I think my 4X6 is defective!

[Tin Nugget]

I only use the 4X6 when I absolutely have to because I had never gotten a hit deeper than 5" and even 5" didn't happen often. Today I was working the sidelines of a football field where they remove the bleachers when the season is over. Very trashy place. It gave me a target with a pretty strong response, the VDI was 77, I pinpointed it and it said 7". I was like man, that's gotta be a can and almost didn't dig it. I went after it anyway. Dug a plug about 5" with my lesche and then had to scrape out the rest. There at the bottom of my 7" hole was one thin clad dime. I looked at it for a moment, stuck my Lesche in the hole and it was completely to the hilt. That's 7". A couple minutes later I got a good response and a VDI of 18, pinpointed at 6". Once again I was not going to dig it, I even kept re-sweeping it trying to get a 22 out of it so I could walk. It bounced down to a 16 once or twice so I decided to dig the junk anyway. 6" down, every bit of 6", I had a nickle. Pulled 52 clad today but those were the only two deep targets. Maybe it fixed itself because I did not get any more targets that deep. Maybe I just never gave it an honest enough workout so I didn't realize it's full potential. Most of the time I will leave the 6X10 on too long for the amount of trash because I don't want to give up the depth. Guess I will have to rethink that.
Anyway, my question is was this just unusual or has anyone else had the same experience with the 4X6.
The ground is a hard black clay. It hasn't rained too recently but the nights have been cool and the clay was a little damp.

 

[cintisteve]

You might try using the 5.3 bulleye coil. It works great in trashy areas and you dount loose much in depth.As far as your vdi numbers ;they seem to be right on the money.Steve

 

[Canewrap]

How does clad get that deep? And the idea of ignoring some positive numbers is alien to me, but then I'm a relic hunter and if I get a repeat positive on a shallow target I dig it, even if its mixed with some negatives. I'd love to cherry pick, but I just don't trust the machine that much. If I ever missed a CW belt buckle and the guy with me got it instead, on ground I just hunted, it would probably ruin my year.

 

[Monte]

[size=medium]by comparison. Personally, I favor the 5.3 Eclipse on an MXT or M6 because it gets better depth of detection, I like the pinpointing better, and the discrimination is usually better.

The depth you're experiencing seems about right. Some bad ground or sites with a lot of trash (or any targets) will limit the depth of detection, naturally. One thing to remember is that you're swinging a slow-motion detector (MXT & M6) and you have a negative impact of depth and overall performance if you sweep the coil too quickly, especially over more mineralized ground.

Monte[/size]