The first thing I would encourage everyone to do who buys an F-75, is to become familiar with the manual. Like all the detectors I have used, I rushed outside to use it but with this one, I did an "about face" and came back in and read the manual, cover to cover.
The manual is well written and understandable unlike a few others that I have tackled in past years. The only thing that I took with me today on the hunt was a copy of the audio settings because pretty much everything else is self-explanatory once you get into the menu.
Right off you notice the weight or rather the lack of weight of this machine. Well balanced and comfortable, even the armrest felt good. Construction is good with no obvious "dime store" parts. Batterys are easy to
install with all 4 AA's going with the + end up.
The area that I went to hunt once had a CW era home but was torn down and a new house built. There was grading that was done, so besides the nails and other trash, I had to deal with red clay to black dirt and every combination inbetween. Some of the targets were beneath the clay in the underlying top soil.
I started out by going to factory default and auto GB'ing. Here you need to use some caution and make sure that there is no metal in the ground at all, which was hard to do in this location. Once I GB'ed, I set the sensitivity to 75 in Discriminate mode...Too hot, too much metal in the ground, backed it down to 70 and it quietened down. I went thru the most of the audio selection and settled on 3. Being a relic hunter, that was all I needed. One tone for iron, one for mid-range targets, and one for high-end targets. I tried other settings but I kept coming back to number 3.
Signals were plentiful and at first was a little confusing until I got my first good target and then I knew for sure that this wasn't small pieces of metal in the ground, this is a good target. The F-75 was so hot in this ground that I dropped the sensitivity to 65 and it helped by eliminating some of the audio I was getting.
The F-75 absolutely loves brass and copper as you will see in the pictures. Every one of the pennys, hit in the mid-range audio and locked in (visual ID) good except when there were close adjacent targets.(After removing a plug of dirt with the target still in the hole, the audio went to the high tone.) One good point here is that with a good target, continue to swing as you did previous to the finding it, and the machine actually enhances the target audio and visual ID. On the silver, there was no question that it was a good target, high pitched audio, confidence bar pegged out and the ID stayed in one place. The pennies gave excellent audio even though they were all very deep. Some were almost blank copper pieces because of being in the ground so long ( some exposure to possible fertilizer) with the deepest being approximately 9-10 inches. It is important to note here, that regardless of the depth, the audio was pretty much the same... The machine was fooled a couple of times by iron but that is expected.
In a field close by, I tried the All Metal mode for a few minutes and I must say that I do like it.. I had fun relic hunting with the Coinstrike and the F-75 I think will do better because of enhanced sensitivity. In AM, I ran the sensitivity up to 90 with no chatter at all and I didn't try to go any higher. Any target under the coil and give a quick glance at the ID number and you know immediately if it's a good target or not. This should really prove to be good for us relic hunters. Too, I set the threshold to only 1, because I just wanted to hear a very slight hum in the background.
I definitely had fun even though my coin hunting skills are not what they should be and taking in consideration that this is a new machine. There may be a couple of areas that you need to be aware of:
The machine is hot- I couldn't crank it up under my conditions--only 65 to get it to run smooth.
Almost all of the pennys locked in on pulltab-- The manual says that that is the area that older coins will go.
Keeping the coil speed up helps the detector to define the target... A good sounding target at an old site, dig it....
Sorry to take so much space but I thought it was necessary to try to give an upfront impression of this machine. I like it and it is going to take more than 4 hours to get use to it but I appeciated it ability the first time out..... Best to all, RichardnTn
Authorized Fisher Dealer
