explorer questions

[Anonymous]

had a couple of questions
1.some times when i am sweeping the coil and past over a target the audio goes thunk what does this mean?
2.when in im the curser moves from top left to top right and back and forth as i sweep. is this two targets one iron and one not ?
3on some signals i can only pick it up from one
direction what i mean is when i turn 90 degrees to it its not there .
4 and on some other signals sweeping from say left to right i get one aduio sound and from right to left a different ..i have dug some of these but was only able to find the non ferrous signal gave up looking for the other or it was not detecable after i did some digging ...

 

[Anonymous]

when the audio signal nulss should i stop swinging till the threshold resets or just continue on?

 

[Anonymous]

If you stop for everything that nulls the coil will never move.
The null is something you have disc out, some will bring the coil back over from a different direction to see if there might be a good target along with the bad.

 

[Anonymous]

Those are some tough questions, the very few times I have heard my explorer go "thunk" I have dug up a gold ring. Is it ID'ing down around nickels? A bad coil can do that too.
There are bounce patterns to watch for, I think Mike Moutray has some screen shots posted. Iron bounces left and right, but so do deep coins sometimes. The difference often is that iron will bounce from the top left corner to the far right side of the screen, with half the cursor off the screen, and crosshair about 1/4 inch down. That bounce pattern is nearly always a nail for me. Coins that bounce tend to bounce left from their coin position, but generally not much left of center screen. Maybe someone has a link to those screen pics.
If you are running say IM at -10 and get a high signal, then turn 90 degrees and get a null, thats a classic rusty nail signal. To test you could open your iron mask up to -16 and sweep it again from both directions, sweep it from the direction that its falsing high, pick a spot where you think the target is located, now turn 90, did it seem to move to a new location? Thats another clue that its a nail. No rule of thumb is 100% but generally the above holds true.
On number 4 thats not uncommon for a nail either. However its also not uncommon for a good target near iron. My explorer likes to latch onto a nail, if I sweep and hit the nail first it might stretch out over the good target. Comeing back the other direction it hits the coin first then the nail. What I do is try to snipe at where I think the coin might be with the front 2-3 inches of my coil, try to nibble off just the coin signal from another angle. If its a coin I'll generally get a signal that way. The mixed iron/coin signals are tough to learn, the more you dig the better you get at avoiding the nails and picking off the coins.
Beware the signal the vanishes after you dig a plug, thats why I don't hunt without my X1 probe. My last signal like that was an 1887 indian head, I dug a plug, out plopped the IH. I checked the hole with the probe, thought I heard another coin. Swepth the hole with the big coil and got nothing. I dug the whole a bit deeper and out came another 1887 indian head plus a seated dime. The bottom seems to fall out of the depth with the explorer once you dig a hole.