As you know we don't have a perfect hunting conditions as some ground has more mineralization and more trash, this will give us different placements of the cross hairs in smart find or different numbers in digital. If this areas are blacked out or disc out we may not get a signal if we run a tight pattern for coins. I have seen where a person can run iron mask wide open so nothing is disc out and hear everything which is a lot to listen too, but can hear those coins close to iron and other trash that you can not hear in a coin pattern.
Patterns are good too, but to know how and when to use them I feel is what you will learn as it is not so much as depth, but being able for the detector to see the item because of trash.
I have several patterns saved myself, but these are very lose patterns so if there is trash close to a coin or such so it will read higher or lower it still can see the coin. I have a pattern where I just reject the main trash area and accept the rest and use my ears to do the dist. When I run most pattens I will run my iron mask wide open so any iffy signal I can switch to iron mask to check them out and get a better signal on all targets around the iffy signal.
Probably one of my biggest pattern I use is my coin pattern that has the whole top opened up and run ferrous tones, then learn in the nickle using the large cursor. Now chances are I wont get any gold rings, but will not get much trash either as like I say it is my coin pattern, but I will get some trash too if I want my IH pennies and my nickles. If in a very old ares that hasn't been in use for over 50 year or more I run my iron mask wide open and dig everything as there is not that much trash and I want everything that is a positive signal.
Bottom line is it is not so much losing depth running a pattern, but with a pattern you can miss targets close to another target whether good or bad.
