"Ah, grasshopper, you have learned...":detecting:

[shadowulf]

First off, thanks to Elton, Mudpuppy, REVIER, ez4sure and many others for all your contributions to this forum.
I have read and tried many of your techniques, but today, it finally all clicked into place.

As some of you know, I detect in notoriously hot ground. Rarely do I get a ground phase # under 80. With the majority of the time GBing in the 90s.
The campground I hunt is only a few miles from an iron ore deposit. the ground fill is a mix of crushed river rock, basalt and granite.
My Dirt meter reads 3 to 4 bars always. If you rolled a small rare earth magnet around this sight, it would look like a sea urchin before you got past 5 campsites.
When wet, the EMI from the buried power lines joins in with the iron to make my F70 overload at any Sens setting above 30.

Until today...

After reading, rereading, and re-rereading several posts, I figured I would try something.
I took off the 10x5 DD coil and mounted my 6.5x4 "lil' football" on to my tall-man's lower shaft.
Then reset my F70 to clean up any unforseen settings , to start with a clean slate.
Then adjusted program 1 to REV's "punch thru" settings.

Disc- 6 , Speed- de , Sense- 99 , Thresh- 0 , Notch-1 , Tones- 1

Then Ground Balanced, GP# 91, but surprisingly calm

Being I had only a half hour to hunt, I started sweeping one of the older campsites.
The normal chatter was tolerable, and I was getting great separation.
In one 10" circle, I pulled 3 "old school" ring tabs, 2 zincs and an aluminum set screw.
The thing is, the F70 accurately ID'd each one individually, at differing depths, some within the same hole.
I plucked up several more tabs, a few more zincs and about 40 cents in clad.

And after finding more of the old ring tabs, I'm thinking this place hasn't been hunted seriously.
Way too hot and trashy, well, for most people.

 

[ez4sure]

glad your getting used to your f70, i think smaller coils see alot less of the ground at one time so minerlized ground has less affect so they run smoother also a small coil like that makes a guy go slower and less likely to miss good targets when you find a area with alot of older beavertail pulltabs there is a good chance of finding some nice gold rings that others missed good luck hh

 

[shadowulf]

That's what I was thinking, but even with the lil' football, I'd get the occasional overload siren. And real jumpy audio aswell.

The combination of it all seemed to make sense. The smaller footprint, the extremely high sensitivity, the low discrimination, limiting the tones, even raising the threshold to "absorb" some of the erratic signals.
It wasn't silent searching, but an educational experiment that worked out great. After a year of poking around parks and ball-fields, I was starting to get a little discouraged. Then a few post later, and some research, I feel I'm back and ready to hit those places again. And with a little more knowledge of what/why/how the F70 can work and respond.

To sum it all up,

[size=large]Very Cool!!![/size]

 

[IBdiggin]

Shadow, You, like many others, are realizing the hidden power of the concentric coil. The hunting technique you talk of works equally well with the 10" elliptical. Better than the DD???. No way. Different than the DD?? Absolutely. Like comparing apples to oranges. All depends what your needs are and how you hunt.
Once you realize you are actually hunting with an upside down traffic cone pattern you can isolate individual target within a small area simply by raising your coil. This technique is a combination of Mudpuppies coil hop(in slow motion) and a heel and toe wiggle. Maybe we should call this "The Higgle"The idea is to focus the golf ball sized tip of the concentric on a smaller portion of the plug area. I use all metal in program 2 set up at 80 or so sens. and 0 threshold as a quick switch program for balancing and unraveling deeper combination targets. But discrimination program is my main program.
I once found a war nickel with 4h tones at 3" with a prehistoric folded beavertail at 5" and about 2" to the side of the nickel. I love Delta pitch but I need to hear nickels as high tones since the midtone fart is essential for telling the tabs from the nickels. I have severe tinnitus and cannot hear the difference between tabs and nickels in DP The sweet high tone of the nickel is what stopped me to pick this unlikely combination apart. The fact that TID and audio signals are different is what told me there was more than one target.

The speed of the 70 is priceless-------------IB Oh and PS-----I actually saw my concentric coil thumbing it's nose at a bottle cap the other day

 

[REVIER]

The way you described that site it seems like a nightmare.
If you could pluck out these good targets, and ID them pretty well using these settings, who knows what else is hiding?
Ground this hot with this many other problems would probably cause most other detectors to display an unintelligible jumping mess on the screen, and the audio would probably match, I assume.
At similar difficult sites I have hunted I know that other hunters with other brands basically tried their luck but decided quickly that they would rather spend their time at much easier places so I would almost consider crazy sites like these virgin, strange as it may seem.
For those with a tool that has this many different possible settings to adjust to, and the patience to learn and practice what the right settings can accomplish, most good targets aren't hiding as well as they think they are.
All I know is I don't run away from crazy bad sites due to stubbornness for the most part, I stay and experiment hoping to hit on settings that work and I have been rewarded for those efforts.
When I say this thing is jaw dropping at just about any site under just about any conditions you are now starting to understand what I mean.
I am starting to believe there is no site where this thing won't work and work well with the right settings and a good understanding of it's behavior and language.
I haven't been to the salt water beach with mine yet, and there are some other difficult sites I have yet to try hunting but I have a good amount of confidence that I will eventually figure out how to hunt them successfully...or die trying.
So far I have done better than I could have dreamed in some crazy areas so I hope that will continue to be the case.
In a few weeks I will be relocating back to Birmingham Alabama and soil that can only be described as devil dirt.
Extremely high red clay mineralization with the added bonus of naturally occurring iron ore infused into much of the soil.
Depth for all of us using any machine is pitiful in the worst of that stuff, hunting in that bad dirt turned me off of deep older coin hunting and into a shallow jewelry hunter.
As much as I am crying because I am leaving this fantastic soil at the other end of the scale here in Kansas I believe I might just have a tool that could possibly combat those problems and help me be more successful than I ever was in the past.
I hope so, anyway, but we will see.
You know I will be posting my settings and finds if I am able to make any headway in that mess.
Also I will be living one block away from one of the oldest and most trashy park I have ever hunted.
When you have to dig up 10-15 pieces of garbage from shallow to 6" deep in a one square foot area just to get a space to successfully ground balance my detectors then you know what a trashed out park really is.
This is one of those sites that is so frustrating that I think most other hunters try it and leave never to return.
I have been there many times and found some great things here in the past, a silver pocket watch rim, some older coins, my first silver thimble, a very rare token and more, but it was never easy and maybe more luck than anything else.
This monotone high power low disc technique seemed to work well for me at some super trashy older parks here in Kansas so I hope it will open up that park to possibilities that I never thought possible before.
You know I will post about that also if it does.

As far as that high power, low disc monotone technique that was actually Nasa Tom's suggestion and recommendation, luckily all this technical and deeper knowledge about how these things work, what the top end Fishers can do and actually what is possible is posted all over the net and freely shared among us.
Something about that monotone just works in areas of heavy trash, heavy iron and even heavy EMI.

The actual blast through method I described is sense and thresh maxed out, DE, and all metal.
This works if you learn to look for patterns and numbers that are repeatable in all that mess you will see and hear in iron and trash filled sites but it ain't easy to get good at this.
It actually took hours of practice before I even started to understand what was going on and I was able to start targeting better targets to dig.
As well as that works for me I think this monotone method works just about as well and is much easier to learn and master.
It is working pretty good for you already and with this technique, as most others, practice makes perfect so it should get even better for you as time goes on.
By the way, I have used this method with 3 different coils and it seems to work equally well, the small DD sniper, the big DD and the standard 10" elliptical.

This is one of those "AHA" moments in the life of a hunter, when you discover something about your tools that you didn't know before that works and works well.
The possibilities at your very difficult sites are now endless and it seems you now understand that.
This is one of the best things about this hobby for me and why I try so hard to learn my detectors as well as possible and never stop.

Looking forward to future posts and pictures of your great finds to come.

 

[mudpuppy]

Magnetic sea urchin got me! Now THATS some iron!

This really is a cool Forum where we come to offer/get advice and cheer each other on...Amazing the range of settings that WORK on the F70...Cant wait until REVIER gets back to Birmingham to use his on that iron and hits some old sites of his...Really great job there Wulf...at least somebody is paying attention!
Mud

 

[REVIER]

BTW....if you ever want to try that actual blast through method, and let me mention again this is not easy and will take some time and practice, this is what might be possible.

This site is an older and favorite park but the area I found this target and also several older coins in other hunts is very challenging.
Not only heavy trash that you find at a park that is over 100 years old but this particular area is at the very edge of one end of the park with extremely heavy EMI problems for some reason.
More EMI than any other site I have ever hunted and it is always there on every visit.
This thing was found using these settings:
99 sense, Thresh 9, SL, All Metal.
Crazy, right?
At an area with extreme trash and such heavy EMI all readings and tones should be unintelligible...but with enough practice they actually aren't.
It surprised the heck out of me the first time I hunted this area with these super hot settings and discovered that the F70 would actually calm down and tell me when the coil caught a piece of something good...but it did.
It was all quite accidental at first, these hot settings were only on program 2 used as a check system over iffy targets I acquired in program 1 using disc and lower settings.
I forgot to change back to program 1 after digging one target and found that I could pick out some decent targets with these settings and after that I started to use them more and more.

This 10k ring was sitting between two pieces of iron, one very large, deep and rusted about 2-3 inches to the right from what I could tell but didn't dig to find out, and another much smaller and shallower rusty nail about 2" to the left.
Big jumping on the screen, numbers bouncing from very high like rusted iron usually causes down to very low iron.
As I swung over each of these targets from right to left and left to right, and at some point I believe all three of these things were under the big DD coil at the same time, I kept seeing 51-53 numbers pop up.
They were fleeting and only there for an instant but they kept showing up and kept repeating.
I had no idea what those numbers represented but I am a gold hunter and this was exactly the numbers I look for when looking for big gold like class rings.
I rarely dig any signal that jumps too much nowadays but these numbers were within my rules, even as quickly as they appeared and disappeared so I got curious and had to find out what this thing was.
I was thrilled when my first gold ring of the year popped up.
Very surprised too, but those kind of surprises are what I live for in this hobby.
In this case those consistent numbers were up-averaged due to the false high tones thrown off of the rusty iron pieces because out of the ground this ring is a solid 41.
This was over a year ago and I have been experimenting with those same high settings but sometimes use DE speed instead and in certain situations I belive the faster processing speed does help to identify targets even better.

Get good at this monotone disc 6 method but maybe one day try this blast through method, also.
Could have some surprising results and I wonder if they would work in the kind of sites you described.

http://www.findmall.com/read.php?37,2064645,page=1

 

[shadowulf]

I'm coming of a stretch of 12hr nightshifts, and just drove 2 hrs to get home, so I'll make this quick.

After going through so much material in a very short time, the authors names got fuzzy. Apparently so did the techniques. What it comes down to is I finally got the figured out for my terrain. It was the total infusion of all the info poured into my cranial blender that came out with that combo. It made sense. Other detectors I've used acted completely different from the F70. And so I had to think differently. Comments about this are in many threads, it seems counter-intuitive. But it works.

 

[mudpuppy]

No worries Mate...thats the F70.!.....good on ya for pulling 12hr shifts with a 2hr drive home...Family an are ya? Keep an eye out for those ransacks and hit them when you can and the weather is appropriate...All the best!
Mud out..

 

[EtracTom-AdirondacksNY]

After that Tom recommends going back in ZERO discrimination and 99 sens and 1 mono tone and seeing what else was missed from extreme co location. I run my F75 in 1 tone or 1N which is a VCO type tone shallow is loud deep is soft VCO kind of like the G2 machine. I tried 3H tones for the nickles and I just tried Delta Pitch or DP but it wasn't right too many garbling together tones keep looking at the screen while sweeping. Switched to 1 tone and listen for the BLAM sound amoungst a few pops and clicks and you can't miss it it's a solid hit. My soil here is also about 87 and 3-4 bars in mineralization so I leave GB on 90.

 

[shadowulf]

After a couple days to process what I did, it was the knowledge from this site finally being applied to the conditions at hand. At the campground, wet ground meant overload, or at least a heck of a lot of noise. Avoiding buried power cables and all the trash made it tough to run with ordinary techniques. I had to dig back through old post and sift out the info that would help.

I actually tried the blast through technique at first, but got some real jumpy numbers. So I switched to Nasa Tom's settings and it settled down. I did try turning up the Threshold, but again it became too confusing. Being I had only a half hour to hunt. I was satisfied with what I found and learned.

I hope to hit a few parks today and see what I find. I'm leaving the tall man's shaft on the 6.5 coil. It's too good at getting in and around brush, fence posts. The 10" DD is on the stock shaft and the 10"conc is in the bag. Maybe the sports fields will give up a little bit more than clad.