Having read several posts regarding coil size and the effect on depth, I was thoroughly confused by statements like "you will lose a little depth over the stock coil" or "this coil is deep". I hope this will clear things up for other newbies. It has helped my understanding of the relationship between coil size, sensitivity and depth.
Since it is raining here, I decided to do a little experimenting to try and get a better understanding of "deep" and "a little".
I tried to make this an "all things being equal" test.
First I built a small gantry using balsa wood and plastic. The whole thing is held together with super glue. I then mounted a balsa pendulum so that I could attach different objects and swing them in front of the coils at varying distances and sensitivity settings.
I set this up on a plastic workbench with a ruler on top and mounted my Explorer SE on a plastic saw horse. Other than the targets there was no metal within 3' of the detector.
I positioned the coil on the ruled surface and the gantry mounted targets 18" away and started inching them closer to the coil until I got a SOLID, clear, repeatable signal.
I will say that the targets started sounding off on average about an inch deeper than the distances in the picture below, however I would not classify them as solid. (I would dig them, but then again I have subscribed to the "dig everything deep" philosophy and I wanted to give results based on sounds that anyone would recognize as a good signal.)
I set the sensitivity to manual and as high as possible without any chatter.
Keeping in mind that ground mineralization etc. will affect how high you can run your sensitivity, I found the results very interesting. Now, if it will just stop raining so that I can test the results in the field....
If anyone has any suggestions on how to improve this test or can spot something that I have not taken into consideration let me know.
Since it is raining here, I decided to do a little experimenting to try and get a better understanding of "deep" and "a little".
I tried to make this an "all things being equal" test.
First I built a small gantry using balsa wood and plastic. The whole thing is held together with super glue. I then mounted a balsa pendulum so that I could attach different objects and swing them in front of the coils at varying distances and sensitivity settings.
I set this up on a plastic workbench with a ruler on top and mounted my Explorer SE on a plastic saw horse. Other than the targets there was no metal within 3' of the detector.
I positioned the coil on the ruled surface and the gantry mounted targets 18" away and started inching them closer to the coil until I got a SOLID, clear, repeatable signal.
I will say that the targets started sounding off on average about an inch deeper than the distances in the picture below, however I would not classify them as solid. (I would dig them, but then again I have subscribed to the "dig everything deep" philosophy and I wanted to give results based on sounds that anyone would recognize as a good signal.)
I set the sensitivity to manual and as high as possible without any chatter.
Keeping in mind that ground mineralization etc. will affect how high you can run your sensitivity, I found the results very interesting. Now, if it will just stop raining so that I can test the results in the field....
If anyone has any suggestions on how to improve this test or can spot something that I have not taken into consideration let me know.