Explorer II problems

[brissietex]

Hi all...

Don't you hate it when the conditions are so perfect to detect and your machine goes and ruins the moment by misbehaving on you. That happened to me this morning...

I woke up early as at 4am (what a perfect time for a pre-work hunt) and found myself reaching for my detector without a hint of hesitation. I got out to the beach with my fully charged ExpII + 15" WOT coil just as the sky was growing light and I was still the only soul to be seen. I turned on the machine and hit the sand. My settings are as always at the start...20 Sens Manual, Deep, Ferrous. I hit Noise Cancel as I swung out to the wet sand. This was going good until I hit the wet sand when my machine falsed to the point of irritation. I "factory reset" the machine and went to the Noise Cancel again. Still falsing like crazy on the damp and wet sand up and down the beech but as soon as I went to the dry sand, it quieted down. This never happens to me on this beach, mind you.

A couple things to note. My targets seem to be 'off'...targets are not showing up in the usual place on screen (I open it up fully in Iron Mask mode). Depth is totally off with only shallow targets hitting consistently. Even had a large jar lid on the surface barely register with no overload signal. I took off the coil cover and cleaned the coil...no difference if falsing.

The machine was working fine a week ago but I had quit early with the same falsing occurring (had put it up to a low battery at the time but now I don't think so).

Anyway, on the drive home, I came up with the 3 possible points of failure:
1) The box
2) The coil
3) The rechg battery pack

1) is possible but since the machine was stable a week ago, it doesn't make sense since there has been no hits or swamps of the box. 2) is also possible but the WOT coil has always been stable and nothing other than maybe moisture and sand on it, has happened to it. 3) seems to me the most likely culprit since low voltages could definitely cause erratic behaviour. I have my rechargeable AAs charging up for that testing.

Has anyone seen this happen? Could the machine be malfunctioning in the multi-freq circuitry to cause such problems? I am seriously thinking about sending my machine over to Minelab for a testing and tuneup. The machine has always been stable so this recent episode of instability has me worried.

cheers...Keith

ps I did find 5 bucks in change and a big ol' diamond(pretty sure its CZ) silver earring. Maybe the diamond is real so I can go get myself an SE. Wishful thinking eh?

 

[digitrich]

If the falsing occurred only in wet sand and the machine works perfect in dry sand or dirt then it's probably not your coil or your machine, because if it were either of those it would be happening continuously. First off, where was your gain set at? Read my post above "awesome explanation Chris". Until I owned two different SE's, I thought my machine was occasionally, with no explanation, totally screwed up. It would happen every so often at a site where it worked fine yesterday, then all of a sudden it acted broken. And I would start considering sending it into Mine lab only to have the same machine pull a dime out of iron infested ground the following day in a pounded out place, at a depth that was incredible. Then, I received my second machine and every time it has occurred since, I immediately pull out the second machine, only to find in every case, the second one acted the same way. Call it solar flares, bad choice of settings on that day, condensation on the circuit board, stepped on a stick, stumbled on a stone...but the fact is they both do it together. A specific example is 2 nights ago, in a cornfield after copious amounts of rainfall that day, one of my units did exactly what you are saying. My other one did the same. I was in really thick iron that kept falsing high silver. I was swinging slow trying to pick the coins out of the trash, every time I bumped a stalk, the ground or even changed sweep direction while over an iron target, it falsed. I got pissed and swung faster and then all of a sudden at a faster sweep speed, now in auto sensitivity, fast on, deep off, gain 7 then 6, the falsing disappeared, and the silver started to ring out from the iron tones like the iron could no longer mask the silver even though it was ten nails to a sweep. I don't know if the faster sweep speed caused the auto ground balance to work better or what, but it did. At the time I was using a Sun Ray 8, which is larger than I would normally use in trash that dense. Point is, for what ever reason, a slight change frequently overcomes these situations that I normally would walk away from thinking I found an area where my detector didn't work or it was broken. The only other thing that I can tell you is in those situations where I received lots of falsing, for some reason on those days, my machines were running really sensitive and unstable, inversely, that means really well, better than normal and on those days, once I got my settings right, sites I thought were empty produced like virgin ground, once I finagled my settings a bit or changed my approach.

 

[Hard Nosed Dave]

I had a very similar problem, with my Explorer and 15 WOT coil, when I put my SENSITIVITY to MANUAL and beyond 17.
Up until that moment I would run it up to 23-25 at the same site.

I found that when I connected the coil and slightly twisted, lightly jiggled or tapped the coil cable at the point it connected on my Explorer that it would make an audible signal. Only happened at that point between the section of curly coil cable bit and the cable connector into the Explorer. I put a meter on the relevant pairs of the coil and one pair showed a break in continuity when I moved the connector from side to side.

I ended up cutting the coil connector off and doing a re-solder. That was two weeks ago.

This week the same problem occurred. I gently jiggled the cable where it goes into the WOT coil and it stopped.

So far all's back to good with the WOT.

Hope you sort out this problem

 

[KCK]

n/t

 

[brissietex]

Hi all...

Took the ExpII out yesterday with the WOT coil on and then today with the stock 10" coil.

The WOT coil exhibited an oscillating threshold everywhere as if it was falsing like heck. I tried every setting that I could think of and nope, the system never settled down tho auto sens did allow it to be of some use.

The stock 10" coil was fine on dry sand but on the wet, I got an awful lot of iron null outs (Iron Mask -7) but this may be possible since I've never had the detector on this beach. Mind you, I don't trust the 10"...it seems to be much more unstable than my WOT coil when I first got it. In fact, on the other beach, I almost threw the detector into the ocean when I first got it after I decided the 10" coil was a piece of...I bought the ExpII used so the stock coil may have been mistreated before I even got it. The WOT was the coil that kept me coming back to the Exp...it was stable at depth and able to pinpoint like a bloody champ. Not to mention covering the ground pretty efficiently. In comparison, the stock 10" sounds like a symphony when hitting targets...something that rarely occurs with the WOT.

Still pondering in sending the machine down to Adelaide for a tuneup and then shipping the WOT over to Coiltek to have them look at it. Should still be under warranty since less than year old. Too bad, I don't have a third coil to test it out with since I am not really sure about the 10" coil (depth was okay but seemed never to really lock on anything like the WOT does and pinpointing is pitiful with it....funny how the much bigger WOT nails pinpointing much better).

Thanks for all your help. Looks like I'll have to rely on either the HH PI (may be doing some diving near where I was today) or Xterra70 for awhile. Sure wish would bring out a 12"+ coil to that line...the 10" is just too small of coverage for me (bloody lots of beach to cover here).

cheers....Keith