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Just bought an Excalibur 1000
- Thread starter Relicpro
- Start date
Sanddigger
New member
n/t
Mike (Virginia Beach)
New member
I recommend that you run the Disc at "1" (none), unless you don't want to get any small gold. Small aluminum trash and gold are indistinguishable by metal detectors, so never any Disc at the beach.
As for Sensitivity, with the Excal 1000 you can do 11 O'clock well in the wet sand but may need to reduce to 12 noon if you are hitting the shallow water, maybe even 1 O'clock if in deeper water. Running it too hot will cause falsing. I generally run 12 noon. You said Excal and not Excal II...on the Excal II 12 O'clock is actually setting "6", with 1 being the weakest and 10 being the highest.
Stay out of Auto, it's pretty much worthless unless you are testing your Excal with every different kind of jewelry you can lay your hands on, in which case I recommend putting it all out on a blanket (outside only, in a clean trash-free area with no signals) and then Auto is good, for surface testing. And if you haven't done that, DO IT...before you go hunting again. Test to see the difference in the tones from a quarter, a nickel, a heavy gold ring, a fine gold ring, a chain, a bottle cap, some aluminum trash, etc. Best preparation you can make!
And practice pinpointing...with out switching to pinpoint. Leave that switch in "Disc" forever....it's NOT needed. Get good at doing it in normal hunt mode. Left-right, up-down, left-right, up-down, dig! Takes a few seconds when you get it figured out.
As for Threshold, set it to a slight buzzing, like a bee. What you want is to be able to hear a steady buzz. When you go over a DEEP target, a SMALL target (diamond ring, gold chain, etc.) or narrowly MISS a target, the Excal is sensitive enough to have that threshold "break" or go "null" momentarily. When it does, that's your cue to STOP, go back, and check it out from a few different angles. You may find that you now have a good low-growl sweet-sounding gold signal. The best diamond rings and gold goodies are faint signals or much less prominent than quarters, dimes, and pennies. LEARN THE TONES, by experience and TESTING with known targets. In time you will KNOW a bottle cap, a quarter, a nickel, a penny...with about a 95% accuracy rate. Of course, the BEST stuff goes to those that dig EVERYTHING. A friend of mine dug a killer gold ring last night that sounded like a penny. Only reason it did was because it was so HEAVY...14K, thick, and sturdy...to hold all those diamonds! Some people who were weary of digging pennies might have passed that one up. Like me maybe. Though I hope I didn't and if I did, I don't want to know! Too painful!
That's pretty much everything you need to know about hinting with an Excal to be very successful. That and get out there and get the hours in on it to get good. And also that when the battery is starting to go dead it will begin to "shriek" at intervals of a couple of minutes and as it gets deader, the shrieks will get closer. I recommend 16 hours of charge and then do two hunts with it, assuming your hunts are maybe 4 to 5 hours each. You MIGHT get 16 hours of hunt out of 16 hours of charge, but I doubt it. Nothing worse than being in the middle of a good hunt and the battery goes dead on you.
Lastly, I made some sound recordings a while back of my Excal sounding off on some various targets. I had a small mic held up to the inside of one headphone. The recordings are good but the level is low. You will want to go into your sound properties and turn the master WAV volume, the Master volume, and the Media Player volume ALL THE WAY UP and they will sound like they should. On the Excal I recommend running your volume at 3/4's too, if you want my opinion on that. The sounds file is a 2.5MB Zip file...you need WinZip to open it. The files in it are named for what they are. You can open it up and listen to them or save the file to your computer (my recommendation) and then play them. Here is the link to it: http://www.findmall.com/read.php?21,405738,405738#msg-405738
As for Sensitivity, with the Excal 1000 you can do 11 O'clock well in the wet sand but may need to reduce to 12 noon if you are hitting the shallow water, maybe even 1 O'clock if in deeper water. Running it too hot will cause falsing. I generally run 12 noon. You said Excal and not Excal II...on the Excal II 12 O'clock is actually setting "6", with 1 being the weakest and 10 being the highest.
Stay out of Auto, it's pretty much worthless unless you are testing your Excal with every different kind of jewelry you can lay your hands on, in which case I recommend putting it all out on a blanket (outside only, in a clean trash-free area with no signals) and then Auto is good, for surface testing. And if you haven't done that, DO IT...before you go hunting again. Test to see the difference in the tones from a quarter, a nickel, a heavy gold ring, a fine gold ring, a chain, a bottle cap, some aluminum trash, etc. Best preparation you can make!
And practice pinpointing...with out switching to pinpoint. Leave that switch in "Disc" forever....it's NOT needed. Get good at doing it in normal hunt mode. Left-right, up-down, left-right, up-down, dig! Takes a few seconds when you get it figured out.
As for Threshold, set it to a slight buzzing, like a bee. What you want is to be able to hear a steady buzz. When you go over a DEEP target, a SMALL target (diamond ring, gold chain, etc.) or narrowly MISS a target, the Excal is sensitive enough to have that threshold "break" or go "null" momentarily. When it does, that's your cue to STOP, go back, and check it out from a few different angles. You may find that you now have a good low-growl sweet-sounding gold signal. The best diamond rings and gold goodies are faint signals or much less prominent than quarters, dimes, and pennies. LEARN THE TONES, by experience and TESTING with known targets. In time you will KNOW a bottle cap, a quarter, a nickel, a penny...with about a 95% accuracy rate. Of course, the BEST stuff goes to those that dig EVERYTHING. A friend of mine dug a killer gold ring last night that sounded like a penny. Only reason it did was because it was so HEAVY...14K, thick, and sturdy...to hold all those diamonds! Some people who were weary of digging pennies might have passed that one up. Like me maybe. Though I hope I didn't and if I did, I don't want to know! Too painful!
That's pretty much everything you need to know about hinting with an Excal to be very successful. That and get out there and get the hours in on it to get good. And also that when the battery is starting to go dead it will begin to "shriek" at intervals of a couple of minutes and as it gets deader, the shrieks will get closer. I recommend 16 hours of charge and then do two hunts with it, assuming your hunts are maybe 4 to 5 hours each. You MIGHT get 16 hours of hunt out of 16 hours of charge, but I doubt it. Nothing worse than being in the middle of a good hunt and the battery goes dead on you.
Lastly, I made some sound recordings a while back of my Excal sounding off on some various targets. I had a small mic held up to the inside of one headphone. The recordings are good but the level is low. You will want to go into your sound properties and turn the master WAV volume, the Master volume, and the Media Player volume ALL THE WAY UP and they will sound like they should. On the Excal I recommend running your volume at 3/4's too, if you want my opinion on that. The sounds file is a 2.5MB Zip file...you need WinZip to open it. The files in it are named for what they are. You can open it up and listen to them or save the file to your computer (my recommendation) and then play them. Here is the link to it: http://www.findmall.com/read.php?21,405738,405738#msg-405738