Mick in Dubbo
New member
G'day all.
I've had a couple of cracks at detecting on the blue metal of the local show ground over the last couple of days. I went there yesterday with my X-Terra 30, which was armed with the standard coil as well as the DD large coil. With the standard coil on, it kept giving an overload signal. With the DD coil on it seemed to handle it better, but not very well. I didn't get much time there to hunt, as I had a lady come up and talk to me, and then due to domestic duties, I had to leave. (Domestic duties have thwarted all my attempts to hunt for the last 2 weeks.)
I got out to the same spot again today for a couple of hours. This time I was armed with the 1500 (first hunt with it for over a month) and the Ace. I tried the 1500, but it flew the white flag (all signals were 4.5). Even my pocket probe couldn't handle this ground, as it sounded off every time it got near it!
Next I pulled out the Ace and found that it could operate in this environment, albeit with very limited depth (2in). I ran it in Jewellery mode with the sens set at 6 at first, but backed it off to 4 bars (there didn't seem to be much difference in performance with either of these settings).
Hunting on this sort of ground, has a similar effect to you dropping tin foil out off a plane to confuse radar! yet somehow the Ace was still able to I'd targets! It did miss some targets. Some screw caps and pull tabs didn't register on a first pass (which were on the surface), so I can only assume that I missed around a quarter of all targets. I've considered this ground as a no go zone for a detector because of previous results, and had to pinch myself a few times, while I was hunting, because a machine with a fixed ground balance was working effectively in this environment! I think that the ID could have been off on a few targets, so I was digging up more rubbish, just to be sure. Sometimes the pinpoint was 3 feet wide, but I found that if I raised the coil 4in off the ground then I could find the rough area of where the target was, after which, I hit the pinpoint button once or more times to detune for an accurate pinpoint. Sometimes I even pinpointed using the null.
At the end off the hunt, I had recovered around 10 junk items and two coins, a $2 which was an inch down and a 10c piece, which was only half buried. The deepest item, was a bit off canslaw at 2in, which I left in the ground.
I'm very stoked with what this little detector can do. Is there no end to it's boundaries. It just keeps giving and I look forward to hunting a new spot. this location is 5 to 10 acres in size (all covered by blue metal!), and has all the side shows set up on it each year, with from around 20 000 people (best guess) coming to the local show. Other detectorists don't detect it!
Mick Evans.
I've had a couple of cracks at detecting on the blue metal of the local show ground over the last couple of days. I went there yesterday with my X-Terra 30, which was armed with the standard coil as well as the DD large coil. With the standard coil on, it kept giving an overload signal. With the DD coil on it seemed to handle it better, but not very well. I didn't get much time there to hunt, as I had a lady come up and talk to me, and then due to domestic duties, I had to leave. (Domestic duties have thwarted all my attempts to hunt for the last 2 weeks.)
I got out to the same spot again today for a couple of hours. This time I was armed with the 1500 (first hunt with it for over a month) and the Ace. I tried the 1500, but it flew the white flag (all signals were 4.5). Even my pocket probe couldn't handle this ground, as it sounded off every time it got near it!
Next I pulled out the Ace and found that it could operate in this environment, albeit with very limited depth (2in). I ran it in Jewellery mode with the sens set at 6 at first, but backed it off to 4 bars (there didn't seem to be much difference in performance with either of these settings).
Hunting on this sort of ground, has a similar effect to you dropping tin foil out off a plane to confuse radar! yet somehow the Ace was still able to I'd targets! It did miss some targets. Some screw caps and pull tabs didn't register on a first pass (which were on the surface), so I can only assume that I missed around a quarter of all targets. I've considered this ground as a no go zone for a detector because of previous results, and had to pinch myself a few times, while I was hunting, because a machine with a fixed ground balance was working effectively in this environment! I think that the ID could have been off on a few targets, so I was digging up more rubbish, just to be sure. Sometimes the pinpoint was 3 feet wide, but I found that if I raised the coil 4in off the ground then I could find the rough area of where the target was, after which, I hit the pinpoint button once or more times to detune for an accurate pinpoint. Sometimes I even pinpointed using the null.
At the end off the hunt, I had recovered around 10 junk items and two coins, a $2 which was an inch down and a 10c piece, which was only half buried. The deepest item, was a bit off canslaw at 2in, which I left in the ground.
I'm very stoked with what this little detector can do. Is there no end to it's boundaries. It just keeps giving and I look forward to hunting a new spot. this location is 5 to 10 acres in size (all covered by blue metal!), and has all the side shows set up on it each year, with from around 20 000 people (best guess) coming to the local show. Other detectorists don't detect it!
Mick Evans.
