BarnacleBill
New member
In a previous post I had written about discovering an area with virtually no mineralization and how that affected Ground Balancing the X70. The full text of that post is listed below in Double Quotes and is rather lengthy. My current comments will continue at the bottom of this post.
""Manually Ground Balancing in mild ground.
Today I stumbled across something I've never seen since the X-Terras came out, a patch of lightly mineralized soil. In a previous lifetime with other detectors I've detected in these types of soils, but now I am usually over moderate to severely mineralized soils. Since I use tracking on the X70, unless something catches my attention to investigate further, I just go on my merry way. But today going through my setup routine I noticed I could push the sensitivity much higher at this particular place than usual. Therefore little man starts ringing bell in head, something's not right............
I began looking for problems, GB was tracking around in the mid-teens with a kick up to 20 once in a while. Batteries showed good, iron grunts nice and strong, audio like usual, coil connector tight, no Leprechauns sitting on nearby stumps having a bit of fun with me(in my younger years when I drank more that happened from time to time, honest).
Soooooo......time to take a soil reading with the X70, I couldn't believe my eyes, I repeated it several times moving around to get an average. The numbers ranged from 600 to 800 which is just crazy low! Now "that" explained the situation, but it also brought to mind an issue discussed on the forum from time to time, difficulty in manually GB'ing.
When I manually GB in my usual locations I will get two numbers with mixed tones at max, normally only one number, and many times a high or low tone, no mixed tones and strong audio. But at this location I couldn't hardly get anything, that is I could move 20 numbers, say up around 40 before I could hear even faint audio. Then light bulb went on, I was now walking in another's shoes. New owners of X-Terra's have reported having trouble hearing any audio response when ground balancing, leading them to believe they're doing it wrong or that they're detector is defective. This leads me to believe that the problem may be that they're are no minerals in their ground to balance against. Therefore the reality is, the point that GB setting doesn't matter, as there is not enough minerals to worry about. Oh that we should all have such problems!
I messed with manually GB'ing for a spell, just to see how the detector reacted, and I could see that manually GB'ing under these conditions could be very frustrating, especially for a newbie. However if you have an X70, the Auto-GB or Tracking will do a much better job of finding this silent GB point. The X70 was quite consistent in zeroing in on the same range of numbers.
OK so what's a newbie that lives in the land of mild soil to do if this very subtle GB sound is giving concern? Well, I did two things to provide a more distinct GB response that a newbie could practice with. One, Asphalt is our friend, find some blacktop, especially with larger stones mixed in, because it is one noisy variable ground. Two, locate some big rocks or boulders. Look for different colored and surface types and GB against them for practice. If lucky you'll find some real nice hot ones that will cause the GB to be loud and very narrow in range. I found one that gave a ground reading of ~100K, now that baby had a very loud and tight correct GB setting.
What about experienced X50 & X70 owners? Well there appears to be a correlation between how strong & tight the GB scale is with the readings from the X70 soil feature reading. Therefore an X50 user can make a determination about how mineralized the soil is by how tight or loose the GB point is. Below is a graphic I made up of the X50 GB scale with 10 assumed to be the GB point in a particular soil. The first row is an example of very low mineralization, next row moderate, third row severe. The graphic shows a trend and is not empirical or calibrated in any way.
Q = Quiet
VW = Very Weak Audio & Tone
W = Weak Audio & Tone
M = Mixed Tones
S = Strong Single Tone
[attachment 114746 GBMineralPoint.gif]
I hope the preceding info may help some new users, and provide a little more info to the experienced users in determining how bad the soil is that they are walking over.""
With the weather being rather nasty for some time across most of the Northern U.S. any chance to get out is welcome. I determined to try a freshwater beach that I am very familiar with that has good drainage and faces Southwest. Despite having had over 2 feet of snow in the last couple of weeks the wind and Sun had done their work and opened up +1000 sq ft of sand. The lake itself was well frozen over in this area so that no wading was possible, ice looked to be about 6 to 8 inches thick so no whacking away at it was going to have any success. But during the storms and freeze cycle the ice had scoured up mineralized sand into a berm about a foot deep and 6 feet wide. Those that live near frozen lakes will be familiar with this type of action where the height of the lake goes up and down during storms and the ice bull dozes the sand up on the shore.
The sand berm in question had exposed patches of black and purple-ish sand that is iron rich. Never missing an opportunity to examine different soil types with a metal detector I decided to GB over the sand where the patches weren't. From past experience, I knew I could generally run the Sensitivity high on this beach in other sections of it, but have to lower it a bit over the piles of hot rocks/gravel that are also present. I Gb'd using all three methods and ended up in Normal GB mode with a setting of 9. That nine(9) was perfectly quiet, no mixed tones, dead silence. I then began bobbing the coil in All Metal mode and increasing Sensitivity till I hit 30. Amazing! Perfectly quiet! So I decided to swing the coil around for a while to make sure the detector remained stable over other areas of this berm. No problem, she ran fine.
Next I thought I would try over the obvious patches of colored sand. The GB point moved down to 8 and the coil could be bobbed without any ill effect in All Metal. Moving back over the colorless part of the berm I wanted to see how "tight" this GB point was, to see if I could guestimate how mineralized this sand was. I tried to manually increase/decrease the GB from 9 down to 8 and up to 10. Holy Molly the detector went nuts. The GB tones were completely pure high & low, no mixed tones, and reducing sensitivity did not help until I got down into the lower teens. To gather further information I used the Ground Response reading feature to determine the "Hotness" of the sand. By averaging several readings the sand produced a response of 32,000, and the area of the sand showing black patches were 38,000.
This situation is the extreme opposite from the rather inert ground I had mentioned in the previous post, and I thought it might provide a good juxtaposition of two widely differing mineralization types and what effect it has on ground balancing. Those who would like to run their detectors a little positive or negative under these types of conditions would not be able to do so without significantly reducing their Sensitivity to keep their machine stable.
My New Year's Message
You simply need to adapt to the ground conditions as you find them and allow the detector to live in harmony with it's surroundings.
HH
BarnacleBill
""Manually Ground Balancing in mild ground.
Today I stumbled across something I've never seen since the X-Terras came out, a patch of lightly mineralized soil. In a previous lifetime with other detectors I've detected in these types of soils, but now I am usually over moderate to severely mineralized soils. Since I use tracking on the X70, unless something catches my attention to investigate further, I just go on my merry way. But today going through my setup routine I noticed I could push the sensitivity much higher at this particular place than usual. Therefore little man starts ringing bell in head, something's not right............
I began looking for problems, GB was tracking around in the mid-teens with a kick up to 20 once in a while. Batteries showed good, iron grunts nice and strong, audio like usual, coil connector tight, no Leprechauns sitting on nearby stumps having a bit of fun with me(in my younger years when I drank more that happened from time to time, honest).
Soooooo......time to take a soil reading with the X70, I couldn't believe my eyes, I repeated it several times moving around to get an average. The numbers ranged from 600 to 800 which is just crazy low! Now "that" explained the situation, but it also brought to mind an issue discussed on the forum from time to time, difficulty in manually GB'ing.
When I manually GB in my usual locations I will get two numbers with mixed tones at max, normally only one number, and many times a high or low tone, no mixed tones and strong audio. But at this location I couldn't hardly get anything, that is I could move 20 numbers, say up around 40 before I could hear even faint audio. Then light bulb went on, I was now walking in another's shoes. New owners of X-Terra's have reported having trouble hearing any audio response when ground balancing, leading them to believe they're doing it wrong or that they're detector is defective. This leads me to believe that the problem may be that they're are no minerals in their ground to balance against. Therefore the reality is, the point that GB setting doesn't matter, as there is not enough minerals to worry about. Oh that we should all have such problems!
I messed with manually GB'ing for a spell, just to see how the detector reacted, and I could see that manually GB'ing under these conditions could be very frustrating, especially for a newbie. However if you have an X70, the Auto-GB or Tracking will do a much better job of finding this silent GB point. The X70 was quite consistent in zeroing in on the same range of numbers.
OK so what's a newbie that lives in the land of mild soil to do if this very subtle GB sound is giving concern? Well, I did two things to provide a more distinct GB response that a newbie could practice with. One, Asphalt is our friend, find some blacktop, especially with larger stones mixed in, because it is one noisy variable ground. Two, locate some big rocks or boulders. Look for different colored and surface types and GB against them for practice. If lucky you'll find some real nice hot ones that will cause the GB to be loud and very narrow in range. I found one that gave a ground reading of ~100K, now that baby had a very loud and tight correct GB setting.
What about experienced X50 & X70 owners? Well there appears to be a correlation between how strong & tight the GB scale is with the readings from the X70 soil feature reading. Therefore an X50 user can make a determination about how mineralized the soil is by how tight or loose the GB point is. Below is a graphic I made up of the X50 GB scale with 10 assumed to be the GB point in a particular soil. The first row is an example of very low mineralization, next row moderate, third row severe. The graphic shows a trend and is not empirical or calibrated in any way.
Q = Quiet
VW = Very Weak Audio & Tone
W = Weak Audio & Tone
M = Mixed Tones
S = Strong Single Tone
[attachment 114746 GBMineralPoint.gif]
I hope the preceding info may help some new users, and provide a little more info to the experienced users in determining how bad the soil is that they are walking over.""
With the weather being rather nasty for some time across most of the Northern U.S. any chance to get out is welcome. I determined to try a freshwater beach that I am very familiar with that has good drainage and faces Southwest. Despite having had over 2 feet of snow in the last couple of weeks the wind and Sun had done their work and opened up +1000 sq ft of sand. The lake itself was well frozen over in this area so that no wading was possible, ice looked to be about 6 to 8 inches thick so no whacking away at it was going to have any success. But during the storms and freeze cycle the ice had scoured up mineralized sand into a berm about a foot deep and 6 feet wide. Those that live near frozen lakes will be familiar with this type of action where the height of the lake goes up and down during storms and the ice bull dozes the sand up on the shore.
The sand berm in question had exposed patches of black and purple-ish sand that is iron rich. Never missing an opportunity to examine different soil types with a metal detector I decided to GB over the sand where the patches weren't. From past experience, I knew I could generally run the Sensitivity high on this beach in other sections of it, but have to lower it a bit over the piles of hot rocks/gravel that are also present. I Gb'd using all three methods and ended up in Normal GB mode with a setting of 9. That nine(9) was perfectly quiet, no mixed tones, dead silence. I then began bobbing the coil in All Metal mode and increasing Sensitivity till I hit 30. Amazing! Perfectly quiet! So I decided to swing the coil around for a while to make sure the detector remained stable over other areas of this berm. No problem, she ran fine.
Next I thought I would try over the obvious patches of colored sand. The GB point moved down to 8 and the coil could be bobbed without any ill effect in All Metal. Moving back over the colorless part of the berm I wanted to see how "tight" this GB point was, to see if I could guestimate how mineralized this sand was. I tried to manually increase/decrease the GB from 9 down to 8 and up to 10. Holy Molly the detector went nuts. The GB tones were completely pure high & low, no mixed tones, and reducing sensitivity did not help until I got down into the lower teens. To gather further information I used the Ground Response reading feature to determine the "Hotness" of the sand. By averaging several readings the sand produced a response of 32,000, and the area of the sand showing black patches were 38,000.
This situation is the extreme opposite from the rather inert ground I had mentioned in the previous post, and I thought it might provide a good juxtaposition of two widely differing mineralization types and what effect it has on ground balancing. Those who would like to run their detectors a little positive or negative under these types of conditions would not be able to do so without significantly reducing their Sensitivity to keep their machine stable.
My New Year's Message
You simply need to adapt to the ground conditions as you find them and allow the detector to live in harmony with it's surroundings.
HH
BarnacleBill
HH Randy