Charles (Upstate NY)
Well-known member
Tony N (Michigan) said:Charles (Upstate NY) said:Increasing sensitivity does NOT cause falsing. The falsing is there no matter what you set your sensitivity or gain to. With the gain you can adjust how loud the falsing is. With sensitivity you can accept/reject falsing, as you lower the sensitivity it rejects the tiny false signals and tiny targets, then as you lower it further it rejects larger false signals and targets. But sensitivity does not cause or increase falsing.
Maybe I'm not communicating correctly.
Often when one ups the sensitivity too high, the machine chatters. There is an instability. Maybe this doesn't happen to you? It does to my Explorer.
No the Explorer is already chattering and unstable, this is not caused by setting your sensitivity too high. When you lower your Sensitivity you are notching out this chattering and instability much the same way you might notch out rusty bottle caps from the signal by painting that area black on the Smartfind screen. This is fundamental to understanding how to apply/adjust Explorer settings. Increasing sensitivity allows in more of the instability and chattering but does not cause it.
The Explorer transmits at 100% power, always, no matter what your settings are. You can lower your sensitivity to zero and its still transmitting at 100% power. You with me so far...therefore the receive winding in the coil has the strongest possible signal also no matter what your settings are, the target, mineralized soil, AC power noise, other local area interference, all lumped together in a blob. Your settings then slice and dice this signal, removing or notching bits of it, boosting some parts of it, think of it as trying to tune a radio to a far off station. You have no control over the radio station's signal, you can only try to clean up the signal you are receiving.
The lone exception to the above is the noise cancel button. If you connect an Explorer to an oscilloscope you can watch the 2 frequencies its transmits. Press the noise cancel button, you will see that it changes the frequencies slightly, cycling through I think 11 different frequencies or "channels" looking for the one with the lowest amount of interference.
Yes only 2 frequencies are transmitted, also fundamental to understanding how Explorers work. In simple terms its transmits 1 high frequency and 1 low frequency, here's the important part, its a square wave. Funny thing square waves if you transmit a square wave at 1 frequency, you get back that primary frequency PLUS multiple harmonics of that primary frequency at other frequencies. From just 2 transmitted primary frequencies the Explorer receives back and processes those 2 plus many of the harmonic frequencies they create hence the advertised 29 frequencies. But here's the important part, the first order harmonic frequency, its stronger than the 2nd and its stronger than the 3rd and so on so there's a limit to this trick as the harmonic frequencies are weaker and weaker the farther they are from the primary.
Spooky trivia of the day, some claim (I have never tested) that silver hits harder on some/one noise channels than others. That's weird but I guess possible because that's the one setting that is changing the 2 primary transmitted frequencies.
