Exact settings aren't to terribly important... one thing to remember is don't set the sensitivity too high. Running it at 28 semi-auto is a good start, or if you run in manual sensitivity, make sure you can hear the threshold every now and then between signals. Definitly set it in Fast recovery. I usually run in -8 iron mask which allows all non-ferrous targets to produce a signal, this makes for a seemingly insane amount of noise from your detector when your'e hunting, but there is a good reason for it. Since most of the good targets are in the presence of trash, you will often hear 2 diffeent tones in one signal. Basically you sweep through the pulltabs, foil, and such hearing a constant blare of lower tones, listening for any higher pitched tone in all that noise. If you get a higher pitch tone and the detector can lock on it using real short rapid sweeps, dig it. Many times you can only get the good tone sweeping from one direction. Many times silver coins will produce a lower sounding tone, down in the screwcap/zinc penny range if they are masked by enough trash items... so don't go looking for only the real high tone targets.
The other important advice is to sweep real slow and overlap your sweeps. Go and find the trashiest areas in your local parks... picnic areas that saw heavy use back in the days of silver coins, and give it a try. Extremely trashy sites are better worked with a smaller coil like the 5" or 5X10" "Joey" so that the big stock 10" coil isn't overloaded with too many signals.
My favorite picnic areas are the ones where the grass is killed off the ground from all the foot traffic and the rain washes the dirt out in areas... These washes are great, since you often have the advantage of mother nature removing inches of ground from on top of the coins and displacing a lot of the masking trash signals.
Hope this helps! Sorry you had to wait this long for an answer, my free time lately has been seriously cut into. Take care and HH, Mike.
