E Trac and Sovereign GT....Strange find !!

[synthnut]

I had some time today and was not in a hurry to beat the clock and find a million dollars ....I went to a local fresh water beach that has all kinds of trash on it ..... This is the beach that I paid $20 for a permit to hunt it and then they STILL wanted me to pay parking ....Needless to say , I boycotted the beach as I was NOT going to pay parking ...The head grounds keeper told me that there was a few regulars that are parking thier cars down by the gate before the area is open and walking to the beach ....Must be a healthy group as the beach is a good 2 miles from where you park your car if you are at this gate ...He said that they would get there at 4 a.m. to get the goodies if there were any ..... STIFF competition here in NY !!!....

Anyway I took my E Trac and my newly Lipo'd Sovereign out for a walk today ...I wanted to do some comparison finds to see how each machine reacted ..... I didn't find anything that one could find that the other couldn't .... They handled the targets differently , but both got the goods ....Nothing extremely deep here ....Its sand dumped on top of hard ground .....There is probably 6-10 inche of sand with hard gournd underneath .... The Sovereign was smoother, and rounder , and overall "flutier" sounding ...The E Trac was more abrupt and sharper sounding .....The Sovereign had a nice range of smooth tones , and the E Trac had a WIDER range of pitch top to bottom as I indicated in earlier threads .....I would have no trouble with either machine , but the nod sort of went to the E Trac because I could see both Conductive AND Ferrous numbers when double checking targets .....There was so many different types of Pull Tabs that you dug everything anyway because you would hear an odd tone close to a Pull Tab tone , and you would dig it thinking that it could be Gold , and you end up digging another type of Pull Tab .... I would check these tones with both machines , and the E Trac's results were very accurate and sharp while the Sovereign was a little more ify , but sitll reading really well ......

Then along came this weird target ....I wanted to dig it right away , but waited and went over to get the Sovereign to see how this target would sound using it ..... I was getting a very weird "Blip" that would start out a lower tone, and "Blip" to a HIGH tone !!.... It was really a strange tone , so I circled the target and watched the numbers jumping ....WIth the E Trac the numbers were all over the place too !!.... Since the Sovereign has a way of "Drawing a circle " around targets very well , I went very slow with it and switched it into all metal thinking that maybe a good target was next to a bad target ..... I went VERY slowly, and the tone just would NOT seperate .....I figured these targets had to REALLY be close to each other .....I finally dug the target .....It was something I NEVER got before .....It was a dime that had a Pull Tab curled around it holding it tightly !!!...... They could not have been closer together !!.....I was really totally blown away that I actually got both low and high tones from this target .....One or the other tone is what I would have expected after seeing the way this thing was put together , but BOTH tones ? ..... These Minelab machines freak me out and show me something new everytime I go out for a hunt .... As picked thru as this beach was , I still ended up with about $6 in clad ....I even got a Sakajuia ( Spelling ? ) Dollar !!.....That was a nice way to end the hunt !!..... Jim

 

[FreeMan08]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing. What you saw on your hunt is the reason we all love the Sovereign GT and the E-trac.
regards
Ed

 

[hershey1]

Minelabs are the best machines I have ever used on iffy targets and I have owned a few machines in the last 40 years. New owners learn those sounds and investigate those high tone chirps and your finds will amaze you. Great read. HH

 

[Rick(ND)]

You hit that right on as this is what I have said for years, you learn something each time you go out, this is where experience with them in actual hunting condition is better than any air test..
Two of the best detectors are the E-Trac and the Sovereign GT with the E-Trac becoming better the more I use it.

 

[Critterhunter]

Excellent read. Thanks. Did you have Iron Mask ON on the GT, and what other settings were you using on it? From my experience Iron Mask ON isn't just about the machine's ability to separate the signal of iron objects and good targets mixed together, but it also helps unveil good targets mixed with non-iron targets in the way it doesn't average signals nearly as much as other machines and also tries to let "other" sounds through when multiple targets are mixed into the same spot.

I realize you were at the beach so it's dig everything, but I bet you'd be surprised in other situations where pull tabs are numerous as to how well proper notch setting on the Sovereign can eliminate those tabs easier than numerous "learn reject" attempts. At least it was true for me in my Explorers. The microscopic closeness they looked at tabs made developing a tab reject program while still being able to recover most rings just about impossible for me to do. I found that even the exact same six tabs taken off a six pack could still have some read slightly out of phase with each other in the ferrous/non-ferrous perspective. The results were that no distinct pattern for numerous tabs could be developed without also blocking out a much larger portion of the gold rings for me. With the GT it's been much easier to quantify that pattern of common tab numbers and yet still be able to recover the majority of gold rings. That along with the more telling audio on a gold ring versus a tab or other junk on the Sovereign has made it better in those respects for me.

 

[synthnut]

Critter,
I'm one of the odd ones that runs my Mask OFF to clean up my signal on what I hear ......I do that on this particular beach becuse the sand is really not that deep before it goes to very hard dirt/rock, and I can hit the bottom without setting up deep ... ....... Even with Iron Mask OFF , I could hear the signal jumping back and forth between tab and dime tones ....I hit it from various angles and went VERY slowly ...It was really one of the strangest tones from BOTH the E Trac and the Sovereign ....There was NO NULL .....The numbers didn't know where to go , and neither did the tones ...... I do run a dicrim pattern on my E Trac ....I can notch all over the palce on that thing , but I do NOT notch out the Tab range ......I respect, and appreciate what you said in your thread on VID numbers and the odds of getting gold with your notch settings for tabs , but after loosing that Platinum ring that read EXACTLY like these certain tabs that I was reading all day when I had my Safari , I would NEVER chance notching out tabs on either of my machines ..... That occasion STILL rattles my cage !!!......Jim