F5 detection depth

[John W.H.]

I've had an F5 for about 6 months now and was really unhappy with it for about the first 4 months. Ran my gain at about 35 and was only getting about 4 inches max on coins. I've since started running the gain at 85-90 and did gain some depth although the detector is much noisier and I get alot of falsing. I find coins up to 6 inches sometimes now but I feel I should still be getting better depth. I read about some users getting 8 inches or better. Any advice on tuning for better performance??

 

[BH_Landstar_]

Most coins will be found in the 2" - 5" range / depth. Coins that are below the 5" depth are rare unless the ground has been dug over or the ground is very soft allowing the coin to sink to that depth.

Falsing can be because you have either not set it up / ground balanced it properly or there is EMI due to electric cables nearby.

The F5 does not need to be set up above 80 on the gain in most cases. I run mine at 75 - 80 with a range of -3 to +4 threshold, and also with the number 2 freq and not the default of 1, as I find that it hits coins and gold better in the ground where I live.

I have found coins at 7" - 9" depth, but these have been very rare.

The trick with the F5 is to play with it's settings, it has loads of them due to having the gain and threshold knobs to adjust the settings, not many metal detectors with a visual display have this ablilty to be 'fine tuned' by the user. For example, the Omega 8000 does not have the gain and threshold on two separate control knobs so it has less in the way of user adjustments over the F5.

 

[Mike Hillis]

Hi John,
What are your typical ground phase numbers and how many FE304 bars do you normally see when you pump the coil?
What tone mode are you using?
What threshold setting do you normally use?
Are you using headphones?

HH
Mike