Cody, Special setting for mineralized soil

[AK in KY]

Cody, My ground measures -92/-95 on the DFX I used to have. Are there any settings you would recommend for the EX11? I have not found any coin deeper than 4". The sites I am working are as far back as 1780 and the latest is 1890.

Thanks AK in KY

 

[Cody]

I have never had any problems with the Explorer and mineralized soils with depth. I would go to ALL METAL, clear screen, in Smartfind screen and look at the depth reading. If you are detecting iron or anything at depth then you are not hearing or don't have deeper coins at that locations. It is easy to hear coins down to 6"but the deeper ones often give a very faint hit. It is critical to have the sensitivity up as high as you can with stability. A consideration is the amount of discrimination. I have yet to see a detector that did not detect deeper in all metal than in discrimination. However, one reason I like the Explorer compared to my other machines is because in area where minerals are a problem to the others the Explorer does fine. As you know that does not mean that your area will be the same as where I hunt but I also use the DFX so understand -95/+95 soil.

Anyhow check it out and I look forward to seeing your results.

 

[AK in KY]

I do see what I think is iron at depths below 6". I will try the all metal with three tones and see what happens. The ground is very very dry here, so it may not be a fair test.

Thanks
AK in KY

 

[Cody]

I went out a couple of days and there were hits where I could not dig the target up. The soil is so dry and packed and it is HOT so I marked the general location. I am about reading to give it up till we get some soaking rains in September. Good luck and keep up posted. I have been using detectors since the late sixties and always look forward to learning what these great hobby detectors will and will not do.

Have you tried coins in clay with the coins at different angles to see what a hit sounds like for a coin at 90 compared to flat. We don't get a great big strong signal for a dime at 90. I have tested coins to see how they respond at different angles and distances from the coil. Most of us, I think, will dig a hole and put a coin flat in the hole, and then stand right in back of the test location and sweep the coil over the coin to see how it sounds. Think of a coin at 90 degrees that is off to the right of left of our sweep and how that will sound. MattR, a retired engineer in the UK wrote a book on the DFX and while talked to him he mentions that we only get about 20% of the use that is there from our coils. I was amazed at that but when I think of sweeping the coil and not really taking our time I can see how we miss a lot of targets. Working nice and slow, pinpointing a hit, and then really working that hit can really pay off with deep coins or co-located targets.

In discrimination I have done better with the Explorer than the DFX but in all metal see no difference other than the tones and settings. One is a frequency domain machine and the other a time domain which is a major factor in how the soil is rejected to my understanding. I very much enjoy the 1024 notches for discrimination on the Explorer and how they can be used. I have found the Explorer to be my major machine but keep the DFX and Sovereign as backups. Backups is really a way of saying I want more than one detector. Ha ha

 

[AK in KY]

One more thing, it seems using the three tones with gain at 4 and sens at 24 in the digital screen, it is slower to show the target compared to having all the tones. Does that make sense?

 

[Cody]

That is one I will check as I have not noticed that. I am not sure of the requirements of the processor to update the digital screen. If we saw a digital reading for each sweep over a target we would see a stutter so I am sure there is some kind of averaging of the hits. Audio1 will give a better ID and takes longer to process so this in conjunction with less tones may cause a slower update. I did not think the tones would do this and would have expected a faster update if anything. Anyhow I will see if I can test this to see if reduced tones change the update speed.

I like tones and I guess most of us do compared to a constant tone. When I think about tones it comes down to a go or no go. The next step in my thinking is if we know something is iron or "something else" and what are we doing to do about that. Iron is a low tone with non-ferrous in the mid and upper tones. If I don't know what a mid and upper tone is other than it is not iron then it seems all I need in reality is two tones. One for iron and one for everything else since I am going to dig "everything else". My next step is why clutter my hearing up with more tones than needed when all I really need is two. I do like the mid tone for pulltabs and the like but really only need two. One for iron and one for everything else. I then go by the digital readings and have done a lot better after I got rid of all the extra tones that were not really doing anything for me. In a way it was like taking something out of a box or have a good guess of what was in the box, the soil, but I still have to take the object out of the box. this is the thinking that got me down to three tones and if we look at so many of the TID machines it is from 2 to 4 tones which seems to go with my thoughts on this. For me there can be so many tones that they only confuse the process.

I play a guitar and keyboard so know a lot of other folks that enjoy these instruments. I have yet to see a musician that can do what we see some user claim to do and that is know all the tones on a detector and what target has generated that tone. I thought for a long time that there were 31 tones on the Explorer which is one for each conductive or ferrous level. However, I connected the output jack to a chromatic monitoring device that indicates the note for a target. I did not mess with this much but say only a few actual notes but what changed was the pitch. Don't take this to the bank but it looks to me like there are only three or 4 and it is the pitch we are messing around with.

 

[AK in KY]

Cody, thanks for your help and let me know how your "speed" test turns out.

AK in KY

 

[LilloEsquilo]

Quick comment on detector that goes deeper in discriminate mode than all metal - the Minelab Musketeer Advantage is just such an animal. Weird but true factoid for any Musky users out there.