> I tried to eliminate the bottom third of the
> screen but when I did I got rid of nickles.
Joe given the difficulty you are having I recommend that you forget about nickels for now, you can always come back in a week or two and hunt them after you get the machine working correctly and have learned what the deeper coins sound like. Black out the bottom of the screen and concentrate on higher coin signals for now.
> but there was a
> great deal of iron hits showing up so I eliminated
> the left hand side of the screen too, out to about
> 1/3.
A big L is fine, just be sure to experiment with iron mask -16 when you think you get a good deep target. Its good to check about a coil size area around the target to see if there is anything else nearby. Oh and when you do finally happen upon a deeper coin take advantage of the opportunity, spend some time sweeping it from different angles, let the signal soak it, your brain will take over after a few hunts and those deep coin singals will stick out like a sore thumb amongst the trash. I know it sounds crazy, the Explorer and all its beeping about drove me nuts at first. But in time the iron and trash signals fade into the background with the threshold and are ignored for the most part.
Your sens at 16 is quite low, thats about 50% power. But you mentioned that there were "lots" of power lines around and underground cables. If thats the case then 16 may be all you can run and even that may be noisy. My strong advice is to select a different, easier site to learn the machine. Hunting around noisy power lines is one of the most difficult conditions to hunt. Go train your ears for deep coins at a more friendly site, then come back to this site and get your revenge.
> I found one target for which I got a coin tone and
> it said 7 inches down so I dug it. It was a rusted
> can lid at about 1/2 inch down.
Depth should not have read 7 inches. Note that the depth meter is only accurate when the coil is centered over the target. If you are picking up the target off the front of the coil which you can certainly do with a surface can lid, depth will be off, it will read deeper than it really is. For those surface targets don't be afraid to raise your coil off the ground several inches for a coin, even more for a larger target like a can lid. This will help A LOT with pinpointing surface targets. Another use for this raising of the coil is to determine if a deep target that sounds perhaps too loud (big) is really a coin or an old car fender. If the target reads deep, and you are centered over the target, but you can still hear the target with your coil a foot or more off the ground then whatever is down there is WAY bigger than a coin. A third trick while learing deep coins signals, a indian head for example at say 7 inches, will quickly vanish once you raise your coil about 3 inches off the ground, you know you got a deep coin sized target if that happens. Last note on the depth meter...its calibrated to about a small cent sized target. Lets consider a 3 cent, an indian head, and a silver half all at say 6 inches deep. The indian head will read 6 inches on the depth meter, the 3 cent being smaller will read perhaps 8 inches and the silver half being larger may read 4-5. Small targets read deeper than they really are, and large targets read shallower. Small bits of trash can be problematic because its probably really only say 3 inches deep, but the depth meter says 6. The easy way to keep from being fooled on those is to raise the coil a few inches, if you can still hear it, its a shallow small target. If the signal goes away, then its deep.
And yes, big rusty can lids will give a high coin tone, as will a large hunk of lead, a big chunk of cast iron, most large metal objects will sound high. Again thats a calibration thing. Take gold coins for example, the 1 dollar gold is way down at the bottom of the screen foil to nickel range yet a $20 dollar gold coin will read/sound more like a quarter. Size matters. After a while you will even notice that a very worn silver dime sounds/ID's slightly different than one with little little wear.
This probably sounds problematic right, all these different tones and sounds but the Explorer gives you a ton of information about the target and thats a good thing once you learn what coins and round targets sound like and how they behave because once you do, you can start picking off those coins that have been hiding under/near iron and trash. Around here the easy targets are mostly long gone. Most of the good old coins that are left are hiding. The added information the Explorer gives helps to sniff those out versus say the Sovereign which does not have nearly the range of tones.
> I put some coins on top of the ground where it
> seemed clean and got about 5 inches for a dime and
> a penny and a little more for a quarter. I didn't
> get to the air test yet.
Thats fine with your sens at 16, 28 will get a couple more inches at least. You just need to find a more friendly spot to learn.
> I understand the nulling is just trash targets
> around. However sometimes even the junk hits
> disappear from the detector. It becomes very
> quiet. This is why I think it is the ground
> balance getting knocked out of wack by the high
> number of trash targets around.
Don't worry about the ground balance, the ground signal pales in comparison to a solid coin signal. I have hunted some really nasty ground full of iron where the machine is in a constant null e.g. no threshold at all. But it WILL lock onto a coin if you get the coil over it. You have to be sweeping slow in that type of condition though.
> Do
> you know of some way to make it more moderate
> while I learn?
Yes, as I mentioned above, go find yourself a user friendly school yard or something. Save the tougher sites until after you get comfortable with the machine.
Charles
