I have been going to a 1798 house off and on for about 3 years now with mostly disappointing results. It's kept up real nice and is rented out occasionally by the owners for vacationing tourists, so there's a bit of modern debris there too. Two years ago I dug my first IHP there and a 3-ringer. I've got a couple of wheats out of there, but nothing real exciting. It's been gone over a million times by other guys, and there are multiple dump sites on the property (which is only about an acre). It's loaded with nails and there is a ton of garbage debris buried in the back yard.
Anyway, today a friend and I struck out at our first spot so we went there just hoping to pull something worthwhile. It's the first time I have been there with my 3030 and the first time he was there with his Etrac, and the first thing I found was a CW round ball on the surface where they had just dug to lay a new drainage pipe earlier this month. On the way to the truck at the end of the hunt I went into "screw it" mode and put on my big coil, high trash program, and jumped the sensitivity up to 30 manual. I heard a faint chirp in with some iron that was repeatable on every 2nd or 3rd pass and at 90 degrees, so we opened it up (it wouldn't pinpoint, so we cut the sod about 6" deep in a + shape about 2 feet wide, folded it back, and went down as far as the soil would let us. Certainly the largest plug I've dug (although I'm proud to say it was damn near pristine looking when we left). I hit a root about as thick as my arm at about 8" so we dug another plug out next to it so that we could tunnel under the root because that's where one of the signals was at. After each pass with the digger, the signal got clearer and was staying around 39-47 conductive with steady ferrous numbers.
Once under the root, I pulled out a handful of soil and found myself looking at a nice Matron Head variety large cent at a measured depth of 11". It's dateless and in bad shape, but it's period and I'll take it, and I rescanned and then pulled out four rusted nails in the same hole. I really wish I would have been confident enough that it wasn't a nail falsing that I would have played around with the settings a little to learn some more or else had my friend do the same with his Etrac to compare signals, but I didn't. It was so faint...I can't begin to imagine what else I've been passing over. I did have the presence of mind to check it with my primary program (GH settings in combined mode) and I would like to think I would have dug it with that too, but the iron grunts might have turned me off of it early. I think the tight pattern high trash mode really helped me out here.
Anyway, today a friend and I struck out at our first spot so we went there just hoping to pull something worthwhile. It's the first time I have been there with my 3030 and the first time he was there with his Etrac, and the first thing I found was a CW round ball on the surface where they had just dug to lay a new drainage pipe earlier this month. On the way to the truck at the end of the hunt I went into "screw it" mode and put on my big coil, high trash program, and jumped the sensitivity up to 30 manual. I heard a faint chirp in with some iron that was repeatable on every 2nd or 3rd pass and at 90 degrees, so we opened it up (it wouldn't pinpoint, so we cut the sod about 6" deep in a + shape about 2 feet wide, folded it back, and went down as far as the soil would let us. Certainly the largest plug I've dug (although I'm proud to say it was damn near pristine looking when we left). I hit a root about as thick as my arm at about 8" so we dug another plug out next to it so that we could tunnel under the root because that's where one of the signals was at. After each pass with the digger, the signal got clearer and was staying around 39-47 conductive with steady ferrous numbers.
Once under the root, I pulled out a handful of soil and found myself looking at a nice Matron Head variety large cent at a measured depth of 11". It's dateless and in bad shape, but it's period and I'll take it, and I rescanned and then pulled out four rusted nails in the same hole. I really wish I would have been confident enough that it wasn't a nail falsing that I would have played around with the settings a little to learn some more or else had my friend do the same with his Etrac to compare signals, but I didn't. It was so faint...I can't begin to imagine what else I've been passing over. I did have the presence of mind to check it with my primary program (GH settings in combined mode) and I would like to think I would have dug it with that too, but the iron grunts might have turned me off of it early. I think the tight pattern high trash mode really helped me out here.
