from what I'm hearing, you are getting some good sounding deep targets, but no amount of downward excavation exposes a good target. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that the majority of those signals you are describing are really nails in the side of your hole. This is a very common and extremely frustrating experience. I can just about guarantee that if you round out your hole large enough to stick the whole coil down in there and then scan around the side of the hole in pinpoint, you'll get a lock in one side of the hole and if you dig out that side of the hole, you'll find a nail about 6-8 inches deep. Now I realize it is no fun chasing after these nice sounding nails, much less digging out large excavations to recover them.
This brings me to the point I want to make... when you first get your good signal, check it thoroughly by first making a series of short, rapid sweeps over the target from at least 2-3 different angles... the signal should be repeatable and landing in the right portion of the screen on nearly all of your sweeps. You should not be getting any tell-tale signs of Iron, for example if your hunting with a discrimination pattern of any kind where the right 1/3 of the screen is rejected, AND you have an audible threshold tone while searching, an Iron target will null out in and around the "good" signal. If you are not hunting in Iron Mask, you can do a neat little trick.... after getting an iffy signal, switch to Iron Mask with it adjusted all the way open to -16 where the iron is accepted, and resweep the target, any repeatable hits in the extreme upper left corner is Iron. Lets go out to the park for a little demo.....
Now, you are hunting... and you get a faint signal that reads in the coin range on most of the hits. You pinpoint the signal by sweeping from several different directions and you get it down to the exact spot you are sure it's at. Now you switch back out of pinpoint and resweep over that pinpoint spot with short, rapid sweeps from different angles..... UH OH!!! Now the signal is choppy and my threshold tone is nulled out. Guess what, you have a nail.... move on!
After a couple of minutes, you get another faint signal like the one before that was iron. But as you sweep over this one, you notice that the threshold blends nicely into the signal and it doesn't null out like the other one. You go to pinpoint and make several sweeps from different angles over the spot and get a short crackly sound... the shorter you make your sweep, the better you home in on the exact target center. Now you recheck that center in your search mode and, BINGO! A nice solid hit... faint but very repeatable, no nulling around the signal and your crosshairs bounce in a steady back and forth pattern in the upper right hand corner. <IMG SRC="/forums/images/biggrin.gif" BORDER=0 ALT="
"> Now, dig your old coin!!!
If you can get this down pat, you'll greatly reduce your digging for nails that "aren't there" and increase your good finds.... so much so that on the odd occasion you do dig up a nail, you think " I kinda knew that one was going to be iron... I thought I heard that steady null around the signal, or I wasn't getting any good hit when I swept it from the one angle".
Don't give up, yet!!! Practice, practice, practice. I still have my days where I spend a lot of time "chasing nails" but when I finally get that good old deep coin, the nail digging experiences sorta fade away <IMG SRC="/forums/images/smile.gif" BORDER=0 ALT="
"> Good luck and let me know if you make any progress. HH, Mike.
