It's the same with mine, but I don't think it's the probe. For $#it$ and giggles I set my Etrac up for just finding SILVER and just silver, fast on, dense trash, difficult soil, auto +3 and all of the screen blacked out except for the right upper corner quadrant, and 1-30 to 1-40 disced out. I did this in an area where it is basically a junk pile full of soda cans and iron galore and somewhere in that null I got a dime signal that sort of repeated. I dug a huge hole and could not pinpoint it for the life of me with the SR probe what so ever. I turned off the probe and swung over the hole and got nothing, swung over my dirt I had dug out and spread and got a signal. Tried it with the SR probe and again could not get a signal. Switched to pinpoint and the probe nailed it. The coin was a beaten the heck out of Merc dime, I mean it literally looked like someone had laid it on a sidewalk and beaten it with a hammer for an hour, by far my ugliest merc yet. With heavy discrimination and the Etracs wavy ID you could easily disc out a target on the SR probe. Once a target is not perpendicular to the coil (any coil), which is what the probe is, just a small coil, the Etrac skews the ID quite a bit and can easily land in an area you have disced out and cause you to miss it or null. In pinpoint, you are in all metal and can then hear it regardless of your disc settings or coin orientation. Same thing happens on high iron falses or tiny targets, you may hear it (a kind of good signal) with the large coil, dig a hole and then not hear it with the probe because the probe now reports it correctly as iron (ghost signal). This is a very frequent episode for me in that I probably chase more iffys with my Etrac than most would as I am trying to squeeze the very last thing I can out of the grounds I have already hunted, in very dense trash. For me the ID on the Etrac is way less accurate and reliable than my SE's, whether I am using the main coil or the probe, it's the machine; and the need to use disc to take advantage of the high trash setting. In manual sensitivity running this machine hot, I literally have to switch the machine into auto sensitivity to use the probe effectively during recovery. You just push the auto sens button and push it again after you recover to go back into manual. Seems like work though, when I just don't have to with the SE and the SR probe works fine while running in high manual sensitivity. But in comparing my results with the SR probe on my SE's and the ETrac, the probe is allot more stable on the SE's. That is the Etrac's problem,
not the probe as I have switched the upper shafts and probes on my SE's and Etrac numerous times to check them out and also to fly with the exact same results. It's a just the way it is, kind of thing and you kind of work around it.