Mike Hillis
Well-known member
Finally was able to get out with it yesterday and give it a go, running with the little 5x10 DD HF coil.
It turned off a lot on me. Most of that was due to the batteries. Every time I squatted to retrieve a target I would lay it across my knee, and it being top heavy would spin around so that the control box was toward the ground. I guess that would break the battery connection and it would shut off. It got aggravating having to reenter all my settings, until I remembered it saves last settings used. So I set it up, then turned it off and back on. So that helped. At least now when it shut off and I turned it back on I didn't have to go through the whole setting up process again. Sometimes I would just lay it on the ground so I didn't have to mess with it.
I used my pocket Uniprobe with it. Which means that I also share my headphones between the detector and the probe. Once when plugging my headphones back into the box, I watched the screen slowly fade and go blank and shut down. Another time, after unplugging and re-plugging the headphones in, I lost all audio. I had to turn it off and back on.
These little aggravations also caused me to remember about the need to stabilize the headphone cord to keep from premature shorting. So I started holding the phone cord so it wouldn't swing from the plug.
Performance wise it did ok. I used it in several different sites. The grassy park auto-balanced at 12 and 10, while a school playground auto-balanced at 8.
Target id was all ground specific. In the sand, the high coins stayed pretty constant but the nickels read up in the 16's and 18's. In the turf, they ran 8s, sometimes a 6. Nothing like the air tests numbers at all which is common for me and my ground.
One feature that I really liked was that the pinpoint mode also gave a target id number. It came in handy for identifying iron falses. I'd get a high tone that I thought might be a iron false and click into pinpoint mode, pinpoint it and see that -8, -6, or 48/-8 bounce and say "iron" with some confidence. It did seem the pinpoint mode automatically narrowed down target signals. I'll have to go back to the manual and see if it is supposed to.
I didn't find it that fast of a responder even with the DD coil, Seems to be very sweep speed dependant. Go too fast and the iron falses, go too slow and you can't isolate the target response correctly. This will be something I'll have to get down so I can teach it to whomever is using it. It may also be coil specific.
It did find me another clad half dollar, a 1 Euro coin, a 2 Rupee coin from India, a tiny little dolphin split ring (heavy but probably tin covered lead) and several dollars in clad.
It will serve its purpose ok once I get it debugged. I just wanted an extra machine that friends or family could use which could go anywhere I took my F-75, including nugget hunting. I'm going to need to get an extension cable for it so that my wife can hipmount the control box as it is still too heavy for her and she also wants to hunt nuggets.
Any suggestions for helping to fix my issues?
HH
Mike
It turned off a lot on me. Most of that was due to the batteries. Every time I squatted to retrieve a target I would lay it across my knee, and it being top heavy would spin around so that the control box was toward the ground. I guess that would break the battery connection and it would shut off. It got aggravating having to reenter all my settings, until I remembered it saves last settings used. So I set it up, then turned it off and back on. So that helped. At least now when it shut off and I turned it back on I didn't have to go through the whole setting up process again. Sometimes I would just lay it on the ground so I didn't have to mess with it.
I used my pocket Uniprobe with it. Which means that I also share my headphones between the detector and the probe. Once when plugging my headphones back into the box, I watched the screen slowly fade and go blank and shut down. Another time, after unplugging and re-plugging the headphones in, I lost all audio. I had to turn it off and back on.
These little aggravations also caused me to remember about the need to stabilize the headphone cord to keep from premature shorting. So I started holding the phone cord so it wouldn't swing from the plug.
Performance wise it did ok. I used it in several different sites. The grassy park auto-balanced at 12 and 10, while a school playground auto-balanced at 8.
Target id was all ground specific. In the sand, the high coins stayed pretty constant but the nickels read up in the 16's and 18's. In the turf, they ran 8s, sometimes a 6. Nothing like the air tests numbers at all which is common for me and my ground.
One feature that I really liked was that the pinpoint mode also gave a target id number. It came in handy for identifying iron falses. I'd get a high tone that I thought might be a iron false and click into pinpoint mode, pinpoint it and see that -8, -6, or 48/-8 bounce and say "iron" with some confidence. It did seem the pinpoint mode automatically narrowed down target signals. I'll have to go back to the manual and see if it is supposed to.
I didn't find it that fast of a responder even with the DD coil, Seems to be very sweep speed dependant. Go too fast and the iron falses, go too slow and you can't isolate the target response correctly. This will be something I'll have to get down so I can teach it to whomever is using it. It may also be coil specific.
It did find me another clad half dollar, a 1 Euro coin, a 2 Rupee coin from India, a tiny little dolphin split ring (heavy but probably tin covered lead) and several dollars in clad.
It will serve its purpose ok once I get it debugged. I just wanted an extra machine that friends or family could use which could go anywhere I took my F-75, including nugget hunting. I'm going to need to get an extension cable for it so that my wife can hipmount the control box as it is still too heavy for her and she also wants to hunt nuggets.
Any suggestions for helping to fix my issues?
HH
Mike
