New F75-Chatter, sensitivity, power lines and the weather - LONG

[Neugene]

I bit the bullet today and bought an F75 over the X-terra 70. Being an Explorer user this thing is going to take some getting use to.
I had read the manual twice before making my decision so as soon as I got home I broke open the box, assembled the F75 and headed into the yard.
First of all I will say that my lawn was literally a scrap metal yard before I moved in here. The word trashy does not even come close. It is almost to impossible to make one swing without getting some kind of signal. Needless to say it is a detectors worst nightmare.
The Explorer nulls out a lot when using discrimination, but performs well in all metal with long tones and ferrous sounds.
The response/recover time of the F75 is mind boggling. I found a few clads at about 4-5" that I had passed over with other detectors presumably due to masking. In all fairness I had not hunted this area of the yard with the new SE.

As far as noise and chattering goes. I found the cleanest spot possible, ground balanced (67) and set the sensitivity to 80 and left the disc set at 1.
I was within 40' of the transformer and power lines that feed my house and it ran smooth as silk. I played around with the disc a little and everything was going fine.

DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME BOYS AND GIRLS.
After a few minutes I heard thunder and saw lightning in the distance. As the storm came closer I noticed more and more chatter. Knowing I should go inside (yeah right), the engineer inside got the better of me and, in the interest of science, I decided to keep "experimenting". At least that is what I told my wife when she started yelling out the window.
It seemed that the chatter increased as the storm got closer. I ended up taking the sensitivity down to 35 to stabilize things before chickening out and coming inside. After the thunder and lightning had passed I went back outside and things had leveled off as far as the detector is concerned.
Has anyone else noticed anything similar to this or do you think it was a freak occurrence?

 

[alton]

Well, I haven't tried my F75 in a thunderstorm yet, but in my experience the F75's stability issues are really non issues.

I've found out that the chatter is pretty much the detector reporting the metal that it sees. This machine is so fast that it hits many more misc. targets than other detectors I've used. Using disc. at 20 gets rid of most of it, but I've learned to just ignore most of it.

I've yet to fail to get it stable when I'm hunting.

It is a very different animal than the SE, but I like the way they compliment each other. Between the two of them you have a pretty good idea of what is in the ground.

HH Alton

 

[Old California]

Use less tones, I found using less tone modes will decrease chatter in most areas of interfence.

HH, Paul (Ca)

 

[captainbottletop]

A thunderstorm is a electrical storm , they drive many detectors nuts when one comes over. I was once out metal detecting with lightening over head , i quickly dismantled the detector !. i have a feeling lightening would just love to to fry my metal detector. Really scary out in a thunderstorm with lightening always is in my mind that lightening could strike especially using a metal cased detector!.
happy hunting......

 

[JBM]

MMMMMMMMM interesting read but The hymn "Nearer My God to Thee" comes mind.

Think I will give detecting near electrical/lightening storms a miss.Jerry.

 

[Charlie P. (NY)]

Lightning is the world's largest spark-gap transmitter. It is basically transmitting over a wide range of frequencies. No surprise at all you picked up signals. You probably would have on the home stereo with headphones listening to AM or FM, or even a CD from the RF interference alone. Lightning travels from the ground up, and all them little ions running to the surface and bristling about on trees and utility poles probably change the ground balance over wide areas. (I don't know this but it sounds good. )

We were out on a small sailboat and a storm came up fast. I dropped the sails and pulled on the starter rope. Just then lightning struck miles down the lake. I got a "ZAP" via the motor through my hand that was pushing on the top of the motor as I pulled the rope with the other. Scared the snot out of me, I'll tell you.