Issues with my Sovereign Elite

[oltimer1940]

Went to a beach in Southern NJ on Monday. Never got closer to the surf than about 50 Yds. Suddenly the machine started chattering and no adjustment would lessen the annoyance. Finally gave up. Yesterday I took the same machine to a local (for me) beach in Central Jersey and used it in the surf (never more than calf high). Only had one find in nearly 1/2 mile of search. Got out of the surf and the machine started chattering again. Returned the machine to the car and got my backup machine out, retraced my steps in the dry sand and found several more coins. Today I visited a Minelab dealer and we tried a replacement coil (Nel Hunter) - still a bit of chatter but it did find metal. The one thing I didn't check was for tones. Got home and tried the machine with the original coil again only to find that no matter what I tried, it was all the same tone (Quarter, Nickel, Dime, Penny, Gold - made no difference). Any thoughts/similar experience?

 

[oltimer1940]

Don't understand what happened, but the problem seems to have gone away. Maybe EMI issues as far as the chattering. Thanks for looking folks.

 

[Greg (E.Tn)]

Took it to a river today frequented by tourist "tubers."

It worked fine for the first 30 minutes or so, as my digging partner and I worked downstream, then I got to a section where I started getting threshold changes, falsing, etc., while operating in autotune.

Kept working downstream, and it lessened, the stopped, except for a few periods where it returned for about 10 seconds, stopped for a few, then returned for about 10 seconds again.

When we got back to our starting point, I asked Al if he had experienced anything similar, and he said yes--his Garrett AT Pro did the same thing at about the same place.

The only thing we could figure was EMI, maybe an electrical line run under the river (unlikely), as there are houses and tourist cabins on both sides.

Maybe interference from wireless connections in the cabins? A lot of them have wifi connections???

 

[GeorgeinSC]

I was given permission to detect a rental property on a local island. There was very little of the yard that I could detect due to the EMI that was coming from the A/C unit. One of my local ball parks has EMI there t comes and goes. A few minutes so bad that you can not detect and then it will be gone. Other days the is no emi at all.

 

[Greg (E.Tn)]

Over the years, I have been in various places using different detectors, and experienced the same.

Once years ago, I was detecting a wooded area on a high ridge overlooking the city of Knoxville, Tennessee, when my detector just went nuts for about a minute. I ended up sending it back, thinking it had major malfunctions going, then later took the replacement detector to the same spot and experienced the same symptoms.

I was standing there in the woods listening to my machine, fiddling with sensitivity and discrimination knobs, etc., then started looking around for power lines and such.

Turns out I was standing under some kind of radio repeater mounted high up on the side of a tree. I guess whenever a radio transmission went through the repeater, it interfered with my machine.

 

[Auriemma]

My Sov XS & XS2, both had to be repaired due to excess chatter. KellyCo repair said that some connections internally were corroded and shorting. Both were salt beach machines. Once cleaned the problem went away.

 

[Ron from Michigan]

Remember the band 1 and band 2 switch,which changing from band 2 to band 1 will act as a frequency adjustment.