A really weird thing happened yesterday - maybe we can figure it out.

[GRAY GHOST]

Hello all. I was gridding a known mild ground farmfield yesterday under overcast skies, and making some good finds.The sandy loam was nice and moist. Now, i'll admit that i run my Tesoro Tejon full wide open, the ED180 circuitry is just screaming, but is well ground balanced - a bit positive. As soon as the sun came out, the ground became erratic, the machine starting to chirp everywhere i put my coil. I went back to where i started the hunt and occasionally got a chirp - and all of this in known mild ground. When the sun went back behind the clouds, the chirping stopped. Weird, huh?

Could it be:


* That i hit some heavily fertilized patches that coincided with the sun moving in and out of the clouds?

* I've heard things about solar activity possibly affecting metal detectors/ detecting through the earth's natural electromagnetic field i.e sunspots, solarstorms.

* Maybe my machine had some trouble adjusting to rapidly changing warm/hot ground?


It didn't turn out to be a serious problem, the Tejon usually handles warm/hot ground pretty well. After the sun was out for about a steady half hour, everything seemed to stabilize, as normal. I'd like to hear your take on this.Has anybody else experienced this? I went on to have a good hunt, finding two silver dimes, a dateless "V" nickel and a pocketful of cw relics.Thanks for reading and commenting, and good luck!

 

[Larry (IL)]

The clouds will not stop solar activity so that can be ruled out. I would suspect moisture, your coil and heat from the sun's rays are somehow involved. Do you use a coil cover? If so, keep clean and moisture free?

 

[scoper]

This is a common problem with certain non motion machines.....sudden temprature changes can send the machine off tune.If i take my non motion machine to a site and the temperature outside is a lot hotter or cooler than in the car,it can take quite a while for the detector to settle down to a stable threshold.I do not know if this just affects non motion machines but i would imagine that sudden temp changes can cause expansion and contraction of the electronics....especially the coil which may cause instability even in motion machines.This may explain that after the temp had been constant for half an hour your detector was back to normal.A detector would be more susceptible to this happening if it was run on it's absolute limit as it was in your case.

 

[Elton]

I have noticed many times over the years warmth from the Sun on the coil and machine does cause intermittent internal noise.. Most of the time a moisture laden environment was present.

I once removed the coil cover and it was moist inside between coil and cover ??????????????????????? This almost always happened on early morning hunts..and temp went up while detecting.


Possible heating the moisture ?? Change in temp on coil ??? ................. Or ground change as it dried up from early morning dew ???????????

 

[TerraDigger]

On the Dankowski site there was a rather long posting thread dealing with what you are describing. I will leave it to you to search for it. Use the search term.....frost theory....don't let the title fool you....the Sun is involved in the postings.

 

[fowlercharles]

Hi Grey Ghost, I have to agree with the others about it likely being caused by moisture/humidity and rapid temp changes likely being the cause. Some areas of the country are not near so humid as others and for those high areas there is probably all sorts of stuff going on around us that goes unnoticed or soon goes away soon as the temp changes a bit. I have had pretty much the same experience not with just my Tejon but also with my X5.. Tejon is already known to be wound tight. No real problems though. This is all JMHO, but makes sense to me. Where I am in S. Ms. is probably one of the most humid areas around, any time of the year and "whenever " the sun comes out, summer or winter, "stuff" is happening. HH Charlie

 

[Rick N. MI]

With my Tejon it would be running really nice where I was hunting and suddenly there is interference. I hunt awhile and like somebody hit a switch and it was gone. I don't know if something was running thru the ground and turned on & off or was in the air. Strange.

Rick, N. MI