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F70 learning curve - still struggling

F

Fantax

New member
Well, I have been out in the cold and warm, soggy and damp, old parks and new places and am still struggling for settings to maintain sanity. I am finding some coins (clad). I am also finding old pull tabs, new pull tabs, old rusty bottle caps, and various other trash. Yet to find silver or jewelry. Details - F70, 11" DD - and various discrimination settings. I tried the "classic coin", Russ's coin, and any other combos I could find, but either get numerous low pitched iron signals, My approach is to find a metal free representative area, ground balance and start sweeping. DISC 6, Speed Default, SENS about 50-60, THRESH -2 to +1 and TONES 2F. In most cases, this results in a symphony of beeps an burps on about every sweep. After digging up nothing worth digging, I start decreasing sens and increasing thresh, and fiddling with tones which really makes me crazy. I have a lot of experience with the older discriminator units where I could put up with constant tone that would distinctively beep on a good hit or wobble with good hit that was deep. Anybody have a set of F70 DD settings that would take advantage of the new, deep, blade coverage and provide noises that could be translated (or learned) without the gibberish that I have experienced? I keep reading and re-reading the setting definitions to figure out how I can tame the beast down a bit when hunting in a normally occupied public space with normal amounts of trash. These places are old and I know there is silver there just waiting to be liberated. Geographic location - western PA. I did notice the ground balance seems to be of dubious value in the discrimination mode - perhaps balance in all metal? I spent 45 years doing Non Destructive Testing and mastered old analog instruments as well as the new digital instruments. I have a grasp on the theory, effects of the controls and variables, coil designs, etc. Any and all help is appreciated. I have a notebook and am keeping notes of settings to arrive at some happy medium for normal detecting. Once I have it figured out I will share with the group - just trying to minimize the pain and frustration to get there.

Thanks in advance
 
Ok well first of all you will have to set your detector to what your ground and the emi will let you, if that's a thres of -3 to -5 and a sens of 35-50 then that's fine. Otherwise you will get a constant beep and chirp while standing still and swinging the detector. I don't know how your ground is there but I have no trouble with the ground balance, maybe try it in AM. Are you making sure that your spot is free of signals? Maybe the machine running to hot is causing ground balance trouble. I know that some places I hunt are just terrible as far as the dirt is concerned, and the emi and I have to hunt around -5 to -7 with a sens of 35-40. Also I like to run my disc around 20 to quiet down the iron grunts and clicks. Hope some of this helps.
 
A simple thing that has helped me is to carry a quarter in my pocket and drop it in the middle of the area I am hunting. Pass over it at different heights to get the ideal sound down in your mind. The F70 may high tone false from time to time but it will repeat a good signal. You just have to learn to second sweep the area where you had the random high tone and if it doesn't lock in and repeat keep on trucking. Once you get the sound down you will lock in on it and learn to dismiss the random chirps. They are noisy but they do get the job done. You don't have to run them hot to find the good stuff. Keep swinging and let us know how you are doing.

Don
HH
 
hang in there fantax, like the obove posters are saying start off with a low sense setting and a minus threshold setting and try raising the disc to 15 to 20 most gold rings will read at 22 or higher that will make it run much quieter and smoother also if your coin hunting try 3 or 4 tones for a day good luck hh
 
Great advice from everybody, and I as well concur with the - thresh to run it more stable and quiet...one thing I may add is you can notch out iron, and try the 3H or 4H or even the DP tones...seems most everyone hunts in those...don't give up, you've had some other equipment you got familiar with in the past, and I have high hopes you will master this thing. I hunted for the better part of a year in AT if you can believe that, I didn't know any better and was afraid of missing something, talk about a chattering mess! And had to watch the screen display for the signal...then I switched to DP tones and have not used any other setting besides that one, and rarely even look at the screen anymore except to check on the battery life..It should not be pinging and popping unless the coil is over something,.if you can get it to run STABLE, those pings of silver will stop you dead in your tracks with no mistake as to what you just crossed your coil over. Oh hey, I just remembered this too...you can push that HZ button to settle it down as well, if its popping and pinging and going crazy. Good Luck!
Mud
 
Great responses and advice - I know that the machine is powerful - just need to get a better understanding - I will try the suggestions, take notes and come up with something that works in this area with this soil. Once I arrive at something that works, I will share it with the group and other newbies to ease the learning for them. This forum is a great source of knowledge and experience!
 
I would always recommend ground balancing in Auto Tune. For those of us who started detecting decades ago you always ground balanced in the all metal mode. Very hard to "hear " the ground response clearly in Disc. So....seriously use Autotune mode and you will hear the ground response as you pump the coil. Stop pumping when the ground stops responding significantly to the coil being raised and lowered.

Also do not crank the sens up too high doing a GB...anywhere around 60-70 works good...any higher and the threshold will warble in autotune.

If the ground is real wet....you will get some falsing...just the way it is. I live in Maine and the ground is wet now and in some areas it is just a pain until it drains abit. So...hunting in wet conditions is asking for falsing.

Now...you may not be finding silver and jewelry because...there is none. You can't find what is not there. Like fishing in a sterile lake...can't catch what isn't there. Just because a lake has water does not mean there is a huge Trout waiting to be caught. May have been fished out prior. Very hard to find spots that someone..or many someones have not hunted. Even DEEP in the Miane woods...I find other relic hunters have been there. So....keep that in mind.

Without sounding tardo...you have to be in the right spot to find jewelry.....and more is lost at the beaches than parks. I have hunted parks over the years and never found jewelry. Many coins and mostly clad as that is the dominant coins. People hunted these parks years ago and got a lot of the silver before me....and no one is dropping silver coins to replenish...but there is plenty of fresh clad being lost...so odds are against finding silver.

Now you will find silver but more likely in places you did not consider. Why is that...cause if it is a place YOU considered first.....well someone else has considered it long before you came along. So...think differently....not the common places that anyone would have thought about. Unless you live in the ONE TOWN in the US that NO ONE has ever detected.

I have detected now for 30+ years and it is a lot tougher to find goodies than it used to be. More so it is tougher to find new spots....but find a spot that has not been hunted AND had activity that caused people to lose coins or jewelry...well....you will be grinning.

Now....you said you were some kind of a tech used to using different kinds of test equipment. O.K.....well.....would you expect good results if you started changing a bunch of settings on your test equipment because you were not getting the results you wanted. Certainly not. I know...I was an Engineering Tech for years....changing more than one parameter ata time or session is asking for poor results and you won't even know what made it better or worse if you start making multiple changes.....it is just a cr@p shoot at best.

If you GB in Autotune like I said and get it close....it will work. Keep your sensitivity around 60 or so. More sens does not add a lot of depth...more so just makes deeper targets respond louder. 60 sens is deep enough. Keep your threshold at a level that is keeping the detector stable while the coil is motionless on the ground. If you lower the threshold too much you significantly lose response on small coins and jewelry. I disagree greatly with the suggestion to lower this. Lowering the threshold response just 2 numbers will have a far more drastic effect on deep small targets than lowering the sensitivity by 10-15 points. Lowering threshold is last resort and ONLY when YOU KNOW that you need to....and you currently do not know what you need to so..leave it alone.. I would keep it at 0 period. if the machine chatters drop sens a bit or change frequencies. if the detector is chatty while the coil is motionless and your sens is below say 70 or so...try changing frequency.

If the chatty noise occurs while you are sweeping the coil well...could be normal...or could be not. If the ground balance is good...and the machine is quiet with the coil on the ground or just off the ground well..it is NOT EMI. So...if those are good and you hear chatty noise as you sweep...it is probably because the detector is responding to what it detecting. The F-70 like the F-75 will respond to small pieces of metal and more so ground minerals. That is the price for using a very sensitive machine...you will get a little chattiness. Generally if it is ground minerals than the chattiness will usually be the iron tone. So if it is noisy and most of it is that low iron grunt...no big deal. Deal with it.....that is the rule. You can bump disc up a tad to lower the noise but try not to eliminate iron completely. Too many people want to shutup iron sounds but you pay a price for that....so just enough to keep her mellow.

Now if instead you have a lot of high tone falsing well....could be multiple issues. Most common is ground falsing from denser ground minerals...ie rocks...or coal cinders etc. These will fals high and not low....also pockets of wet ground where water collects loves to false high...right around silver. Since you cannot manually set the GB you can't offset for this. On manual GB machines you can slightly set the GB positive to get rid of this.

If you want to learn the machine then be careful on how high you raise discrimination. Again all of us old timers almost always run discrimination low..very low. You can't hear the iron grunt that is present with a bottlecap if you disc it out...you will only hear the false high hit from the bottecap. Bottlecaps are not iron they are steel....an alloy..so they do not register always as iron...but they usually will give a mixed signal. This is tue for many pieces of rusty iron.

Sweep thse targets with the toe or leading edge of the coil once you locate it. If the target gives an iron tone with the toe of the coil but then gives a higher coin tone when swept under the center of the coil....well you have iron junk. Coins will give a good non iron tone when swept near the toe.....oh they may jump a few VDI numbers but they won't go iron . Junk targets will jump all over...so move on and leave the target be.

So....as long as you keep changing parameters you will not learn the machine...keep the changes small or just make one until you know what affect it had and whether you liked it or not. Playing with knobs is bad mojo....or as a line in my favorite movie...."buttons aren't toys"
 
Hey Fantax, I'm with you, the learning curve and constant chatter just got to be too much. Bought an AT Pro and I'm enjoying detecting once more. Roger
 
Yes, the F70 is a racehorse. The pair do make a good team, since they use the same batteries and all, hope you find some good stuff with the At!
For me, the F70 is my go to unit. The At gets to do the deep water work.
Mud
 
Thxs Azsh07 you have helped me tremedoisly with that last post of yours. I got a F70 over the winter and been out with it 3 times now and have been shaking my head the whole time. I had a F5 last year for a few months and hated it. And the F70 was following suit. but after reading your post it opened my eyes to a few things and I think i will be loving it soon enough. I was planning on going out this morning but we got a 1" of snow/sleet over night. what a crappy spring here in WI.
 
Try the 10" concentric for awhile. Sensitivty around 80, Threshold -2 or -3, disc 6. Try tone 1 for awhile and see what you think.

Rick N. MI
 
Update - I went out yesterday and hunted the fringes of a public park using the following parameters:
F70 DD Coil
Disc 21
Speed de
sens 51
thresh -2
Tones 2F
Notch 1
found a iron-free area and ground balanced in AT - then switched to disc. Not real sure that the GB transferred over so I did a GB in disc mode also.
Got random iron beeps (low burps), high random chirps ?, and solid repeatable high tones that were zinc pennies, couple of newer nickels, clad dimes and clad quarters. Deepest was a clad quarter @ 5". Remaining coins were easily determined to be good hits and normally ID'd with high confidence. This setup was a killer for dimes and quarters - good loud signals although the dimes were a bit of a challenge to pinpoint due to peripheral junk. I am getting better at pinpointing with the DD coil. False positives were normally tabs, rusted caps or can shrapnel from lazy mowers who just run over cans with the mower. Also got some junk jewelry. I found if I increased the thresh to 0 or a + number it got pretty noisy. Tried DP tone for a bit but did not like the result with the other parameter combination. Any advice on what I may be giving up in depth or potential high value targets? This combo did discriminate between newer square tabs and nickels pretty well, and I dug older pull tabs to avoid missing potential rings. Hope to get out today to continue my quest for optimum settings for the typical soil characteristics here in western PA. - applying the advice and suggestions given in this post.

Thanks again everyone for the help!!!
 
I feel your frustration Fantax. I went through the same thing. You want to know how I solved the problem? Sold the F70 and bought an AT Pro. Now I'm one happy camper. Roger
 
Second follow up and more field trials -
Went back to my "old sawdust piles" where I picked 197 coins (with my old Bounty Hunter Red Baron). Waded into the multiple hit zone starting at the fringes - using the following parameters:
F70 DD Coil
Disc 21
Speed de
sens 51
thresh 0
Tones Delta Pitch
Notch 1
Ground balanced in discrim mode on clean patch outside the circle of hits - this time I switched to Delta Pitch to give it a fair shake on known coin targets. It was helpful and the VDI was pretty accurate as long as the targets were solitary. Took a tip from Mudpuppy and worked from the outside fringes to maximize the chance of having only one target under the reach of the DD coil. Did the 90 degree pinpoint method raising the coil up 5-6 inches since all the coins were 3" or less deep. Pinpointing still improving but there were a few dimes and pennies that proved elusive. Also multiple or close targets made for a bunch of probing to find the little suckers. Also noted that the worms did not like the passing of the coil - could be used as an expensive worm finder for fishing bait! Picked about 110 coins in 2 hours and left a bunch more there - mostly dimes and pennies - several quarters and 8 nickels. Will go back with different settings to see if I can improve. Bottom line - it is possible to tame the F70 down for shallow clad without going crazy.

As noted on previous posts - when I first found the sawdust pile places - I ditched the F70 for my old Bounty Hunter simply because of the precise pinpointing with the 6" concentric coil. To all F70 new guys - hang in there - there is hope and I am starting to like it a little more every time I use it. It is a lot easier to sweep than the old beast and 4 batteries for days of hunting beats 16 batteries for 8 hours of hunting.
 
I don't know if its the coil, or the stabbing, but they sure do come boiling up out of the ground! I take along a ziplock bag and pick them up, then dump them in a dirt filled container in the truck! For fishing gills in the Fall! You will get really good in heavy tight coin spills by raising that big coil and only using about a golfball size circle of it right under the PP area without hitting the pp button...little tiny wiggles, locks on, and stab! Those heavy spills mask a lot of coins...who knows what all is in there?..big fun unraveling them! especially when theres several under the coil at one time...Good report! :thumbup:
Mud
 
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