Silent Search

[mazarelo]

I see a post in the S1 thread from sand4brains. He said he sent his GT in because he had a problem with silent search.
I wonder if what I thought was normal behavior is a problem. Silent search only lowers the threshold a little bit, doesn't
make it silent. I'm sure my previous 2 GT's were the same. Is this normal, or a problem?

 

[Critterhunter]

If you switch to silent search and can still hear the threshold then you had the threshold too loud in regular threshold mode. I've noticed that too. Normaly you'd set it in threshold mode very low to where you can just hear it to notice any nulling or small rises in it. It's supposed to be set that way (very low) so that you'll notice the deepest of targets due to the threshold reaction. If you blast the threshold you are lessening your ability to hear super deep slight changes. It's supposed to be just loud enough to barely hear, but not so low that you can't tell what it's doing. Just loud enough to hear it lower or raise as it goes over something.

If you do that then when you switch to Silent Search mode you shouldn't hear the threshold. If you can still hear the threshold in Silent Search then you had it set too high before switching over. Flip back to threshold mode and lower it a tad more, then switch over to Silent Search again. I think it's important to only adjust it in normal threshold mode, because I think when you flip to Silent Search the machine is locking the threshold at a static reference point, and then boosting the signal above that to a point where you can hear a target. Otherwise why would they even have a silent search mode if you could just lower the threshold in regular mode until you couldn't hear it any more?

Reason being that silent search is not just killing the threshold. It's setting up a reference point and then "boosting" target signals above a cut off point so that you will hear them. That's why some have speculated that if you switch to silent search and then raise the threshold just high enough to hear again, it *might* act as a signal boost on super deep targets, raising them pretty high and louder to hear, but far as I know nobody has ever tested this on some super deep targets to see if it acts like an audio boost.

If you are still hearing a threshold in silent search mode and know you lowered it in normal mode super low to where you could just hardly hear it, then for sure something is wrong with your machine.

PS- I think Minelab says if you hunt in silent search you can swing a bit faster. That's either in the manual or somebody posted that in this forum a while back. Can't remember.

 

[mazarelo]

Yeah, it works fine. I had the threshold a little too high. Thanks.