I spoke with Ray-Mo and since we are having so many members inquire about TTF, how to set it up, how to run it correctly etc, that I am gonna post my article that I wrote for my website here and make it a sticky. I hope this article will help those who have questions about TTF.
Have you ever ran across an old house, section in a park or an area in the field where you just completely lose threshold due to a massive amount of iron around? Your E-trac just completely nulls over all the iron. No matter how much you slow your swing speed down too, you just can't seem to get the threshold back and pull any targets out of this area. Here is an idea to try! Put your e-trac in 2 tone and use ferrous sounds with a mostly open screen. I use the relic screen, as it only has a small section blacked out on the bottom right corner.
The E-trac has different audio options ferrous sounds and conductive sounds. You all know when you use conductive sounds and you click on quickmask iron screams high pitched just like silver, so running an open screen in an area like described above just won't work. There is no way to tell from iron and good targets,....But if you choose ferrous sounds the iron will produce a low grunt and it makes it very easy to distinguish from ferrous and non ferrous items. Using two tone at an old site can be very productive. Normally this type of site will have very little clad, aluminum, pull tabs etc, so every high tone you get will be worth investigating.
In order to use this method of hunting with the e-trac you must be patient, as it will require you to go extremely slow for two reasons:
#1 going slow allows you to hear that coin or desirable relic sitting directly under or beside a nail, you will get a very audible easy to hear higher pitch tone for the good item and a low tone for the iron by it.
#2 if you go to fast with your swing it will cause you to get false signals from the iron. Slowly down will allow your machine to see ALL the targets in the ground, good and bad.
Like I mentioned above you will need to use a mostly open screen. I chose the relic screen for simplicity, you can use a 100% open screen if you want, try different options and see what works for you. There is less filters for the machine therefore the e-trac has a much faster response time allowing you to hear that coin when before the iron beside it masked it out and you simply got a null and walked right by it. In conductive mode sometimes there is just too much trash/iron for the coin to come thru.
Using ferrous sounds with the stock coin program would be worthless because you need to allow the iron to be heard in order to hear the good target along side it. You need as little as discrimination as possible.
Pinpointing in this type of environment is another tough thing to do, and using the machines pinpoint is not a real choice. When you use the e-trac's pinpoint it is in all metal and it will try to pinpoint the strongest signal which might be the close iron. Here is how you overcome that battle. You get a high tone and you do your best to isolate it from the trash by wiggling the coil over the high tone as you slowly walk a circle around the target until you achieve the best signal you can produce. You might only be able to wiggle the coil an inch back and forth over the good item. Then while your wiggling the coil and still hearing the high tone, slowly pull the coil back until the high tone goes away. STOP, the good target will then be exactly at the center front of the coil. Cut your plug and retrieve your item. (I have a video on youtube and also in the etrac classroom showing this method)
Why use two tone and not multi tone? It may be a personal choice but by using only two tones it is SIMPLE......iron is low grunt, and everything ABOVE iron is a higher easy to distinguish tone. If you use multi tone, it will be murder on your brain trying decipher the musical song you will be hearing. When in this type of iron rich site the numbers will be bouncing all over and with multi tone it will be like a machine gun of tones going off, making it extremely difficult for you to really pick out good from bad. Keep it simple, iron low tone, everything else high tone. Go extremely slow and let the machine do it's job.
I even experimented with 4 tones and this still was too much ear candy for my liking. I suggest you stick to two tones for the best performance and chance of pulling goodies out of all the iron. Also by using two tones you are allowing the e-trac processor to work as quickly as possible giving you even more chance to score the goodies.
Don't expect the numbers on the screen to be solid 12-45 for a silver dime or 12-36 for an indian penny, with the close iron it may very well mess with your numbers, pay more attention to the conductive number. Listen for a clear high tone, try to work your coil around it till you get a nice clear tone, without a broken, scratchy sound. The first indian I found using this method gave me a 07-35, it had iron all around it. If I had waited for a 12-36 it would have not happened and I would have kept walking.
Using this method you WILL detect targets other machines have walked right over many times because their machine either nulled over the iron and did not see the good item or their machine
Have you ever ran across an old house, section in a park or an area in the field where you just completely lose threshold due to a massive amount of iron around? Your E-trac just completely nulls over all the iron. No matter how much you slow your swing speed down too, you just can't seem to get the threshold back and pull any targets out of this area. Here is an idea to try! Put your e-trac in 2 tone and use ferrous sounds with a mostly open screen. I use the relic screen, as it only has a small section blacked out on the bottom right corner.
The E-trac has different audio options ferrous sounds and conductive sounds. You all know when you use conductive sounds and you click on quickmask iron screams high pitched just like silver, so running an open screen in an area like described above just won't work. There is no way to tell from iron and good targets,....But if you choose ferrous sounds the iron will produce a low grunt and it makes it very easy to distinguish from ferrous and non ferrous items. Using two tone at an old site can be very productive. Normally this type of site will have very little clad, aluminum, pull tabs etc, so every high tone you get will be worth investigating.
In order to use this method of hunting with the e-trac you must be patient, as it will require you to go extremely slow for two reasons:
#1 going slow allows you to hear that coin or desirable relic sitting directly under or beside a nail, you will get a very audible easy to hear higher pitch tone for the good item and a low tone for the iron by it.
#2 if you go to fast with your swing it will cause you to get false signals from the iron. Slowly down will allow your machine to see ALL the targets in the ground, good and bad.
Like I mentioned above you will need to use a mostly open screen. I chose the relic screen for simplicity, you can use a 100% open screen if you want, try different options and see what works for you. There is less filters for the machine therefore the e-trac has a much faster response time allowing you to hear that coin when before the iron beside it masked it out and you simply got a null and walked right by it. In conductive mode sometimes there is just too much trash/iron for the coin to come thru.
Using ferrous sounds with the stock coin program would be worthless because you need to allow the iron to be heard in order to hear the good target along side it. You need as little as discrimination as possible.
Pinpointing in this type of environment is another tough thing to do, and using the machines pinpoint is not a real choice. When you use the e-trac's pinpoint it is in all metal and it will try to pinpoint the strongest signal which might be the close iron. Here is how you overcome that battle. You get a high tone and you do your best to isolate it from the trash by wiggling the coil over the high tone as you slowly walk a circle around the target until you achieve the best signal you can produce. You might only be able to wiggle the coil an inch back and forth over the good item. Then while your wiggling the coil and still hearing the high tone, slowly pull the coil back until the high tone goes away. STOP, the good target will then be exactly at the center front of the coil. Cut your plug and retrieve your item. (I have a video on youtube and also in the etrac classroom showing this method)
Why use two tone and not multi tone? It may be a personal choice but by using only two tones it is SIMPLE......iron is low grunt, and everything ABOVE iron is a higher easy to distinguish tone. If you use multi tone, it will be murder on your brain trying decipher the musical song you will be hearing. When in this type of iron rich site the numbers will be bouncing all over and with multi tone it will be like a machine gun of tones going off, making it extremely difficult for you to really pick out good from bad. Keep it simple, iron low tone, everything else high tone. Go extremely slow and let the machine do it's job.
I even experimented with 4 tones and this still was too much ear candy for my liking. I suggest you stick to two tones for the best performance and chance of pulling goodies out of all the iron. Also by using two tones you are allowing the e-trac processor to work as quickly as possible giving you even more chance to score the goodies.
Don't expect the numbers on the screen to be solid 12-45 for a silver dime or 12-36 for an indian penny, with the close iron it may very well mess with your numbers, pay more attention to the conductive number. Listen for a clear high tone, try to work your coil around it till you get a nice clear tone, without a broken, scratchy sound. The first indian I found using this method gave me a 07-35, it had iron all around it. If I had waited for a 12-36 it would have not happened and I would have kept walking.
Using this method you WILL detect targets other machines have walked right over many times because their machine either nulled over the iron and did not see the good item or their machine
in all reality if a site has that much roofing in one area, your only choice may be to just move out of the area, sometimes that is the only option. I have had sites before where I knew there would be goodies but the ground conditions or amount of trash in the ground simply made it not worth the headaches. This hobby is supposed to be fun and if you have an area driving you nuts.....move on!
Can't even move your coil 1/2 inch without an iron sound around the side of the driveway area
I don't use anything else. Most other options and settings are wasted on me.! TTF Rules..