Last week I had the pleasure of hunting with a couple E-Trac users at Golden Gate Park (GGP). It was great fun and I really appreciate their hospitality. I did ok that day, with a nice Mills Novelty Slot Machine Token, a silver war nickel (1943 D), a 1957 English Half Penny, and a few wheat cents. But these are nothing compared to my fellow E-Trac hunting buddies whom both brought home silver that day. On top of having a great time, these guys helped me to tune my E-Trac settings to better find the deep silver, which can often be 8"+ in the parts of GGP where we're hunting. And boy did these changes pay off . . .
Being a rookie E-Trac user, my goal has been to find at least one Barber coin before the end of the year. So on Friday I headed back to GGP and using my modified settings I searched around an area of the park that's old enough to find Barbers. Within less than an hour I had my very first Barber in my hand that was buried about 6" deep - a 1899 S Barber dime which is my oldest coin to date. I also found a couple pieces to a necklace that were ~20 feet apart from each other. I'm not sure the stones are real, and the back appears to be silver plated, but nice finds just the same.
I raised my threshold tone to 19 to mimic the Explorer's warble sound when it hits silver, ran manual sensitivity 27, set gain to 30, and added a couple points to my disc pattern (01-02/28-40, 01-02/46-50) to help minimize iron falsing. Another big takeaway from them was that my volume was too high on my headphones. With all the deep iron and occasional EMI chatter, after an hour or so, too high volume in your headphones makes it difficult to concentrate on the deep, high tone silver signals. So I turned down the volume on my headphones by two notches, so that my threshold was barely audible. With my gain set at 30, I'm confident that I'm still going to hear the deep, iffy signals as long as I'm running a high enough sensitivity.
I hope these settings will help you find more silver. PM me if you would like more detail.
Happy hunting to everyone this week!
-Alex
Being a rookie E-Trac user, my goal has been to find at least one Barber coin before the end of the year. So on Friday I headed back to GGP and using my modified settings I searched around an area of the park that's old enough to find Barbers. Within less than an hour I had my very first Barber in my hand that was buried about 6" deep - a 1899 S Barber dime which is my oldest coin to date. I also found a couple pieces to a necklace that were ~20 feet apart from each other. I'm not sure the stones are real, and the back appears to be silver plated, but nice finds just the same.
I raised my threshold tone to 19 to mimic the Explorer's warble sound when it hits silver, ran manual sensitivity 27, set gain to 30, and added a couple points to my disc pattern (01-02/28-40, 01-02/46-50) to help minimize iron falsing. Another big takeaway from them was that my volume was too high on my headphones. With all the deep iron and occasional EMI chatter, after an hour or so, too high volume in your headphones makes it difficult to concentrate on the deep, high tone silver signals. So I turned down the volume on my headphones by two notches, so that my threshold was barely audible. With my gain set at 30, I'm confident that I'm still going to hear the deep, iffy signals as long as I'm running a high enough sensitivity.
I hope these settings will help you find more silver. PM me if you would like more detail.
Happy hunting to everyone this week!
-Alex
Just kidding. Actually my wife was born and raised here and that's why we stayed.
Take care, and continued good luck at Mercury Dime Park 