Menu
What's new
Find's Treasure Forums

Welcome to Find's Treasure Forums, Guests!

You are viewing this forums as a guest which limits you to read only status.

Only registered members may post stories, questions, classifieds, reply to other posts, contact other members using built in messaging and use many other features found on these forums.

Why not register and join us today? It's free! (We don't share your email addresses with anyone.) We keep email addresses of our users to protect them and others from bad people posting things they shouldn't.

Click here to register!

Need Support Help?

Cannot log in?, click here to have new password emailed to you

Changed email? Forgot to update your account with new email address? Need assistance with something else?, click here to go to Find's Support Form and fill out the form.

X-70 took me back 168 years.......

Digger

Digger

Constitutional Patriot
Staff member
Now, keep in mind that my neck of the woods wasn't settled until the mid 1850's. Having been a detectorist for 35 years, I ain't ashamed to say that, until today, my oldest coins have been 1853's. But today, the X-Terra 70 took me back another 15 years to 1838. Not the best condition, granted. But she looks better than any of us will when we are 168 years old. Especially when you consider she has been ran over by heavy farm equipment for over 100 years.

I will also tell you that this dime was found in a very trashy environment. Not modern trash. But lots of nails and shotgun shell casings. I GB at 54, ran full sensitivity, full volume, 4 tones and all metal. I ignored all the low tones. When I got a high tone, I did the X-Terra wiggle over it. (Sovereign lovers will cringe when they read that comment) If it would stabilize and stay true, I dug it. I found 3 IH cents, 2 SL dimes and another Shield nickel today. Not bad for a detector without a small coil. HH Randy
 
no matter where or how old the area. But for your circumstances it looks like a new milestone. Besides the coin yielding a:surprised: so did your GB number at 54, I think that's the highest I've ever seen posted here. Do fixed GB machines do well where you live?

Also have you ever watched the X70 in GB mode with tracking on? Mine acts like a pinball machine within a range of numbers i.e. 11-21 because of the sands and gravels I usually frequent.

Congrats on the nice silver!

HH
BarnacleBill
 
Congrats on your oldest coin find Digger! You got me beat by 4 years on the dime. My area was settled after the Civil War so I don't have a lot of oldies here either.

If you go slow with lots of overlap the X-70 will do OK in those conditions. Were you using the eliptical DD coil? I agree with Bill that's a pretty high GB number, have never seen it that high around here.

Tom
 
The area that I hunted the other day had a GB number of 46. That may explain why the Xterra 30 does as well as the Xterra 70 down here in this area. Kelley (Texas) :)
 
Nice finds digger. I told people these machines will produce, now you have proven it. My oldest with this machine is a merc but I have only been to two different areas thus far. Keep em coming.
 
Posting about finds like this motivates and encourages others...thanks for sharing. Kelley (Texas) :)
 
Most of ground around here reads 14-15 I have seen 17 tho! :lol

My area is mostly glacial till consisting of mixed soils.. mostly sandy loam or sandy clay loam. Just dug a bunch of post holes for a pole barn and going down 4' you can see 3 different soil types (colors and clay mix).

Tom
 
That 54 was as high as I have seen around here. This same area has been running in the mid - high 30's during a couple previous hunts. I don't know if it was the moisture in the soil or what????? I thought at first that I was GBing over some metal object. But, I checked it a dozen times during the day and it always settled around 54.

I can usually run a fixed GB detector with little loss of depth or sensitivity. I know the X-30 seems to do alright. Maybe an inch less than the X-50 or X-70. And, with my Advantage, I can't see much difference between fixed mode and manual GB. I had a Cibola that hunted about as well as the Vaquero. Maybe 5-10% less depth, but not much.

I haven't gotten into the habit of running with Tracking on. I had enough problem listening to all those low tones and sorting out the high ones. Seriously, much of the time, there were 3 or 4 low tones on each sweep. After hunting 6 hours and finding 6 coins, you can imagine how tired my ears and brain were at the end of the day. Not to mention my arm! HH Randy
 
I was using the stock 7.5 kHz coil. As to the GB numbers.... I did a bit more testing today, just to find out what was going on. I turned on the X-70 and went into GB mode. I pressed Auto and let it do its thing. It came up right where I left it yesterday, 54. (coincidence?) I bobbed the coil up and down and was able to "fine tune" it a little lower, to 50. I ran it there for awhile. In another part of the field, I decided to check to see if 50 was still the best I could do. I went into the Auto mode and it set itself at 50. (another coincidence?) Once again I bobbed the coil to "fine tune" it, and was able to lower it down to 42. When I checked it a few minutes later, via AUTO, it was still setting at 42. Now I am confused!!! I will have to admit that I usually don't raise and lower the coil during the time the X-70 is finding its AUTO GB level. I usually just let it rest at ground level. Guess maybe I am getting lazy? But now I wonder if my X-70 is actually finding the best GB setting for a particular site. OR, maybe it just recalls the last setting used? I usually check it after AUTO, and fine tune it manually. But to be honest, I don't know if I did that yesterday or not. Any thoughts? HH Randy
 
HI Randy,

If the detector is not seeing the air and ground by bobbing the coil it is not balancing properly. Thats probably why it showed the previous setting. Have you been using the XL-Pro too much lately? ;)

How wide a sweep do you use in the iron areas? I tend to shorten up a bit as it gives me a little better coil control which helps prevent falsing at the end of the sweep. 3-4 iron tones per sweep is normal for my sites.

Tom
 
During Auto-GB the coil has to be moved up and down to get a correct reading. To check if Auto-GB is doing it's thing you can manually adjust to an extreme like 90 and then re-Auto-GB. If she scoots back to 50 she's working.

From time to time while Tracking is on, I'll go to GB mode just to see how much the ground is varying as I swing the coil.

HH
BarnacleBill
 
Randy,

No matter what detector I use I notch/accept some iron or set a progressive disc so that nails jsut break up. It does get to you ears after a while listening for the good stuff in the noise.

There is a way to offset the ear bashing. First lower the volume on the X-70 to say 25-26 then turn you headphones volume all the way down. Place a coin on the ground and gradually increase the volume of your headphones while sweeping over the coin about 6" off the ground. Stop increasing the volume when the coin give a nice comfortable audio response. When starting with a low setting and increasing the volume versus starting with a too loud headphone setting and reducing I find that I end up with a much lower setting that hunts just fine and is a lot easier on the ears. Human ears will adjust and the faint sounds will sound just as loud after a bit.

Tom
 
You guessed it. I have been using the XLPro quite a bit. Mostly due to the variety of smaller coils I have for it. :ranting:
As to the width of my sweep.... when hunting most of the places we like to hunt, we are restricted by the width of the rows. Anywhere from 30 - 36 inches. Even after the crops are harvested, you still have stubble sticking up. If you bang into the stubble, it falses. If you sweep your coil perpendicular over a downed cornstalk, it falses. Every so often, you will be able to hunt two rows simultaneously, if the implement tires have mashed one down. I look for those!!!! HH Randy
 
n/t
 
I've never heard that before, and did a fair amount of corn work back in my Hoosier days. Is the soil very saline or heavily fertilized so that the corn has taken up these salts? Thats the only reason I could imagine a detector falsing over them since they are just vegetative matter.

But if they acted as a tube filled with salt, then I can see them acting as a sudden ground shift. You really have peaked my curiosity.

I usually don't ask someone to try something with their detectors because I don't like to impose on their hunting time, but I have no way of replicating what you have described. So in the interest of Science the next time you happen into one of these fields, and get a false over a stalk would you mind quickly trying the following.

Go to the GB screen and turn on Tracking, then swing the coil over the stalk to see if the machine Tracks to a new GB. Then turn on Beach mode, swing over the soil to obtain a Tracking reading and then over the stalk again noting any change.

If my simple hypothesis is correct and the stalk is acting like a little piece of saltwater beach, Normal GB may not be able to Track in and Beach mode may be needed.

HH
BarnacleBill
 
Randy,

I never had coil falsing issues in cornfeld stubble with any coil (3 Khz, stock or HF elliptical). What happens mostly is the varying ground height and erratic sweep speed due to hanging up of the coil causes the iron to false with high sens settings. Now that is more with the ID Edge than the X-70 but, the 70 does it too especially when cranked up. Over uneven furrowed ground like that I use tracking on all the time it seems fast enough to compensate a bit for the varying ground response. I even switched to hunting perpendicular to the rows because the ground height is more consistent (ie: swinging with the furrows rather than across them). The only cornfields I hunt are where there are early for this area homesites and the only clue now is the broken glass, pottery and iron left. I am pretty much limited to setting the sensitivity at 19-21 for the heavy iron areas.
Tom
 
If it is an uneven ground issue, and if Tracking helped with the uneven ground issue, then Beach Mode Tracking should help even more as it is several times faster in reacting than Normal Mode Tracking.

HH
BarnacleBill
 
The X-Terra is not the only machine I have that does this. And, it is not nearly as bad as with the Vaquero or the Cibola. Especially if you catch yourself sweeping too fast. (which is another problem I have with the V and C, as fast sweeping will actually eliminate targets when verifying targets, as I do with the Advantage)

I suspect there are a couple "contributors" to this falsing effect. One is that I like to scrub my coil on the ground. I figure that if a detector is capable of detecting a dime at 8-inches, why would I want the coil above the surface an inch to begin with? So, I let it run on the surface. The second issue may be my sweep speed. Speed is relative. But if I am skimming the surface at a brisk rate, and the coil goes perpendicularly over the corn stalk, it does "break the rhythm" of the hunt with a false signal. If I run the coil parallel to the cornstalk, it doesn't false. :shrug:

The XLPro and my Advantage are the only two detectors I currently have that do not "false" in corn fields. I attribute that to their ability to be swept faster than most. That is why I figure sweep speed has something to do with the falsing I get with the other detectors.

I have learned to adapt to the falsing, to a point. The tone don't repeat as a coin will. However, it sure slows down the hunt when you are checking and reconfirming targets every few seconds. In corn fields, I usually hunt by walking across the picked rows as opposed to walking down the row. It makes it more difficult to walk. But most of the stalks are laying parallel to my sweep.

Next time I am "out standing in my field",:detecting: I will try your suggestions. Thanks. HH

Randy
 
it will just go to show that you can teach an old dog new tricks! HH Randy
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top