BarnacleBill
New member
Today I stumbled across something I've never seen since the X-Terras came out, a patch of lightly mineralized soil. In a previous lifetime with other detectors I've detected in these types of soils, but now I am usually over moderate to severely mineralized soils. Since I use tracking on the X70, unless something catches my attention to investigate further, I just go on my merry way. But today going through my setup routine I noticed I could push the sensitivity much higher at this particular place than usual. Therefore little man starts ringing bell in head, something's not right............
I began looking for problems, GB was tracking around in the mid-teens with a kick up to 20 once in a while. Batteries showed good, iron grunts nice and strong, audio like usual, coil connector tight, no Leprechauns sitting on nearby stumps having a bit of fun with me(in my younger years when I drank more that happened from time to time, honest).
Soooooo......time to take a soil reading with the X70, I couldn't believe my eyes, I repeated it several times moving around to get an average. The numbers ranged from 600 to 800 which is just crazy low! Now "that" explained the situation, but it also brought to mind an issue discussed on the forum from time to time, difficulty in manually GB'ing.
When I manually GB in my usual locations I will get two numbers with mixed tones at max, normally only one number, and many times a high or low tone, no mixed tones and strong audio. But at this location I couldn't hardly get anything, that is I could move 20 numbers, say up around 40 before I could hear even faint audio. Then light bulb went on, I was now walking in another's shoes. New owners of X-Terra's have reported having trouble hearing any audio response when ground balancing, leading them to believe they're doing it wrong or that they're detector is defective. This leads me to believe that the problem may be that they're are no minerals in their ground to balance against. Therefore the reality is, the point that GB setting doesn't matter, as there is not enough minerals to worry about. Oh that we should all have such problems!
I messed with manually GB'ing for a spell, just to see how the detector reacted, and I could see that manually GB'ing under these conditions could be very frustrating, especially for a newbie. However if you have an X70, the Auto-GB or Tracking will do a much better job of finding this silent GB point. The X70 was quite consistent in zeroing in on the same range of numbers.
OK so what's a newbie that lives in the land of mild soil to do if this very subtle GB sound is giving concern? Well, I did two things to provide a more distinct GB response that a newbie could practice with. One, Asphalt is our friend, find some blacktop, especially with larger stones mixed in, because it is one noisy variable ground. Two, locate some big rocks or boulders. Look for different colored and surface types and GB against them for practice. If lucky you'll find some real nice hot ones that will cause the GB to be loud and very narrow in range. I found one that gave a ground reading of ~100K, now that baby had a very loud and tight correct GB setting.
What about experienced X50 & X70 owners? Well there appears to be a correlation between how strong & tight the GB scale is with the readings from the X70 soil feature reading. Therefore an X50 user can make a determination about how mineralized the soil is by how tight or loose the GB point is. Below is a graphic I made up of the X50 GB scale with 10 assumed to be the GB point in a particular soil. The first row is an example of very low mineralization, next row moderate, third row severe. The graphic shows a trend and is not empirical or calibrated in any way.
Q = Quiet
VW = Very Weak Audio & Tone
W = Weak Audio & Tone
M = Mixed Tones
S = Strong Single Tone
[attachment 109438 GBMineralPoint.gif]
I hope the preceding info may help some new users, and provide a little more info to the experienced users in determining how bad the soil is that they are walking over.
HH
BarnacleBill
I began looking for problems, GB was tracking around in the mid-teens with a kick up to 20 once in a while. Batteries showed good, iron grunts nice and strong, audio like usual, coil connector tight, no Leprechauns sitting on nearby stumps having a bit of fun with me(in my younger years when I drank more that happened from time to time, honest).
Soooooo......time to take a soil reading with the X70, I couldn't believe my eyes, I repeated it several times moving around to get an average. The numbers ranged from 600 to 800 which is just crazy low! Now "that" explained the situation, but it also brought to mind an issue discussed on the forum from time to time, difficulty in manually GB'ing.
When I manually GB in my usual locations I will get two numbers with mixed tones at max, normally only one number, and many times a high or low tone, no mixed tones and strong audio. But at this location I couldn't hardly get anything, that is I could move 20 numbers, say up around 40 before I could hear even faint audio. Then light bulb went on, I was now walking in another's shoes. New owners of X-Terra's have reported having trouble hearing any audio response when ground balancing, leading them to believe they're doing it wrong or that they're detector is defective. This leads me to believe that the problem may be that they're are no minerals in their ground to balance against. Therefore the reality is, the point that GB setting doesn't matter, as there is not enough minerals to worry about. Oh that we should all have such problems!
I messed with manually GB'ing for a spell, just to see how the detector reacted, and I could see that manually GB'ing under these conditions could be very frustrating, especially for a newbie. However if you have an X70, the Auto-GB or Tracking will do a much better job of finding this silent GB point. The X70 was quite consistent in zeroing in on the same range of numbers.
OK so what's a newbie that lives in the land of mild soil to do if this very subtle GB sound is giving concern? Well, I did two things to provide a more distinct GB response that a newbie could practice with. One, Asphalt is our friend, find some blacktop, especially with larger stones mixed in, because it is one noisy variable ground. Two, locate some big rocks or boulders. Look for different colored and surface types and GB against them for practice. If lucky you'll find some real nice hot ones that will cause the GB to be loud and very narrow in range. I found one that gave a ground reading of ~100K, now that baby had a very loud and tight correct GB setting.
What about experienced X50 & X70 owners? Well there appears to be a correlation between how strong & tight the GB scale is with the readings from the X70 soil feature reading. Therefore an X50 user can make a determination about how mineralized the soil is by how tight or loose the GB point is. Below is a graphic I made up of the X50 GB scale with 10 assumed to be the GB point in a particular soil. The first row is an example of very low mineralization, next row moderate, third row severe. The graphic shows a trend and is not empirical or calibrated in any way.
Q = Quiet
VW = Very Weak Audio & Tone
W = Weak Audio & Tone
M = Mixed Tones
S = Strong Single Tone
[attachment 109438 GBMineralPoint.gif]
I hope the preceding info may help some new users, and provide a little more info to the experienced users in determining how bad the soil is that they are walking over.
HH
BarnacleBill