Mineralized ground

[Mike Hillis]

My new toy (the harlot) told me something I had always suspected but never knew for sure. Much of my ground is highly mineralized.

I've been playing in the sandboxes, and the ground phase readings averaged from a 93.4 to 95.6 as I move up in elevation. It drops alittle bit as I move out of sand onto the grass but not a whole lot. The topsoil was brought in to grow grass on

The range = toward 95 is ferrous, toward 0 is conductive salt, so you can see that I am on the extreme end of ferrous. This doesn't tell strength, but does tell what the GB is dealing with.

Anyone having to deal with high ferrous ground mineralization with the CoinStrike? How does it do? I don't remember and it looks like I am still a couple of weeks away from being able to test it myself.

Sick Coin$trike

 

[Daniel Tn]

Down in my part of Tennessee we have pockets of very bad iron dirt, that reads much like what you talk about on the MXT, XLT, and DFX "ground phase" readings. I've got dirt that the Minelab Quattro I had, would null out on just the dirt itself if you had the iron section disced out. Some bad stuff right there.

But one thing I found out...the CoinStrike is the best ID machine I have ever used for handling that kind of dirt. BUT...there are tricks to it that you have to do. The first one I learned, was it really helps if you get versitle with the Iron Disc setting. If you run that sucker at 99 you will be missing stuff in the iron dirt. Trust me. Case in point...one of those sites happened to be a site loaded with 3 ring minie balls from the Civil War. I found by trial and error how bad the dirt was there. It was the first site I took JeffTn to...whom also hunts with a CoinStrike. We hunted for a little while and I had dug a few bullets and I went to see how Jeff was doing. He hadn't dug one yet and I thought that was odd. I asked him what settings he had on his machine and he was running iron disc at 99. What was happening...is the detector is seeing the dirt as one solid sheet of iron. Once I told him what was going on and to try the disc at about 60, he started digging bullets. If you run at high iron disc levels, it will mask the good targets. A good way to test the dirt....take a Civil War bullet or a coin and just flat out dig you a test hole and put it down in there. Set your machine up exactly how you would be hunting and see if it will sound off on your bullet/coin. That's how I found I had to set the C$ at a MAX iron disc setting of about 50-60 to be able to detect those bullets. All other machines I had to hunt in all metal to get the bullets....especially those with ED 180 discriminators (most non metered, knob discriminator machines).

So yes...in bad iron dirt, the C$ is probably the best thing out there right now. I've been around the block and used just about everything out there and I came back to the C$. And unless they update it or come out with a totally new machine with similar technology, I will hold onto the C$ for a while. Another thing to note....in dirt like that, your VDIs will be off. I'm not sure if you are hunting for newer coins or older things...but just be aware of that. I have dug some CW bullets that were sort of deep, that IDed into the low to mid +teens and once it was out of the hole it would read like it's suppose to.

 

[Mike Hillis]

Daniel,

That is exactly what I needed to know. I don't care if I need three or four machines to do what I want to do, but I do need to know what machine to pick up based on the ground conditions and the depth I'm trying to achieve.

Thanks for the excellent reply

Sick Coin$trike