Mike Hillis
Well-known member
Talk about cold. It was cold today. Woke up to what looked like a blizzard. BIG snowflakes. Only lasted about 40 minutes and the wind picked up and blew the clouds away. But hey, it stopped so I took off.
Took the F5 to my steel bottle cap and tab site. Been a few months since I was last there as some homeless folks took the place over. Looks like the city removed the picnic table and grill to make them move on to someplace else.
Forgot exactly how trashed out the place was too. It was worse than I remembered. The ground is a carpet of tabs and steel bottle caps and foil trash.
The F5 did great. Set the Gain at 85, threshold at -9, 3 tone, disc at 7 and swept slow. Ground balance at 72. FE at 3 bars. Noise galore!. But the F5 was telling me all about the trash. Way to cold to sort through that today. Ok then, raise the disc all the way to max, notch in nickels and try again, better but still honking at me and its way to cold to concentrate. Kill the nickel range audio. Much better just listening to the high tones. I could deal with the cold, the biting wind, and one tone to focus on.
Some of the caps are disc'ed out while the flattened buried ones still sung out with a high tone. Sometimes the FE graph would give them away, other times the bouncing id would give them away. Guess what I learned to trust? The ID number. Yep, the target id number. I soon learned I couldn't trust the FE graph at this location to give away iron bottle caps. I got one target that gave me a nice steady 74 but the FE graph was maxed out. The FE graph was saying bottle cap but the id number said Dime. I retrieve a dime. ????? ok. A couple of minutes later I get a steady 85. FE graph was maxed out telling me a bottle cap. I retrieved a quarter. OK...ignore the FE graph and focus on the numbers. Dimes and quarters came out of those caps. The caps bounced all around the high coin range but the coins stayed right where they were supposed too. Great target separation with the stock coil.
Froze my behind off. At one point I thought it had started raining as a saw a couple of drops hit the screen of my F5. Turned out they were from my nose
Tell you something about the F5. It hits hard on low conductors yet has a wide spread of id numbers on the coin side. Zincs hit at 60. Game tokens hit at 63/64. Copper pennies hit at 70 -71 depending on ground conditions Dimes ranged from 72 to 74 depending on the ground conditions. Quarters hit at 84-86 depending on the ground conditions. I've never had a unit that could tell the difference so clearly between zincs and tokens, or copper pennies and dimes. The more mineralized the ground the more the numbers shifted upward.
Time to give it up and go home and thaw out with a hot shower.
I love my F5. Fisher got this one right. Just please give me a 8x14 elliptical coil and I could pack away my Golden uMax.
$3.81 was the take. No silver or gold today.
HH
Mike
Took the F5 to my steel bottle cap and tab site. Been a few months since I was last there as some homeless folks took the place over. Looks like the city removed the picnic table and grill to make them move on to someplace else.
Forgot exactly how trashed out the place was too. It was worse than I remembered. The ground is a carpet of tabs and steel bottle caps and foil trash.
The F5 did great. Set the Gain at 85, threshold at -9, 3 tone, disc at 7 and swept slow. Ground balance at 72. FE at 3 bars. Noise galore!. But the F5 was telling me all about the trash. Way to cold to sort through that today. Ok then, raise the disc all the way to max, notch in nickels and try again, better but still honking at me and its way to cold to concentrate. Kill the nickel range audio. Much better just listening to the high tones. I could deal with the cold, the biting wind, and one tone to focus on.
Some of the caps are disc'ed out while the flattened buried ones still sung out with a high tone. Sometimes the FE graph would give them away, other times the bouncing id would give them away. Guess what I learned to trust? The ID number. Yep, the target id number. I soon learned I couldn't trust the FE graph at this location to give away iron bottle caps. I got one target that gave me a nice steady 74 but the FE graph was maxed out. The FE graph was saying bottle cap but the id number said Dime. I retrieve a dime. ????? ok. A couple of minutes later I get a steady 85. FE graph was maxed out telling me a bottle cap. I retrieved a quarter. OK...ignore the FE graph and focus on the numbers. Dimes and quarters came out of those caps. The caps bounced all around the high coin range but the coins stayed right where they were supposed too. Great target separation with the stock coil.
Froze my behind off. At one point I thought it had started raining as a saw a couple of drops hit the screen of my F5. Turned out they were from my nose
Tell you something about the F5. It hits hard on low conductors yet has a wide spread of id numbers on the coin side. Zincs hit at 60. Game tokens hit at 63/64. Copper pennies hit at 70 -71 depending on ground conditions Dimes ranged from 72 to 74 depending on the ground conditions. Quarters hit at 84-86 depending on the ground conditions. I've never had a unit that could tell the difference so clearly between zincs and tokens, or copper pennies and dimes. The more mineralized the ground the more the numbers shifted upward.
Time to give it up and go home and thaw out with a hot shower.
I love my F5. Fisher got this one right. Just please give me a 8x14 elliptical coil and I could pack away my Golden uMax.
$3.81 was the take. No silver or gold today.
HH
Mike
