Angie,
Careful in the gravel driveway if it is old and really hard packed. You can make holes that will keep coming back if you aren't careful.
If you get frustrated with the machine try switching over to either the relic pattern (search this forum for all dates, search for Jason's relic pattern) if you find it load it and switch the ET to ferrous sound and 2-tones. It will then respond like an F75 set in 2F (a low tone for ferrous and a high tone for non-ferrous). It is not the "fluty tones" that are so hard to get used to and in 2-tone it will not give you iron falses, at least not high ones but it will alert you to any non-ferrous target in and among the iron. If the ferrous number is between 8 and 14 and the conductive number is good... dig it. Deeper targets may have a slightly lower conductive number but the conductive number is generally VERY reliable. Another thing that helps me is using what is one of the big strengths of the Sovereign line... "pitch hold". Pitch hold works especially well weh you are in 4 tones or in multi because it will change the threshold tone to the last target tone until you hit a new target. It can help you to know that there is something there when you got a quick quiet tone.Most of the time I use fast=on and deep=on, though ifI am in a clean place without much trash I will switch to fast=off.
I have run the gain at 22 to 24 but after talking to some others who regularly dig deep oldies I have decided to run my gain at MAX... there is still a depth guage so why not hear those deep targets as loud and clear as possible? Makes sense to me.
I can't telll you how many good targets I have pulled out of HARD hunted places using auto+3; ferrous/2-tone; pitch hold; fast=on;deep=on; modified relic pattern. You can also do well by loading a minimal "iron mask" into your search window, then keep iron mask open for checking a target but remember that if you do indeed have an iron masked target that the E-TRAC is hitting and you check it with the iron mask open... the ET may tell you the target is iron, when the pattern will still unmask it..
Tell me this.. did you buy the ET for prospecting, coin hunting, or relic hunting? The ET is, IMO, the best VLF machine in heavily mineralized ground for relic or coin hunting and it is the best machine for "unmasking" targets that other hunters passed over or didn't even hear... but to get them you have to dig "iffy" signals. Signals that are good but maybe only from one direction, maybe even only on swinging from one side. Like one the left swing you get a good TID everytime, from the right you may get something else, turn 90 degrees and it may or may not be there or it may be there but with bad numbers... but back at that left swing it soundsand looks good and you can wiggle it in.. at least something is consistant. You'll dig some trash but you'll also dig some treasure. I especially like this at civil war sites. Generally a minnie ball will have a conductive number of 33, maybe 32 or 34. If I get that conductive number consistantly from some direction and with the wiggle... I dig it and it is usually a bullet. You'll figure out the targets that work that way for you and you'll be amazed by the E-TRAC. Just remember, if you are only going to dig soild good signals that give you a good tone and TID number from all directions... you could do as well with an ACE 250, any machine will find the easy targets. Trash signals aren't always trash!! Some old brass buttons read exactly like some pulltabs, some old brass buttons read exactly like a square pulltab, slightly above a nickle. Always consider the history of the site but remember that anything can be anywhere. About two years ago I dug a souvenier medal from the 1913 Confederate Veterans Reunion. I dug it in a trashy vacant lot in town. I had dug a few silver coins in another part of the lot, two IH pennies in another part, lots of bottlecaps and auto reapir junk in another part... there was no indication that something like this should be there. It wasn't deep and is larget than a silver dollar... I am sure most people would have passed it by as trash, shallow... too big, a trashy site. A few years ago I found out about a CW site after the local clubs had hunted it hard. Easily over a hundred people hunting mostly 1/4 acre or so of a site where a Church was being built. Everyone was concentrating on the upper end and more toward one corner. I dug a zinc time fuse adapter from a 20# Parrot shell at less than 3" deep. It was large, about three inches long and maybe and inch and a quarter in diameter. It reads 01-40 on the E-TRAC, the signal was too big to be a dollar coin so I am sure everyone wrote it off as trash and passed it by. There were way too many hunters there and it was too shallow and large for it to not have been hit many times... You have to dig trash if you want to dig treasure.
Have you considered getting some of these.. just to be sure you can hear that bear or moose? http://thrpro.com/Killer%20B%20site_page14.html
Julien
Hope you collect Canadian pennies. Have fun.
