Learned something today regarding 10" Excal coils

[Steve in PR]

Spoke with Sandy at Minelab this morning. What a big help she was! Yesterday I went hunting and found a nice 10K cross about 1.5" long. A little later, a woman asked me to look for a lost earring. I asked her to pass the one she still had under my coil. No tone! I couldn't believe it! Discrim at zero, max on sensitivity and no tone!

Called Sandy and she educated me. Maybe some of you already know this but I will risk repeating it.

With the 10" coil, you will need to boost the threshold control a little to hear smaller gold. This is not so true with the 8" coil which will be able to sense smaller gold more easily. The 10" will find larger gold at standard threshold settings.

Guess who will be boosting his threshold from now on......

Also, opened or open-loop earrings are tougher to detect.

 

[Gulf Hunter]

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[bdahunter]

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[GraveDiggerMax-VaBch-Va]

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[Steve in PR]

Sandy said just a little but I am going to play with it today and I will let you know what I find out.

 

[sandman256]

I have bad hearing and am running threshold a little higher. Son went to try my detector at a beach and said it was louder than he liked it.

 

[Marc(NB)]

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[Steve in PR]

I gave it a try yesterday and I can tell you that I was finding deeper, smaller targets but, no small gold. Or any gold, for that matter!

I cranked it up until the sound was just a continuous noise then backed it off slightly when it started ti settle down. It seemed to be stable but, yes, a little louder. There was a continuous buzz in the background but nothing so terrible or annoying. I guess that "annoying" is the operative word. I set the buzz level just below "annoying". Tell you the truth, I tweaked it a little higher after it seemed to quiet down an hour or so into the hunt.

I think the jury is still out on this one but I will conduct some tests later this week at the beach with some small gold to see if I can tell if it makes any difference.

 

[bdahunter]

Thanks Steve! Anything we can learn to make our hunts more productive is good for everyone. I found the higher threshold really annoying too.

HH,

BDA

 

[Rick(ND)]

This is why I like to run the threshold on my Sovereigns too and why I feel in silent search you will lose some depth and weaker sounding targets. With the threshold it can me annoying at times, but you can tell if you are going too fast or a slight blip of a good target at the end of a null you normally would not hear in silent search. Now what I mean about a threshold is with the coil in the air and not targets close to it you will hear the hum of the threshold and can tell when it nulls and when the tone will change so you know when it see a target whether good or bad.
The real small gold I feel that will read lower then alum foil you will not get a signal at all in silent search, but with a threshold I think you will know as the threshold will change pitch a little letting you know it has seen something. Now if it is real small like a earring stud it may not see it at all like the links in a gold chain unless it is big enough.

Rick

 

[Steve in PR]

Good stuff, Rick. Thanks for the insights.

I agree that small and large gold sounds lower than aluminum. That has been my experience. But I submit a caution that I have also found some gold sounding very close to aluminum.

Perfectly round aluminum tabs are what drive me nuts because I will always tend to dig them because of their distinct tone. I still feel I cannot take the chance of ignoring them.

 

[Steve in PR]

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