Picketwire
Well-known member
I have a one gallon ice cream container almost full of sand from our old dump. Ground balance is about 4 on the Legend and 87 or so on my other detectors. It is very mineralized with ferrite. I can max out the mineralization meter on my Deus pumping it over this sand. I placed the container on top of a quarter to see which of my detectors would see it best. No go, not one, so I pushed the quarter down from the top into the sand and tried again. Some with small coils didn't make a sound unless they were in real all metal. Some sounded off but VID wouldn't make a person dig. I was just out in the garage with the Legend and the 9x6 coil checking it out again. I usually run in M1 field mode with all tones and iron filter about middle of adjustment, all metal accepted and sensitivity down a couple of notches because of EMI. These settings are what I tried first. I got mostly low iron numbers that would once in a while jump higher, about once every 10 or more swings to the mid to high 30s. Like every mode I tested, the higher numbers came up sweeping left to right. I don't know why, but it was consistent. The numbers never approached 50. I tried M2, and M3 with about the same results. The only thing I was changing was the frequency. When I got to 4khz, VID still jumped a bit but there was a much higher percentage of high VIDs. If I slowed down sweep speed VID improved. 10, 15 and 20khz was about the same with a bit higher percentage of high numbers and I could sweep faster. With SMF, I could tell there was something nonferrous down there, with single frequencies, I was getting an indication that a high conductor was there.
I switched to coin mode with basically the same results. Beach MD had louder tones, but no real indication there was anything good down there. I have saved profile 2 which is default mode and tried it. I got no response at all so I guess my changing adjustments didn't hurt performance too bad. I did find out one other thing I didn't know. When I set up profile 2 in field mode, one was created in park mode too. I did find out earlier that when you choose a new profile, it is automatically default mode.
I know not everyone's conditions will be close to mine but I have only been using SMF on my Legend and this has been an eye opener to me. Maybe the EMI was affecting SMF worse, I don't know. I couldn't hear any. I know all this proves is that if you have a quarter in some bad dirt in an ice cream container in my garage, single frequency might work better. It made, for me, a bigger difference than from switching from one SMF to another in this instance but it may not somewhere else. To me this says, don't be afraid to try single frequencies. I had always just assumed that because of my mineralization, SMF would alway be better here.
I switched to coin mode with basically the same results. Beach MD had louder tones, but no real indication there was anything good down there. I have saved profile 2 which is default mode and tried it. I got no response at all so I guess my changing adjustments didn't hurt performance too bad. I did find out one other thing I didn't know. When I set up profile 2 in field mode, one was created in park mode too. I did find out earlier that when you choose a new profile, it is automatically default mode.
I know not everyone's conditions will be close to mine but I have only been using SMF on my Legend and this has been an eye opener to me. Maybe the EMI was affecting SMF worse, I don't know. I couldn't hear any. I know all this proves is that if you have a quarter in some bad dirt in an ice cream container in my garage, single frequency might work better. It made, for me, a bigger difference than from switching from one SMF to another in this instance but it may not somewhere else. To me this says, don't be afraid to try single frequencies. I had always just assumed that because of my mineralization, SMF would alway be better here.
