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You manual users

A

Anonymous

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I have a question. I tried something that Cody, mentioned. I don't know if he was air testing or in the ground. But I have a small test garden that I put in, somewhere around 8 to 10 years ago, got old and can't say the exact time. Anyway I put the Explorer 11 in factory presets, and lowered the Sensitivity down to 1 in auto. Nailed that quarter, at 9 inches first pass. Then I changed it to manual, nothing, not a peep, kept raising it one at a time, at 16 got a real iffy one, little better at 17, and at 18 was about as good as it was on 1 in auto. Tried it a couple of times to be sure, and it worked that way every time. So I think you guys are selling auto short, and that it is a whole lot better than you think it is. The manual seems to lean that way to, from what it says. It says manual in just certain situations. I know you want control over the detector, but are you really gaining by it? Sometimes we get an idea, but it may not be a fact, even if we do believe it. Try this and see for yourself, don't take my word for it, it surprised me to. At 1???
 
On where you are hunting and how trashy.
I tired auto at 32 in a area where they pulled up a old sidewalk. It was runing smooth and I thought I should get some signals, I put down a new dime and got no signal from it untill the dime touched the coil. I took it out of auto and it was not stable, so I dropped the sensitivity to 20 manual and it was much more stable and could get the dimes at around 4 inches, but still no great depth untill I dropped it to 16 manual. Now I could get a good 6 inches, switch to auto and it was about the same. Now I went to 20 auto and notice it seem to get a little less depth than 20 manual, but auto was smoother sounding.
Now in accual hunting I will run auto at 27-28 and never higher, if it is too smooth i will switch to manaul, if not stable I will lower my sensitivity untill it is fairly stable, then throw a dime on the ground and check it with auto and manual and run the one that has the best depth.
I dont think auto is good in trashy areas, but good in cleaner areas.
Rick
 
When I read Rick(ND)'s post, then I got confused again. But based upon your post and that from Rick, I am beginning to believe that I need to do a lot of experimenting.
It would sure be nice if the folks from Minelab would get active on the forum and help us clear up some of the mysteries.
HH,
Glenn
 
Gosh we could debate this for hours and actually in some situations lower sensitivity will excell depending on your soil..I really don't think there is a right or wrong and remember if I am not mistaken Explorers are made and tested in Australia and I don't have a prayer what their conditions are.
Actually my feeling(only an opinion) if your ground is fairly stable a manual sensitivty may excell but if it is not perhaps Auto may be the way to go to let your unit do the work and keep a stable machine.I personally set my unit at 30 Auto from the get go and have gotten silver dimes 10 inches plus and just don't want to dig any deeper. Sort of like don't fix what ain't broke. Remember your areas may differ so experimentation is the name of the game. Again never saw one unit produce deeply with so many different settings..
 
But what I found interesting was in auto, and set on 1 it did as good or better than manual at 18. That is in the ground not the air.
 
Hey Charles,
In auto the sensitivity can vary UP and DOWN from the set point, it is only a suggestion and the explorer actually sets the sensitivity as high as it feels it has a stable threshold. From your test it would appear that it can vary as as much as 18 clicks. Some of my non scientific testing methods showed it could vary 12-16. Think Cody and others did some similar tests and came up with the same results.
What this means in that Auto you are never really sure where you are at. Sometimes it is about the same as manual, sometimes very different.
Sometimes you want to limit the sensitivity, such as what Rick(ND) is talking about. When he was in Auto the machine was running too hot and picking up too much trash. By switching to manual he could control the sensitivity and set it less sensitive than the explorer would do by itself in Auto.
The reverse side of the coin is that you could be running in 32 Auto but the machine is really running at the equivilant of 16 or so manual. You will lose alot of depth in this situation. If there is lots of electical interference the explorer will back off sensitivity until it gets a fairly stable threshold. My opinion is that when you are sweeping the coil over trashy areas the explorer also see this as too much noise and also backs of the sensitivity. In this case when you run in manual you can force the explorer to keep a higher sensitivity than it would run in Auto.
In clean ground with little EMI present they probably run about the same at higher settings. At low settings Auto will almost always be hotter than in manual. In trashy ground or high EMI environments Auto will almost always be less hot than manual at higher settings.
To get the greatest depth you need to push the sensitivity, many of us who use manual kick it up to just the cusp of instability. This is higher than what Auto would do. The down side is that you pick up alot more signals that will either null the machine or cause your brain to go into overload from all the noise. You then have to work more slowly and listen harder and probably cover less area than you would in Auto.
I know people who do well running either, but I am personally certain that you will loose depth in Auto in trashy environments.
Chris
 
That is interesting for sure and wondered on that too how this all works. My test was too in accual hunting conditons and the area was very trashy. I feel myself and would like to hear others opinions also that the higher you set the sensitivity in auto the more it will varry. Now being it was very trashy and set at 32 auto that it was changing the sensitivity to lower than when i had it at 16 auto.
Could it be the higher the sensitivity is set in auto the more it will change when in trash. Maybe this is why Minelab factory setting is 16 auto and if you go to 16 manual it seems to be about the same.
One thing I have done and tell others to try is take a area where it seems to null and put a dime on the ground and see if you can get it in semi auto at 30, then drop it to 18 or so and see what the difference is, then try manual. Seen some times I get no signal untill i drop the sensitivity lower, then it will see it.
Rick
 
Chris, that all sounds well and good, except you are disagreeing with what Minelab and Andy Sabisch say. I have to believe that Minelab knows their detectors, and no one I know of knows more about detectors than Andy. Minelab says on page 47, "In this mode, the detector continuously monitors the environmental conditions and will adjust actual detector sensitivity as close as possible to your specified level of stability, depending on these conditions". Now Andy says on page 43 on his book, that on the Sovereign and the Excalibur, that set in AUTO it would pick the best setting and try to maintain this maximum setting.
But on the Explorer it has Semi-automatic mode. So the user sets it in the range he wants it, if set low like at minimum 1, it will maintain the actual sensitivity as close to that value as possible. And go on, on the next page 44. Set at lets say "3" you will not be bothered by deeper targets. And that it will automatically adjust the actual sensitivity setting around your value of "3".
So I would like to hear from Andy or minlab and have them give the real reason, why the test came out this way, as they should have an answer, that agrees with what they have wrote down.
 
Charles,
You already proven by your test that this is not the case. I had previously tried a test similar to yours(but in air) and also another test at the other end of the spectrum: I turned on the detector in a high noise environment and turned the sensitivity down in Auto until it was stable. I then switched to manual and then kept dropping the sensitivity until it was as stable as what I had before in Auto. In manual I had to drop about 12 or so clicks. Both the tests are somewhat subjective, yours is probably best because you were using a target in the ground.
Part of the issue is what "close" is defined as. I would not call the variations we are seeing as "close", it's almost half the sensitivity scale. Your results for the experiment you did suggest that in this case Auto 1 was running around Manual 18. My experiments in high EMI and high sensitivities suggest Auto 32 was running closer to Manual 20, possibly less.
Another issue: I build custom machinery and often work with a team of writers to do the documentation. Often the writers do not have a very strong technical background and what ends up in the manual may not be real close to reality. Sometimes the process of working with writers and editing the manual gets very time consuming and eventually the engineers will throw up their hands and say "good enough".
Additionally there are times with a new product that what you think you have designed and how it ends up working/being used are not the same. Both the Minelab manual and Andy's book came out when the Explorer was first released. Now that it has been field tested by thousands of people there are several things in the books that have been proven to be inaccurate. This happens in any technical manual so I am not blaming the writers, I think they did a swell job with the information available at the time.
This topic comes up quite frequently, and there are users who swear by either Auto or Manual and both groups make great finds. The one thing I am sure of is that in Auto the number you set is not the upper limit as is commonly believed. Do a web search for Mike Moutry's settings, he gives a good explanation.
Chris
 
<STRONG><span style="background-color:#ffff00;">Sensitivity is the detector
 
"WILL MARGINALLY AFFECT DEPTH OF PENETRATION AND DETECTION OF SMALL OBJECTS" with the explorer xs more than with the xsII.
(maybe the manual is the same for both the xs and xsII)
but, i noticed a difference in the two machines.
 
I do not have the possibility to make this test now but I think it would be interesting to put two coins in clean area at maximum and medium detection depths in a distance of say 10in and sweep the coil SEVERAL times over targets in max manual 25-28 and in semi-auto at 28 for instance. Then to record the results and put some common shallow trash around , NOT over, the targets ( few pull tabs, crown caps, iron nails ) in 5in distance. To sweep SEVERAL times in the same Semi-auto at 28 to give to detector to see all targets and adjust the sensitivity as it programmed by Minelab. Then to make the same in manual 28. I think the deepest coin will be lost forever in auto and still will be detectable in manual and if not, then auto could be more preferable mode in trashy areas and manual in clean areas.
Sweeps=Finds
HH/doc
 
You say the hit was as good at 18 in manual as it was at 1 in semi-auto. That just reinforces what I have thought for a long time. That the Explorer in semi-auto should be called auto. Mainly reason being that the Explorer in semi-auto IS adjusting the sensitivity up to around 18 as proved by your test when it should be trying to keep it around 1. There is no way the Explorer is hitting that quarter without have the sensitivity up around 18. I have hunted several places that semi-auto would not work because of the Explorer in semi-auto was adjusting the sensitivity upwards too much and in semi-auto the Explorer would be very unstable in the single digits. As soon as I would switch to manual I could push the sensitivity up to 15-17 (at one particular site) and remain very stable. On the flip side of that is I've been out and had hits in manual and switched semi-auto on and the signal totally disappears. With as many hours as I have in the field with the Explorer (4+ years) I can tell you manual is BY FAR the better choice UNLESS the soil varies alot and you have to keep changing the sensitivity. I know there's not a hit out there that the Explorer will hit in semi-auto that you can't hit in manual. BUT, there are hits out there that you can hit in manual that semi-auto won't give a peep on.
Once you understand what the Explorer was doing it makes sense why you seen the results that you did.
-Bill
 
Interesting input from over 4 years field experience. Gosh we find out a lot when we kick these aspects around...I still feel with any aspect used there will be give and take aways...Minelab gives us these options and up to us to use them in our neck of the woods for maximum efficiency.Remember the manual was written years ago when the Explorer XS was the new kid on the block and am sure since then a lot more has been learned about its abilities and many are indeed still are debateable..
 
I agree with you but found of interest the following. On the test quarter that could be nailed at 8" in Semi-auto at 1 but could not be detected in Manual unless it was set to 16 there is an interesting twist. I then decreased the sensitivity while still in manual and could decrease it to 7 and still detect the quarter. So, from 16 down to 7 the quarter can be detected but from 1 up it takes a setting of 16.
<span style="background-color:#ffff00;">Once you detect the quarter at 16 in manual you can now lower the sensitivity to 7 and still detect it. What do you think causes that</span>?
My guess is we are trying to relate sensitivity to something other than stability. Stability is an input to the microprocessor. The detector detects at maximum depth all the time as far as the TX is concerned since all we can do is shift the spectrum with Noise cancel. The adjustments we make are instruction to the MP. The MP makes decisions based on those instruction, environmental data, and uses an algorithm to process the data which includes our desired stability, Audio Gain and the other settings. They don
 
Cody,
My <span style="background-color:#ffff00;">guess</span> on your question that makes the most sense to me is that Explorer is adjusting the ground balance and when you're bumping the sensitivity up and down. At middle level sensitivity I am sure the ground balance is more accurate than at lower sensitivity levels. Since ground balance is automatic we can only assume that has something to do with your experiences. Your finding mind actual be a very good thing to know. Mainly because if you are hunting in a trashy area or have to back down on the sensitivity it might be better to start out go up in sensitivity then back it back down. It would be interesting after you get the hit with the sensitivity at 7 to go wander around and come back in 10 minutes or so and see if the Explorer still hits the target.
-Bill
 
<span style="background-color:#ffff00;">The explorer actually does not have ground balance.</span> It is common to read that is has but I let that one go most of the time as it would start a debate and you really have to go into the technical detail to see the way it compensates for ground minerals. I thought it had ground balance when I first started to use it and that it also had automatic tracking. <span style="background-color:#ffff00;">When they say automatic they mean that is compensates for the soil with no user input needed.</span>Ground compenstion is included with each pulse of data so there is no need for ground balance.
The explorer uses a very interesting way to reject almost all of the signals from ground minerals with each pulse. I have never seen anything like it before Candy patented the process. There is no balance as with other detectors. I think I posted something on how it does this down the page. According to Minelab this is the primary reason the Explorer is a time domain detector instead of a frequency domain. Once I went over the patents I understood why. There is some ground signals because the cirucits are not perfect (linear) but is very small. That is one reason for Semi-auto as it takes care of that little bit we hear as ground noise in Manual.
Anyhow, I tested some more and was even more amazed to see that I could set the Audio Gain to 1, Sensitivity to 1 and still hear the quarter just fine in Semi-auto but again not in Manual. I ended up liking the modulated audio much better than I remembered.
I am even more sure that the presets are correct with a little adjusting of sensitivity or Audio Gain to prefereces. I hate to even start this but I am starting to think we are over driving the detector and creating some of our own problems. An engineer mentioned this several times about a year ago and it kind of went by with little notice as I think we all shook our head at his post thinking he was wrong.
C.C. mentioned his friend that use the presets and only adjust the audio gain and sensitivity and that is what I have done but now think I might need to back off on some of these setting in particular when there is a lot of trash. I know co-located targets are a problem but am looking even more that this.
HH, Cody
 
I suppose when you're switching from auto to manual you're still leaving the sensitivity at 1? That goes back to what I was saying that semi-auto should be called auto. Comparing semi-auto and manual is NOT an accurate comparsion IMHO because of the way the Explorer compensates in semi-auto vs. manual. Ground compenstion or whatever you would want to call it could account for the differences you experienced when moving the sensitivity up to the mid-teens then down to 7. I've used the Explorer way long enough and have experimented with semi-auto vs. manual enough time to make me blue in the face. In MY area manual is the way to go 95% of the time. I would be EXTREMELY (a vast understatement) suprised if you could show me a hit that you could hit in semi-auto that I couldn't hit in manual. That is letting me make the choice as to what to run the Explorer in sensitivity in manual. As I said before there ARE places that the soil varies alot and semi-auto is the better choice because of that sole reason and no other reason. If the soil is pretty uniform in mineralization manual is the better choice from my experience of more than 4 years and not a casual observation.
-Bill
 
Then I have the question, of why on the older models of Minelabs, it was called auto. And then on the Explorer they call it semi-auto. There must be some difference, but just what is it?? Are they just trying to confuse us? Or maybe we are doing a good enough job of that ourselves.
 
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