Millertime,
Here are some setting from a friend in TN who set me straight on how to set up a machine in bad ground.
With his permission he let me pass on his wisdom to others who needed help like I did in bad ground. Here it is:
First off, start in preset relic mode.
Then you're basically gonna scrap the pre sets from there.
Under "Search Audio" put the machine in ALL METAL setting.
Then under "Sensitivity" adjust your all metal sensitivity up to match your Discrimination setting. I'd put it about 80-85.
This is going to enable you to hear the targets that the iron ground of Culpeper is going to mask. Running your machine in discriminate mode...all your bullets/buttons and such are going to come in on your VDIs as iron. So with the disc set to reject iron...you lose it all. You're gonna get the audio signal from the stuff in All Metal but most everything is still going to ID as iron.
That's where this next setting comes into play.
Adjust your RECOVERY SPEED to around 40. This speeds it up quite a bit...and will enable you to hear a sharp double blip sound on nails. Since you're hunting a Civil War campsite....you are gonna want to dig everything BUT nails anyway. This way you still get good iron targets...like shell frags, gun tools, bayonets, gun parts....that kinda stuff.
The good thing about the V3 is that it has a tendency to "summerize" the target on each sweep...so even in bad dirt, you CAN get bouncing VDIs that will go into the upper limits. But it will only be every so often. Your best bet is to use the machine in all metal at 40 recovery speed, and just be able to tell a nail signal BY SOUND from the others.
Oh and put the machine in SINGLE FREQUENCY...at the 7.5 frequency.
Under "ground tracking" put it in LocTrac...and then manually GB the machine ever so often. That dirt is so bad up there that auto trac will hinder you more than help.
That's about it. If you can't stand the all metal thing....put it back in Disc mode under Search Audio....then go to your disc settings and ACCEPT everything from -40 to +93.
You'll still hear the targets but they wont be as easy to tell apart as it is in All Metal, from my findings.
Oh and pay close attention to what the machine is telling you to set your RX Gain at. Around here I have hot dirt and the V3 only allows me to hunt with a 5 or less setting...and I'm still pulling minie balls at around 8-10 inches with it on 5.
deltamann