dewcon4414
Well-known member
I finally had some time to do some testing of a small section of beach that had produced a few wheats. So i started out in AM Ferr just because there was some deep iron, my gain was 7, sensitivity was 26 manual. I had both deep and fast off. I hit what i knew was a scrachy wheat that showed was berried on the depth meter. I noticed adding disc didnt make much difference in the tone of the coin..... which of course tell ya that AM just means no disc unlike a whites machine that in AM functions much like pinpoint with a little improved depth. I dug the coin and sure enought it was a really crusty wheat at about 9 inches. So i started again and didnt find a thing. I upped the gain to my normal setting of 9, added my normal disc of 26, and turned up sensitivity to 30 manual....after noise canceling these settings were stable. Took a bit of a time to find another target. It sounded deeper but as slow as i was going there was no question it was a repeatable coin in the copper range. This time i turned deep of and went back to my normal fast and deep off. To me the target sounded cleaner with deep off at these settings. Deep is a setting that is supposed to reduce the recovery speed to allow the processor to "get a better look at the target". It didnt seem to work for me. I switched to auto sensitivity... i couldnt get a hit that i would have recognized and dug. That didnt seem that strange to me since my air testing showed a target would just cut off at a given distance in auto, while manual would continue to try and ID the target. Which means you might or might not get a iffy signal you would dig in manual over auto. However, those targets in auto were cleaner to me. Since this was a really deep target i turned down my sensitivity to 24, which i use in most parks. Nada.... tried 26... nada... 28 nada... but at 29 it sounded better than at 30. I dug this target and it turned out to be another Gloria Swansan token from a 1925 silent move she did... it was at about 15 inches. The token is about the size of a half dollar. The coin seemed to be setting at an angle.... and it was a deep hole. Next i switched to Cond and tried all these settings. It wasnt until i used gain 10, deep off, manual sensitivity 29, and IM 26 that i hit what i knew was a silver coin. I could tell it was near some iron and would only repeat with a wiggle from one direction. It pinpointed as iron... i just couldnt get a good pinpoint on it and i likely wouldnt have dug it if i wasnt on a beach. After digging it i found a merc at about 9 inches and yes there was a couple of pieces of corroded iron i got to before the coin. I either missed this target in Ferr, was checking targets more carefully, or my hearing is just atuned more to cond. Either way, i picked up a merc. I think the biggest surprise for me was that sensitivity 29 worked better than 30. Obviously these were my settings, my way of hunting, and my findings.... any surprises to you all?
Dew
Dew