Hi all,
I am brand new to detecting so I want to start out on the right foot. I picked up a Fisher F4 last week and have been practicing in my back yard. My only question so far is:
1. Do I need to ground balance if I am running in "DISC" mode?
The manual only talks about this if you are running "AUTO TUNE" hardcore mode. Pluses or minuses would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance for your help!
The F4 will only GB and work in all metal and won't transfer over to the disc side, in disc it reverts back to standard factory pre-set GB settings and acts and hunts exactly like my beloved F2 minus the all metal setting and there is nothing you can do about that.
There used to be ton of arguments on the forums about this very subject because owners would call the factory and ask about it and half of them were told it does and the other half were told it doesn't...depending on who you talked to.
Bad training I guess, on most other subjects those guys that answered the phone were great but in this one they dropped the ball a lot and confused a whole lot of people for years.
Or maybe they were told to do that to make sales because the F4 really wasn't a huge upgrade or great value over the F2 at all, very few people hunted in all metal but if you got a new F4 you had to pay $200 more than the F2 to get those two features that most never used.
Eventually the engineers that designed the thing at FTP came in some forums and finally cleared it up...GB settings do not transfer over to disc.
End of discussion.
Not really a huge issue though, I used the F2 in both great dirt and some of the worst dirt you can imagine and paid for it more than 10x's over its $200 cost in the coins and silver and gold jewelry it found for me in the 3 years I used it.
It locks on coins like a religion, the 5.6kHz frequency is perfect for clad and not to much of a slouch on silver and other coins either...it's
not the deepest tool in the world but plenty deep enough to find 80-90% of the treasure we look for in most sites.
On jewelry, and at the time I concentrated in that way more than coins, well, I brought so much silver and gold jewelry into show off at my monthly club meetings 4 guys with very high end detectors went out and bought F2's because they saw how I did and what I found and seeemed to think it was magic.
I killed every other member 3 years running in clad counts for the year usually by several thousand coins.
I brought in silver coins too and a lot of silver jewelry, also, as far as gold I brought in so much of that stuff that after four months showing off gold I missed one month and several members made jokes... "What, no gold this month?"
It wasn't magic...the magic was actually in how well I learned it, the language, the tones, the numbers and screen and tone target behavior.
Both of these have the normal language you learn but they also possess a deeper, more hidden language I discovered that If you learn it well will pay off in dividends you can't imagine...yet.
These are entry level detectors but they don't seem to know that, top end Fisher detector DNA runs through these two also...hard as it might be to believe.
If you really want to learn this thing as quick as possible and spin your wheels way less in the initial learning curve you might want to read one of the longest threads on any forums that I started and monitored for years.
It's all about the F2 but the F4 can be substituted easily if you hunt mostly in disc, (as I said they are exactly the same unit in disc).
Many owners chimed in with tips, tricks and their thoughts and I put down everything I learned from day one in it too...all my insights, observations and theories.
I have been told by many it shortcutted them quickly to the fun stuff after they used and understood what was in it.
I spent over 1000 hours with this thing, learned a ton and got quite good with it and put it all down in that log....also it has tons of great pics from many F2/F4 owners so if you want to be inspired as to exactly what yours can do if you learn it well.......
Google
F2 review...final impressions below
It will pop up.
Now go, read, learn and dig a lot...things will get way easier and much more fun if you do.
If you have other questions in the future just ask, I haven't used my F2 in years but I still remember it all.
I think.
