OldBeechnut said:
Not bad critter, thanks for sharing... the only thing, on your next compare, and this may hold true for the GT also..is you get more depth with the excalibur in the PP mode with a faster swing...and this is at the beach's I hunt..and I'm hearing it from a few other hunters now...in florida
Yep, I've found the GT can be swept much faster in PP mode when I was hunting a badly mineralized beach, and it wouldn't cost me any depth. Best way I judge maximum sweep speed for fringe depth stuff is when I run across something at the outer edges of detection, I'll do long "looking for my next target" sweeps over it at various speeds to judge what speed the soil or sand matrix seems to be calling for to maximize depth, or at least not hurt depth. For sure I can sweep faster in PP to cover large areas faster. But, more often than not I've found that even in discrimination mode, at least on my GT, and at least using my 12x10, and at least in *my soil or sands*...Wants what I would call a medium speed for a Whites for maximum depth. I've tried the slow 4 second "Minelab crawl" over some of my soil/sand sites and I'd said about 5 or 6 out of 7 sites I found that a super slow crawl got *less depth* than a somewhat medium speed, and at least with the 12x10 separation is not a factor at this perhaps "Whites medium speed" for me. Never want to of course swing faster than you should were masking might come into play. Not as much of an issue on many beaches, and even on land in disc I'm pretty shocked how fast I can swing over some badly masked coins with the 12x10 and still see and hear a very distinctive separation of targets. I never worry about recovery speed on a detector. Far more important to have a sharp DD line, because a detector can't see what a coil can't see separately. Besides, I like a slower search over "dead" sites and feel I can drink in a better look at fringe depth stuff without a machine trying to reset on me and cut things short.
But on your tip about the faster sweep thing to test PP depth on the Excal- Yea, saw the same thing with the GT (as said above) when hunting, but just the same in all these testing videos I'm using the "Sovereign wiggle" most say will pull the hardest hit out of fringe depth stuff for best tone/ID. The way I'm measuring with the yard stick in the foreground of the camera, it's very important to have the coil as close to the yard stick as possible in order to not offset the view of the camera in relation to the yard stick and the coil in perspective to each other. If I brought the coil further away from the yard stick so I could do longer swings, it would create errors in the depth measurements due to the angle of the camera to them both.
Regardless of all that, so long as these two machines and/or coils compared are used in the same fashion as each other (IE: The Sovereign Wiggle), then the end result should still be the same in terms of contrasts of air depth. IE: If I swung them both faster and wider, they probably both would increase their depth a bit maybe, but the depth standings would probably still hold equal to each other in static spacing (half an inch or so), if you know what I mean.
Besides, we all know Minelabs can get more depth in certain soils or sands than they do in air tests. I've dug a few coins with the 10" Tornado deeper than these air tests show for this particular coil, and I've also read of Excalibur users digging coins in disc or PP deeper than the air tests showed for it as well.
It would appear that the Excalibur is wired different than the GT. Even with the threshold high enough to hear, with volume at it's lowest the Excalibur won't sound off to the dime only an inch or two away or even so close it touches the coil. I've heard many say in the past that to insure you get maximum depth on a Sovereign the volume should also be at full and then adjusted on the headphones.
I just don't see this in my testing and also actual in ground tests before digging. Lowest volume gets me the same depth as with it at full on the GT. Maybe prior Sovereign models were wired like the Excalibur, where volume has a direct impact on whether a fringe depth target will sound off at depth, in that at lowest volume a weak fringe hit isn't being picked up by the audio amplifier and passed on to the headphones.
Only thing I can figure is that the GT has been wired different, where volume doesn't show me a change in depth. I've said it before, but when I do the Sovereign wiggle I can hear a "click" sometimes and then the machine goes into a sort of "white noise" type of amplified response in audio, and then when I stop wiggling I sometimes hear this click again that the audio changes back to normal. Perhaps the GT has some kind of audio amplification built in that boosts weak signals? I can hear the meat of the target at fringe depth (it's finer traits) better with full volume though. No doubt about that.
Certain headphones, if they don't allow weaker signals to break through, might require higher volume on a Sovereign to sound off. Your thoughts on that?
