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At the risk of disbelief I am back from another Beach Hunt.....

Beachcomber

New member
Ok I don't even believe this myself but I have not hunted 3 different beaches this weekend with the E-Track and found a gold ring at each one. I can't even remember the last time I found 3 gold rings in one weekend let alone 3 gold rings with diamonds. Tonight's beach didn't have nearly as many targets as the other two and it is a very big beach when the tide is out as you can see from the Sunset photo. There were more junk targets and this beach is more mineralized than the last two. For stable operation on this beach I needed to change the ground setting back to Difficult and I turned "FAST" to OFF. I left Deep on to see if it would work and it did so I left it on. The E-Trac even with Fast turned off was able to detect some tiny pieces of metal and jewelry like that little butterfly that gave a reading of 12-1. The Zipper parts tend to read in the 12-4 to 12-8 range. The pulltabs were reading in the 12-18 to 12-24. Unfortunately the beavertail from a pulltab reads 12-12 :( Luckily there aren't too many of those around. Now for the interesting one. The Gold ring took me totally by surprise. I had a nice clean deep Nickel 12-13 reading on the E-Trac. Depth meter was near the bottom. So I was expecting a deep nickel. But instead pulled up the ring from a foot down. Go figure! The pix of the ring in the ringbox is after I cleaned it in an Ultrasonic cleaner. That really cleaned all the black goo out from around the stones! One thing that can be a little annoying about using Auto Sensitivity. If you stop detecting for a minute or two and leave the coil flat on the ground......(I stood it against my scoop while I was taking pix.) the sensitivity will get raised very high. On the beach it went all the way up to 27. At that level on this particular beach the detector would false until you hunted for a little bit an then it would lower itself back down to where it needed to be. I found it was quicker to jsut shut it off while I was taking pix and then turn it back on since it comes on at 16 it was ready to hunt and then would work it's way higher on it's own and I could hunt without any falsing while ti was doing that. I have to check but I think there is a place in the Menu where you can set the level where the Auto Sensitivity starts at when turning on the detector.

HH

Beachcomber
 
It also drops off considerably if I run across a patch of dense iron nails almost like the detector thinks the soil is more mineralised.
 
I think sometimes less is more. If you are in a heavily trash laden area too high a sensitivity setting can make it almost impossible to separate one target from another. So whether it is lowering it because it thinks the iron is heavy mineralization or if it realizes that you are in a trashy area the result is the same.....better target separation at a cost of some depth and a better chance of pulling some good target out of the iron :) Auto Sensitivity never worked on the beach in that respect this machine is the opposite of an Explorer. The more I am using this machine the more I like it.

HH

Beachcomber
 
It's the old Auto/manual debate. Now we finally know what is going on inside. The theory was that in Auto EMI or lots of trash would cause the sensitivity to go way down. When you got in a quieter area (or just holding the coil still) the sensitivity would start to rise again. Sounds like the E-trac has a couple of settings that control how "hard" the machine tries to bump up (and perhaps down) then sensitivity.

Only thing I'm still wondering about, does the machine react differently to mineralization in Auto than in Manual? Does going to manual kill or slow the auto GB process?

Chris
 
What is interesting to me is that on the Beaches here the Explorer was very erratic if you tried to hunt in Auto but worked great in Manual. The E-Trac is just the opposite. It works fine in Auto but you need to run a fairly low manual Sensitivity on the beach for stable operation. I am sure as I get more into the settings of the E-Trac that I will find other contradictions between it and the Explorer.

HH

Beachcombe
 
(ie; IF you do) like a 15" WOT or a EQ 14x10 and see what the Manual Sens. settings need to be at. AUTO all the way, I say.....

So, are you tempted to waterproof the ET yet?

I'm thinking about modifying mine into a w/p chest mounted version.................here I go again.............maybe.

David E Di
 
LOL :) :) :) I would be lying if I said I hadn't thought about it but I am going to wait and use it for awhile before I decide about waterproofing it :) Right now I have my hands full just learning how to get the most out of it :) I am hoping that Minelab will come out with a Sov version of this 11" DD coil as it slices through the water better than any other coil Minelab currently has and it is built extremely strong. This 11" coil is very impressive!!!!!

HH

Beachcomber
 
Beachcomber said:
Ok I don't even believe this myself but I have not hunted 3 different beaches this weekend with the E-Track and found a gold ring at each one. I can't even remember the last time I found 3 gold rings in one weekend let alone 3 gold rings with diamonds. Tonight's beach didn't have nearly as many targets as the other two and it is a very big beach when the tide is out as you can see from the Sunset photo. There were more junk targets and this beach is more mineralized than the last two. For stable operation on this beach I needed to change the ground setting back to Difficult and I turned "FAST" to OFF. I left Deep on to see if it would work and it did so I left it on. The E-Trac even with Fast turned off was able to detect some tiny pieces of metal and jewelry like that little butterfly that gave a reading of 12-1. The Zipper parts tend to read in the 12-4 to 12-8 range. The pulltabs were reading in the 12-18 to 12-24. Unfortunately the beavertail from a pulltab reads 12-12 :( Luckily there aren't too many of those around. Now for the interesting one. The Gold ring took me totally by surprise. I had a nice clean deep Nickel 12-13 reading on the E-Trac. Depth meter was near the bottom. So I was expecting a deep nickel. But instead pulled up the ring from a foot down. Go figure! The pix of the ring in the ringbox is after I cleaned it in an Ultrasonic cleaner. That really cleaned all the black goo out from around the stones! One thing that can be a little annoying about using Auto Sensitivity. If you stop detecting for a minute or two and leave the coil flat on the ground......(I stood it against my scoop while I was taking pix.) the sensitivity will get raised very high. On the beach it went all the way up to 27. At that level on this particular beach the detector would false until you hunted for a little bit an then it would lower itself back down to where it needed to be. I found it was quicker to jsut shut it off while I was taking pix and then turn it back on since it comes on at 16 it was ready to hunt and then would work it's way higher on it's own and I could hunt without any falsing while ti was doing that. I have to check but I think there is a place in the Menu where you can set the level where the Auto Sensitivity starts at when turning on the detector.

HH

Beachcomber

Great finds and I can't wait to try it out on the beach as my XLT was very poor on depth on beaches.
 
Auto sensitivity on the beach with my SE worked really well for me, in fact the sites I am hunting here now in Iowa, I have always used auto sensitivity and got awesome depth. My Etrac in auto is not getting any depth.
 
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