pinpoint on 250 going bad?

[Anonymous]

I buried a dime 3" down and when i sweep right to left all is good. I do the usual x then hit the pinpoint button and sometimes it doesnt work or i hear a faint steady sound kinda like when a speaker is going bad very faint and muffled out.
I know that im right over my target. anyone else have this problem. also if i keep hitting the button itll kick in as if nothing ever happend.

 

[Anonymous]

right over the target, it won't work properly.
Move a coil's width or so away, press the button and try again, it should be loud and clear, unless of course you pressed the button over a piece of iron or another target.
Try that, and if you would be so kind as to report back I'd appreciate it.
DAS

 

[Anonymous]

Tried it like you said. just like in my first post, itll work fine for a couple times then go muffled or nothing for a couple times then back to working.
I've had it for 2 weeks now and its done this straight out the box. Just trying to figure out if this is normal or a defect on my detector?

 

[Anonymous]

what is happening is if there is a good strong signal, the pinpoint function dials back the gain (sort of like an automatic volume control). This tends to "shut up" the pinpoint since it has already locked onto a large signal, the only way for it to get louder is to have a bigger target to respond to.
You can prove this for yourself by placing a coin on the surface, and a large token, jar lid or whatever next to it. With the button pressed, you should get the coin just fine until you move over the jar lid or whatever, in which case going back to the coin usually will have lost the coin as the detector dialed back for the larger signal.
In any event, I'm certain that the pinpoint must first be engaged OFF of a target, and that includes any iron or whatever that the discrimination might not even let you know is there. Also, when first pressing the button, you need to keep the coil steady in all three axis, X, Y, and Z. By that I mean you can't be wiggleing left or right, front to back, and also cant be raising or lowering the coil when the function is first engaged.
Mine occassionaly goes "cold" as I mentioned in another post, but the only way I've found around it is to keep the coil immobile and off a target when engaging the pinpoint function.
At one time I was convinced that raising the coil well into the air before pressing the button was the way to go, but the resulting pinpoint, while SEEMING to be "hot" in fact works repeatably only for shallow targets.
In short, the pinpoint seems to require a bit of discipline to engage properly, but I'm guessing (never having owned a Garrett before) that this is a common issue with Garrett machines as the Garrett die-hards never seem to complain and there are a LOT of 250's in the hands of oldtimers!
I hope this helps, and I hope we can keep up the dialog to make sure this get working for you. I'm not concerned at this point about the health of your machine because mine has been finiky from time to time as well. But the solution so far is agin, no target near the coil, the coil near the ground in the same height as you will use for finding the target, and no movement of the coil when engaging the pinpoint function.
Try that out, and let me know how it works.
DAS

 

[Anonymous]

I get the same thing since I received my 250

 

[Anonymous]

I get that sometimes when I get in a hurry and press the pinpoint before I get off the target.

 

[Anonymous]

Mine did that straight out of the box..........cut the sensitivity back to 2 bars and it is fine.......dont forget 3" is not very deep for this great machine and in full sens it overloads!