 5 or less, the deeper targets will sound much fainter.
You are far more likely to get the "thunk" sound. That is the sound of the threshold cutting out with a quick rise and then possibly a null target silence. Those are worth taking a second or a third look at as those are generally pretty deep.
3. What an unstable Explorer sounds like... Well, it can vary. When it is really bad, the Explorer chatters all the time. When it is marginal, the threshold comes and goes (and some folks hunt at this point).
I tend to run the sensativity all the way up and drop it a couple of steps if it doesn't seem stable. Once I get to a stable point, I tend to lower sensativity by one or two more steps as I like for it to be rock solid.
Now here is the important part... You are going to get a lot more one-way falses in manual mode. Be sure to check your targets from two directions and avoid digging the unrepeatables. Yes, sometimes the target that reads from one direction is good - but the odds are at least 100 to 1 against it (probably a lot worse, but I wanted to be conservative).
And oh yeah, be sure to noise cancel before you get your sensativity beyond 24. The first thing you should do before you start detecting is to noise cancel.
I hope this helps.
Tim

 

[Anonymous]

I am a new explorer owner and mine acted funny as well. May I suggest that you take several things of something known such as a piece of jewelry and swing it in front of the head. After using my new detector four times, I could not get the erraticness to stop. It locked up a couple of times and I had to cut the detector off to get it to stop howling long and loud. My detector was even erratic in air when I lifted it up even after I ground balanced it. I sort of felt like something was wrong and went to get a handful of my wifes jewelry. It didn't detect an 18K diamond bracelet at zero inches. It barely whispered at two 18K rings at one inch. At that point I figured it must have gotten banged up pretty bad in shipping and opted to send it back. My new one was shipped this week and I hope to have it tomorrow. So...try a few known things and see what you get. I hope this helps.