Charlottesville, VA city lot finds

[yardminer]

Hit a site I've worked several times already near the university today, and between the mid 90's temperature and the mosquitoes I pulled a few trinkets out of the ground. Nothing special, the Buffalo is dateless, the little triangular piece with the round part on top is (I think) the hinge from either a wooden folding ruler or an engineers caliper type device. The pocketknife looks like a run of the mill Case or knockoff. Someone must have lost a souvenir bullet because the house wasn't built til at least 1910 or so. This lot was no more than 60 x 100, and I'd already canvassed it 3-4 times pretty thoroughly!

I'd been hunting in IM-16 lately with the sens. at about 24-28 (whatever the conditions would bear), gain at 8 and _fast_ ON. But I went back and read alot of the posts from a while back by Cody on the classroom site, and decided to try it once his way - I set a discriminate pattern after going through the specific reject/accept steps he advises (something to do with if you don't include all the ICONS in the reject list the CPU has to try to apply the "reject" items you did include in it's comparison for rejection = leads to rejecting legitimate targets....I think...)

Sure enough I was able to hear the targets you see below through the nulling and iron. Interestingly, I switched back to IM-16 once I got one that sounded ok thru the disc. pattern and most often it was lost in the low iron tones, certainly nothing that would have caught my ear as I swung by it. The site was pretty trashy, when in IM-16 the audio from each sweep usually contained 4-8 distinct signals from targets, mostly iron. Plus this house had several coal and ash dump areas that drove me crazy.

Not to oversimplify, but now I'm thinking I'll work a site a few times in IM-16 to get the stuff that my ears can hear through the iron and trash, and when the yield starts to drop off I'll switch to this discrimination pattern and let the CPU do some of the work. Any thoughts?

 

[yardminer]

Try the pic again resized

 

[wade tx]

n/t

 

[Arturo de Zorro]

or just the surface blanking? I tryed it once over a 10'x 10' spot I had cleared out with -12 iron mask (conduct) but didn't come up with anything but I will try it again next hunt.

 

[yardminer]

No, I did the ground blanking ritual (black magic or pure science?) with the sens. real low ..

Medium length story begins here.... skip if easily bored.

I've always gravitated towards working the EX2 with IM-16 because of my involvement in amateur radio. I used to spend a lot of time on the airwaves operating Morse Code. Most modern transcievers exceed the CPU/technological level and capability of an EXII by an order of magnitude or two. They have "filters" (read: discrimination patterns), Digital Signal Processing of received signals, noise blanking, notch filtering, etc.... I learned though that the best filtering and processing occurrs between your ears, as your brain listens to 55 gallons of noise and pulls out the 1 oz. of signal that you are trying to hear, decode, and understand. I came to grips with that early on, put the gadgets aside, and proceeded to "work" stations that some (but not all by any means) other operators couldn't hear or couldn't separate from the noise.

So, when I learned about the EXII it seemed like a "radio" that had no filters, etc....I could listen to all the signals and let my brain filter through the trash. The identical paradigm, except that .... the amateur radio RF signals I listened to on my headphones were actual signals, sent by humans, subject to atmospheric conditions. The signals I hear through the headphones hooked to my EXII are the CPU's audio frequency representations of what it thinks it sees in the soil, shaped and filtered through (AUDIO1, DEEP, FAST, GAIN=8, etc....). So what you hear through the 'phones is not the reality of what's below the coil, it's the EXII version of reality underground, modified by all the constraints you have programmed into it. IM-16 with all the options off, coupled with a complete understanding of the logic of the CPU(which I don't claim to posess) is probably the closest approximation to X-Ray vision. But you are still inherently limited to the capabilities of the machine, even @ IM-16 and gain 28+ etc. A horsehoe next to a half-dime....what's gonna happen there, hmmmm....

I'm intrigued by posts by people like Cody who obviously spend more time than me learning and mastering the machine, especially when they come at it from a logical angle. That's why I tried the ground blanking black-magic, and at least anecdotally it worked _ONE TIME_. I'll try again.

You never know, I might catch on and find some good stuff one day.

Yardminer