wpruden said:
YES YOU DO NEED TO LEARN THE TONES!!!!!
HOWEVER; due to having a meter I was able to pick out deeper coins on edge that can give a chirp or faint pitchy scratchy sound that my 550 meter said it was a coin between various junk. 550 flashed on my meter in one akward coil movement. I dug the trash Items and scanned that area again now I was able to swing the coil and get a repeatable tone, still at times its not repeatable but find it to be a coin anyway on edge again of course.
There are times when hunting zero disc. that other tones conceal the the faint tone of a deep coin! Thats why I always go back and cover the area again in the silver mode and found more coins that I did not hear due to over tones of other junk items. The silver mode has its place and the meter is a must on land sites for sure! I once dug a wheat penny that was an honest 11 inches deep with the 7.25 bbs coil using the wiggle the tone did climb slightly but the meter was able to hit the 550 mark on the right angles, so thats another reason for the meter. you need BOTH. TONE & SIGNAL strength using the wiggle.
TONE is key, but there are times that soft tone can be missed due to nearby targets, but the meter won't miss it.
Get clives book on the sovereign and read it over and over and over.
We haven't even gotten to the all metal mode regarding sound.
Its not just the hours on the sovereign but the right scenarios!
Learn the language and know your digital numbers on gold once you truly learn it; Go out with the explorer/etrac guys and LISTEN to their targets as they can only hear a beep beep! The sovereign speaks a language and once you learn it you will never depart from it!
Wil
Wpruden,
excellent post! So many things right that you touched on. By the way, I re-posted your 12x10 reviews in my 12x10 thread. I know (think) you don't get on too much, so just for an update I traded my 15x12 for a 12x10 because the 15x12 wasn't showing greater depth than the 10" Tornado in my high mineral soil. On the beach it did, though. So far the 12x10 looks to be deeper than the 10" coil but I'm still doing comparison tests. What's interesting is after I experienced this coil and then re-read your old review many things were similar to us. Namely, the crisper/sharper sound for one thing.
Anyway, back to the topic. I can relate on deeper silver being missed because of louder/shallow targets and so using "Silver Mode" will allow you to hear the deep ones and ignore the loud/shallow trash. I have experienced this as well when using the notch to silence the pull tabs in an area. My nickle count (deep and old nickles too) goes way up when I do this. Not only do I pay more attention to the lower conductivity targets that do sound through (like nickles) while shutting up the tabs, but I'm also more apt to hear the deeper ones where a nearby loud target can talk over it. I mainly only use the notch when ring hunting in high tab areas, or when old coin hunting in a bunch of tabs but still wanting to look for nickles in there, yet I can't put up with the 3 to 5 tab hits PER SWEEP at some sites. That's when it's killer. Can't tell you how many older nickles (1930's to 1960's) I've found only an inch or two deep in areas like this, yet everybody else walks right over them. That's due to both machines that don't have the resolution of the Sovereign in the middle part of the scale, as well as people getting blasted out by the tab hits. Mainly though I try not to use any notch or discrimination when old coin hunting.
I can also say that one silver dime I dug a few months back was about 6" deep or so, but it had two shallow tabs about 4" away on either side of it. The first few sweeps through the spot I only heard the loud blast from the tabs. For some reason I decided to turn around and re-sweep the spot more carefully, and only then did I hear the nice/soft/sweet silver coin between them. It's like trying to hear somebody whisper in a bar with loud music playing. Even though the coil could easily see all three targets, until I gave the coil proper use (I was using the S-5) and lingered between the three targets did it have time to isolate and sound off to the coin. If I moved faster or in a different way through them the coil could still see the coin, but the audio was being overpowered by the loud trash hits. I have no doubt that had I ran discrimination all the way up I would have heard that coin while not hearing the tabs, causing me to notice it the first time.
Besides that, there are so many extra traits a meter provides. Very outer fringe depth on coins the audio might only go high/low, but the meter will give some distinct traits to show you it's a coin. At near fringe depth the meter will steadily climb to 180 as you wiggle and it makes it there. On a tiny bit deeper targets the meter might only get to like 173 or 176 before falling to the basement and then steadily climbing with the wiggle again, over and over it does this. You'll know it *should* being doing this based on how deep it sounds *for that site*. Different sites have different max depth responses.
On targets at the very outer edge of detection depth there is a new and distinctly different pattern to coins. They may only linger in the 140's, 150's, and 160's, never getting higher and never settling on one number. The trick is they don't settle into say 165 when it would then probably be a tab. A outer fringe coin might "slide" around, yet the numbers are still far less random than junk. If it sounds fringe deep and does this then dig. If it sounds shallow enough to not be giving you this response then chances are it's oddly shaped trash (non-uniform shape causes shifting numbers).
Above all, constant slow back and fourth wiggles over the target need to be maintained to draw out the ID. Beyond all this, I find the GT will pretty much ID as deep as it can hear a target. I'm talking only in the last say 1/4th to half inch of fringe outer depth do the above things start to come into play. Found no other machine that will ID as true at depth, and all the way out to the very edge of it's detection depth. My Explorers would get "funky" past about 6" in my soil when it comes to the ID.
Can't say this enough...If people want to practice deep coin signal responses then sticking a dime in the ground is the best way to learn. After all, if you don't know what a deep coin acts like then chances are you'll never dig one up. Even if you do, chances are you didn't soak in how it acted before digging it, since you didn't know for sure what it was. By sticking the dime slightly deeper every time you will see where the above three "phases" of a deep coin come into play and how they act. Slowly getting to 180 for near fringe depth, only getting up to 160's or 170's for outer fringe and then dropping down and climbing again, or just doing a 140's 150's thing when it can't get any deeper and still be seen by the machine, but the pattern to these is different than the first two. Practice makes perfect. Even at some rough ground/high mineral sites what is "fringe" depth can be a lot shallower than what it is at others. Mainly you go by sound when you know to expect the above stuff from coins, but there are those really bad sites where the target won't sound all that deep yet it will do one of the three above things. By sticking a coin in the ground at that site you'll know at what depth to expect the above types of responses. It may only sound 6 or 7" deep but it can't give a text book perfect ID due to the harsh ground conditions. As bad as these sites are for even the Sovereign, they were much worse for my Explorers, and even worser than that for non-BBS/FBS machines. Never forget that.
Wpruden, one more thing...You're remark about the Explorer/Etrac is so right on. They do have some traits to their audio but it's still processed and put in a "nice clean wrapper" and sanitized beyond what I want in terms of the telling traits of say gold versus junk.
I better go look in the closet.