"I've been reading a number of posts about some who have been swinging their X-Terra's quite fast(Digger, Barnacle Bill and Bob Valdez) and was wondering how fast you are swinging?"... With ANY make & model the sweep speed used will be somewhat dependant upon the ground mineralization and the amount of discrimination used.
Naturally, other factors will have to be considered, such as whether the particular model is designed as a faster-sweep (4-filter type for example), an ultra-slow motion ( such as the Minelab Explorer), or what would generally be grouped into the slow-motion (two-filter, generally speaking) type detector.
The X-Terra series do not require an ultra-slow sweep, and they don't do real well with a 'too-fast' sweep speed, either, but ... just what is the definition of too fast and slow?
The operator's manual suggests the X-Terra be swept from side-to-side at a rate of about 3-seconds for each direction of sweep. My personal search technique covers only about 4' in a fairly straight line going left-to-right, and I try to cover that distance in about 2-seconds, and maybe 3-seconds if it is brushy or very trashy. If I made a longer side-to-side sweep I would definitely shoot for the 3-second time.
I'll also point out that this is when I am searching in either All Metal (aka a '0' rejection motion discriminate mode) or a Pattern motion discriminate mode. I usually am in Pattern 1 and I only reject -8, -6 and -4 on my X-Terra 70 at most sites.
Now, to give you two examples of what I mean about the mineralization level and the discriminate level having some of the most effect on sweep speed performance. First, mineralization.
If I am hunting in a woodchip playground I can get away with a much faster sweep speed because, as a rule, if the woodchips are deep then there is very little, if any, bad ground signal for the detector to have to filter out. But if I move in to a more moderately mineralized are I will have to sweep a little slower, and if I have to deal with more intense mineralization, such as here in NW Oregon where I live, I need to be very careful so as not to sweep too fast. A 'too-fast' sweep will feed too much ground signal in and the circuitry will not be able to process the ground signal and pass along a target signal. You could say there is so much ground signal is 'swamps' the target signal.
Second, we have to consider the amount of trash target rejection we're using. If I hunt with my X-T 70 and reject everything from -8 o[ to 16, I might not lose too much depth on a US 10
