I need adult supervision

[Anonymous]

I got so frustrated today I gnawed the bark off some trees.
I was detecting a wooded area, for C.W. relics, and was in heavy trash, plus heavy mineralization. I was hunting around an old house site. I was detecting in Advanced Smart, w/ coins, jewelry, accepted, nails, crowncaps, rejected, sens at 20-24 auto. Lots of nulls. As I swept the coil, occasionally I would get a high pitched, signal, and when I went back to it and tried to center it, it would jump around, and the crosshairs would jump around too. One each of these I could not get a repeatable signal, so I dug them anyway, and they turned out to be small iron nails, which I thought should have been discriminated out.
On some of the signals, the tone warbled through several tones, almost playing a tune, and it was very exasperating trying to figure out what the machine was telling me. I dug all targets which I thought "might" be good, but none were.
I had my gain set at "8", which I later thought might have attributed to the problem. I tried switching to Iron Mask set to "0", then to Iron Mask set at "-6", and I was still getting what I considered to be false signals from iron. Very frustrating.
Also, I dug a brass shotgun shell which gave a very low tone, and a fired lead bullet which gave a higher tone, but when I laid them both on top of the ground to see what they sounded like then, I noticed the tone changed remarkably. The brass item and the lead sounded pretty much the same after being dug. I have my sounds set up for full variability for the highest tone separation.
What I am figuring is that my problems were being caused by the gain settings being too high, and the 10.5" coil covering multiple targets in the high trash environment.
Any help on this will be greatly appreciated. I know that confidence in this machine will come with experience, but it is really taxing my patience right now. Thanks.

 

[Anonymous]

Greg, the gain setting is too high for iron sites, move it down to around 5 or even 4, also try sens in manual at around 20, you will probably null more but you wont get as much falsing from iron caused by the sensitivity trying to adjust in auto on the edge of nails, other than that the detector is working normally, when you get over a good target you will know it, as you said in your post they didnt sound good and jumped all over the screen as well as nulled on rechecking.. typical bad target, and digging them proved it. on your brass and lead you got repeatable signals right? After a while you will learn to trust your instincts and leave those bad signals alone by sound alone....

 

[Anonymous]

Jim that sounds like exactly what Im going through
the two way good signals are ok on shallow to medium depth targets,but what do the deep ones sound like are they still clean and repeatable many times Ive had one way signals but no audio in pin point and the depth scale is only just registering is this a good deep target or trash again.
Gary.

 

[Anonymous]

Sometimes you gotta work the deep signals in iron with the quick coil wiggle, and circle around them from all angles, just listen to the audio and the good targets will just have something about them that tells you its a positive reading. Also if you get one thats repeating good at one angle pretty solid but breaking up or nulling in most of the other angles its probably a good target with iron close to it. when the blade of the coil is perpindicular to the iron it can see the target well, but any other direction the iron is under the coil.. again theres just a distinct good audio tone on good targets, Now not to say all good targets sound great, but at least most iron and tin targets sound bad.. I seldom get a suprise digging one I thought was junk in the first place and not have it be junk...I also think its the best way to learn the tones is to dig all these questionable targets till you get enough confidence to pass them up..of course if signals are slim I just dig em all anyway..you never know

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks Jim. I'll make the necessary changes and keep plugging away.

 

[Anonymous]

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