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New to Forum, new to V3, first impressions, questions

Still learning ... went to the schoolhouse today, dug everything that either had a bell shaped signagraph or had the 2,5KHz highest. Found some old iron bits (which correctly ID'd as iron), a piece of aluminum (which ID'd as a quarter), and part of a gold(*) ring. The ring was the most interesting part -- I don't recall the VDI number (30-something?), but I recall that it had just a little tiny "blip" sound when I moved the coil over it. But it was a consistent signal, and the 22.5 KHz was strong, so I dug it. It took forever for me to actually find it amongst the dirt. It is less than half an inch long and maybe and 1/8 inch wide. Wipe the dirt off and it's shiny yellow gold. I was quite happy with that, and looked hard for the rest of it, but couldn't find it.

* When I got home and washed it off, I find that it's most likely not gold -- instead of being stamped "14K", it's stamped "HONG KONG". Oh well. One of these days... :rolleyes:
 
These posts of yours have produced a lot of info on the v3 and I thank you for them. Today I was detecting and I found a rusty bottle cap that I was sure was a quarter but next time I'll remember to check which frequencies are peaking. I've been really enjoying this detector and so far, I think my favroite program is relic with tone id, but vco only for the pinpointing function. As far as your yard goes, I have the same thing in my apartment yard. It must have been used as a dump in the 40's because every detector and every coil I've tested back there made them go crazy there's so much brass and aluminum etc. and in close proximity to one another. Sometimes the only way is to just dig up the junk and then go over it again. I was reading a lot of crushed aluminum cans at around 66 vdi today so I kept that in my head and it helped to avoid them. Experience is really an important thing in detecting....my buddy uses a dfx that I used to own and programmed it for him because he doesn't mess with the programs himself. Well, he does so fantastic with that machine and always kicks my butt when we go together and he's running a small coil...he even beat me when I was using a bigfoot on my dfx! I'm always changing programs and settings on my detectors constantly and he just keeps on learning on his one program and that's really the key. Of course it would be better if he understood the machine and was able to make small changes now and then for different conditions but I'm learning from him not to go crazy with changes but learn the program that I'm using really well before I go changing too many things around at once. Again...thanks for this thread and keep us informed as to your progress and finds! -Dave
 
DavefromCt said:
Today I was detecting and I found a rusty bottle cap that I was sure was a quarter but next time I'll remember to check which frequencies are peaking.

I went out for about an hour today, and I dug half a dozen bottle caps, but I suspected they were bottle caps before I dug them, because they didn't peak on the 2.5 KHz. But at this point I'm still digging them, just to be sure.

I got a solid "penny" hit that turned out to be a copper ground rod for the building's electrical system. I left that one in the ground. :)

The two that fooled me today were both solid "quarter" hits, both with nice bell graphs, and both with the 2.5 KHz peaked highest. One was a piece of metal rod that I can't identify, and the other was a jar lid of some sort, which was folded in half nearly a foot down. With it folded, it was about an inch wide by 2 inches long, and the V3 gave a very solid signal on it at that depth (and I was in "high trash" mode).

The only "good" find today was a memorial cent. I wish it were something better, but hey, I'll take it. It beats getting skunked. :)

DavefromCt said:
I was reading a lot of crushed aluminum cans at around 66 vdi today

I found two of those today myself, but they're pretty easy to deal with -- right under the grass, and way too big a signal to be a coin. I pulled them out and put them in the trash bin.

DavefromCt said:
Experience is really an important thing in detecting.

I'd say that's right. I'm trying to resist the temptation to play with the settings too much until I learn it better. I did some more messing with it in air tests last night, but I try to leave it at factory in the field, for now. I can always hit these same sites again (and again, and again...) later once I know more of what I'm doing.

Incidentally, the air tests I did last night were checking recovery speed. The default settings in the coin modes are pretty slow -- I could put a bottle cap and a quarter six or eight inches apart, and it would only hit on one of them, even with a fairly slow sweep speed. If I turned the recovery delay down, or put it in "high trash" mode (which has a faster recovery by default), it would ID them both no problem, even if they were just an inch or two apart. If I put them right next to each other, I'd get an "iffy" signal that would make me think it was a bottle cap -- which it was, though it also had a quarter overlapping it.

I envy the guys that hunt relics and have ground clean enough to "dig everything that isn't iron" without going insane. :)
 
I appreciate all the info you put forth, posts like this will help us all learn our V's much quicker!!

However....

I envy the guys that hunt relics and have ground clean enough to "dig everything that isn't iron" without going insane.

Sometimes...not always true. Several places I hunt for civil war relics are yards that used to be battlefield. So..being yards for the last 50-100+ years, they have the same trash as any other yard, mixed with bullets, buttons and other goodies. I must say that being a relic digger, where we "dig everything that isn't iron", in a yard like that will drive a person quite quickly and efficiently insane!! :detecting: :wiggle: :wacko:
 
Downdeep said:
So..being yards for the last 50-100+ years, they have the same trash as any other yard

It amazes me that there is so much trash in yards. Did people never pick anything up?

Of course, the way our culture is going, in a hundred years they'll need to invent a "plastic detector" to find anything we left behind.
 
Another day of practice with the V3.

Much better results today -- I think I'm starting to learn to tell good stuff from trash! Finding a few good things always helps. I ran mostly in "coin" mode today.

The bad:
A mower tooth (from a horizontal farm mower).
Several pieces of cast aluminum from a fence post that got mangled by a mower. These ID'd and analyzed exactly like a quarter.
An aluminum breath freshener bottle.
A few more bottle caps -- the vast majority of which I figured were bottle caps before I dug them, I just dug to verify and to get rid of them.
A Dr. Pepper can. I figured it was a can from the size of the signal, but dug it anyway just to be sure. It was about 4" deep, completely intact.
A few rusty nails (which were not detected, they just happened to be on top of other targets).

The good:
3 Mercury dimes. (These were left over from a club hunt, but I was still very glad to find them. The signal, tone, and ID on these was solid as a rock, and very different from the trash targets.)
1 clad dime
22 memorial cents
1 fake plastic dime (looks like a clad dime, but has the word "COPY" stamped on it. It was in the hole with another target).
2 hot wheels cars
1 old toy cap gun. This was about 8" down, and looks to be pretty old. It is copper colored, ornately decorated, and has "Wild Bill Hickock" on one side, and "44" on the other. Both handgrips have a horse carving on them and the letters "LH" on a metal inset. It's not in very good shape, but it was definitely interesting to find. It is interesting to note that It was found in an area that has been hunted many times before. It had tone, graph, and frequency just like a quarter.

Things I learned today:

Trash targets don't have the clear, repeatable signal that the coins (and cars and toy gun) had. All the coins were very repeatable. The memorial cents would jump around a little on VDI, and were sometimes hard to get a good graph on, but they were consistently in the high 50's to low 60's VDI number, and had the middle frequency strongest. The dimes, on the other hand, VDI'd from 68 to 75, with the 2.5 Khz (green) frequency the highest, every time.

The depth indicator is fairly accurate if the target is a coin. If the target is larger than a coin, it's probably deeper than the depth indicator says it is.

Pinpointing isn't as easy at is seems like it would be. Most often I was dead on, right where the target was. But sometimes I was off a few inches. I'm not sure why.

Keep a spare set of batteries handy for the wireless headphones, unless you want to start making a lot of noise when they run down.
 
n/t
 
At least with the ones I found today, yes. Checking them now in the air, the clad has a VDI of 76, the silver has a VDI of 80. I have "Tone ID" turned on, and the silver has a noticeably higher pitch when it hits. The signagraph looks about the same on both of them, but the silver definitely sounds different and VDIs a few points higher.
 
Not too shabby for for a practice day Robert..........:please:
 
OK, scratch what I said about the silver dimes VDI'ing higher than clad.

Today's quickie hunt yielded 2 mercury dimes and a stainless steel spoon.

The V3 thought the spoon was a quarter (even had a nice signagraph with all the frequencies in the right places).

The 2 dimes were enlightening -- one was lying flat, the other was on edge. The flat one VDI'd at 73. The one on edge, however, only VDI'd at 68. The V3 thought it was a penny. The depth indicator was correct -- it was about 6" below the coil (3" of dirt, 3" of tall, thick grass). With a VDI of only 68, the V3 thought it was a copper penny. But the signagraph looked really good, with the 2.5 KHz strongest, just as it did for the one lying flat.

The area I was hunting had a LOT of electrical interference. There are some underground phone wires right there, but I don't know if that was the source of the problem. I had to keep turning the gain down to get it to run stable. When I got that dime, I had the gain at "2". The signal was, as it has been before, solid and repeatable in all directions, and like I said, that was about 6" from the coil.
 
I haven't found a spoon yet with my Vision, but when pinpointing at different angles, just that alone should indicate that the size is not quarter, length wise. I dunno, but I would also think that analyze would not show coin size length wise.
 
tab-nabit said:
I haven't found a spoon yet with my Vision, but when pinpointing at different angles, just that alone should indicate that the size is not quarter, length wise.

I don't think I actually pinpointed along the handle.

I dunno, but I would also think that analyze would not show coin size length wise.

It does if you do your analyze pass across the "bowl" part, directly perpendicular to the handle, which is what I did. :) (Oddly enough, the spoon was oriented directly perpendicular to my line of travel -- bowl side facing me, handle pointed directly away from me, lying perfectly flat, two or three inches down.)
 
Some great info, guys. Just what this forum is for....US! :clapping:
 
Another quick hunt today, another few coins (1 mercury dime, two memorial pennies), and a little more junk.

New things I learned:

VCO pinpoint wants to be right directly over the target before it makes any noise. That comes in handy if you want to measure the size of the target -- move it around a bit, and as long as you've still got tone, you're still over the target. I dug two tin cans today (ID'd as pennies), but I pretty much knew they were cans because of the apparent size when using VCO to pinpoint. I just dug them to confirm and to remove them.

According to the Whites website, the control pad is rainproof, as is the electronics box under the handle, as long as the headphone jack isn't left open. They did say not to turn it upside down in the rain, though (why would you?).
 
When you are pinpointing and you don't get audio till you're right over the target, there may be 2 reasons for this. One possibility is that you have the ratchet option enabled for pinpoint (audio menu/pinpoint audio/ratchet). You should hear the target for the first pass, but until you release and retrigger, any subsequent pass you will only hear the audio when you are centered over the target. The other is that you may have older software that requires a delay after pulling the trigger before pinpointing over the target. If you don't wait for a second (or so), the timing may be such that you are over the target when the ground offset gets calculated. If this occurs, this will make the detector very quiet when you are away from the target and give you the pinpoint audio you expect only when the target signal is stronger than the offset signal which may be when you are over the target at its strongest point. Try doing the delay before sweeping, and I think you will find that it acts more like you would expect. Or the third possibility is that you're pulling the trigger while you are over the target. This will give the same result but from your post, that doesn't sound like that's what you were doing.
 
ak_1234 said:
When you are pinpointing and you don't get audio till you're right over the target, there may be 2 reasons for this.

I checked, and I don't have ratchet enabled. I have 1.1 software. However, you were right about me pulling the trigger while over the target. If I move the coil off to the side a bit, then pull the trigger, it behaves "normally", so the audio increases as the entire coil moves across the target. If I pull the trigger while over the target, it only signals when I'm right over the target. However, I don't consider this a problem -- I consider it a feature. When I do it that way, it is easier to be dead on with the pinpointing, and gives a good view of the size of the target (it is very easy to tell when a target is coin-sized that way, even without checking the analyze screen). Knowing that it works both ways is even better. :)
 
I went out again today for an hour or so, this time my family went along, and my kids got to take their first swing with a metal detector. They were using my old Garrett GTA 1000, which works sometimes, and I was following them checking their targets before we dug them. The kids did pretty well, finding a quarter and a few pennies. Then we split up and hunted independently. The kids found a couple more pennies, and I found a quarter, two dimes, a few pennies, and my first ever nickel with a metal detector. I dug several pieces of aluminum can at a VDI of 19, then the nickel VDI'd at 23. Sure enough, it was a nickel.

I'm definitely still learning, and still digging a lot of "questionable" signals just to figure out what they are. But there's an important pattern emerging here. The questionable signals are just that -- questionable. The signals that are solid and repeatable, and hitting on the right frequencies, are correct. When we were checking targets today, I could call almost all of them before digging. I'd say "that's a quarter", or "that's a bottle cap", and it was. The ones in the foil range I wasn't sure about, but even the nickel, I said "that might be my first nickel", and it was. On those "sure" targets, the depth was right on, too (deepest was one of the quarters at 5").

Now if I could just get the coil over some old coins...
 
I've done a lot more hunting, found a bunch more coins, mostly modern. But I did have an experience today worth noting:

I went to a local park that has been hit hard and repeatedly by other detectorists. I didn't really expect anything. But I hadn't been there ten minutes when a 1964 nickel jumped out of the ground. Shortly behind it I pulled a 1963 nickel, then a 1944 wheat penny, two memorial cents, a recent roosevelt dime, and two more 1960's nickels. All this from a fairly small area. The V3 is indeed a nickel magnet. :)

But the most fun find of the day was a 1962 memorial cent. What's so special about that? Well, nothing ... except that it was 8 inches down, *on edge*, and still rang out a nice clear penny signal on the V3. And that's a *measured* 8", because I thought surely I had missed it, but my pinpointer found it right in the bottom of the hole, just off to the side. I brushed back the dirt, and there it was standing on edge, 8" down. I have no idea why it was down that far, but it was. I was just very pleased to see the V3 hit it so strongly at that depth. That was in the stock "coin" program, no boost, RX gain at 8. :)
 
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