MarkCZ said:
Ed Steinhoff said:
I hunted a small school totlot in january, shooting through 8 to 10 inches of snow with the f-70 carring the f-75 11" eliptical coil tuned up the settings to make up for the extra depth and pulled 34 clad coins in an hour.
Went back to the same tot lot yesterday with the same big coil. turned it way down to narrow the signal band so not to false on the equipment. setteing disc 6, speed de, sens 35, thres -3, 4=h tomes.
pulled 114 coins and a mood ring in two hours.
When you get yours from ftp, hang on for the ride!!
HH Ed in co.
So, what do you think of my idea of getting 11" DD coil for my F70?
Mark
This is actually my favorite and most useful all around coil.
The 5" DD sniper is a wonder, in heavy trash that thing can snake around trash, give very accurate ID's, goes amazingly deep in my soil because it will match the standard elliptical at least, and with one find can usually pay for itself quickly in gold or a little longer in the clad and silver it will sniff out.
The standard 10" is also amazing and I have some new found respect for this thing considering what it has done for me since putting it on and using it since mid Jan. when I was able to get out and hunt again so I will be using that one a lot more this year.
3 gold rings, 9 silver jewelry targets, a Dragoon button and 2 silver coins most of that found in some pretty heavy trash with that coil so far this year.
I can get great ID's up to the 8-9" area, the screen usually goes blank on me on 10" or deeper targets but I have dug a few at that level, most of the time beaver tail tabs that maddeningly come in as solid and repeatable high tones at that depth, but still the depth reading was right on and there were actual targets down there which is fantastic.
I have also seen pinpoint numbers past the 10" mark on targets with that elongated concentric but didn't dig them because I hunt public parks and I suspected iron, plus most of my good and older coin targets usually hover around the 6-8" area but nice to know I can get down there with this coil.
Hunting in sites with a huge blanket of pop tops this is the coil I go for because there is absolutely no issue with these at all using the concentric and it is even faster and more efficient at problem sites with large amounts of this sort of trash than the sniper.
The big DD, however, is probably the best all around coil I have and because the F70 is a chameleon and can change into several different detectors with different settings the big DD can change along with it and you can use it to hunt just about any kind of site you come across and hunt them well.
Let me tell you, or even better show you, what this coil has found me in several completely different sites under wildly different conditions.
First coverage.
If you are in a wide open area and want to cover some ground nothing better than that long scanning field for this task.
I never get the feeling I am missing anything when using this one, and going slow is usually the smart thing to do most of the time but the Fishers are really fast and forgiving in this area and in the case of the F70/F75/T2 platforms a faster sweep will actually do better on acquiring and ID'ing really deep targets rather than slow.
Weird to try to wrap your head around that fact which is opposite thinking using most detectors but true never the less.
Depth.
Definitely deeper than the standard 10" by at least a couple of inches but I think in my case it is even more than that in my great soil.
Again 6-8" is usually where I need to be to dig most of my oldest stuff but I have gone further.
In an area with the most severe EMI I have ever come across and also severe trash since this was a public park that has history back to the early 1900's, I rolled over the best coin spill of my life with 4 coins spread out over an area about a foot square that jumped a bit from zinc to dimes but had such solid tones I had to see what was down there.
Depth ID'd at the 7-8" level and 4 coins were every bit of that and maybe one or two a bit more at about 9"...one older wheat in the teens and 3 Indian head cents from the late 1800's to the early 1900's.
I have dug several of those high tone tabs at the 10-12" level with screen info that had high numbers too and also super nice solid repeating tones.
Not sorry I dug them that is just what you have to do in these cases but glad there was something down there to dig.
One day a signal like this will be something better than a tab for me I am sure.
Once I got a signal in that same park away from that heavy EMI and got a signal in disc that was solid, repeating, had numbers on the screen on every pass from two directions that jumped a bit but stayed between 23 and the low 30's.
When I used the pinpoint button the screen said 14-15" and that one I had to dig just to see what this thing was.
It turned out to be a thumb ringer off an old bicycle bell that out of the ground showed up as a 25-27 signal...and I measured the depth on that one also.
Every bit of 15" and my jaw dropped.
Target separation.
Again at that old park near the edge with that severe EMI I rolled over a funny signal bouncing from iron to high, but as I made some short quick side to side sweeps I kept seeing flashes of the same numbers in the middle that peaked my curiosity because they were the same every time as I moved the coil over the area in quick short side to side passes.
This one turned out to be a gold ring with some huge rusted iron on one side very deep that had to be close and within inches to the side of the ring, and a small piece of rusted iron that was shallow was about 2-3" away from the ring on the opposite side that I dug.
I have no idea what this signal would have looked or sounded like if I had rolled over all three of these targets from a different 90 degree angle, but in this case the long thin scanning field picked them all up and separated them enough to give me indications to dig.
It turns out the middle numbers I saw were higher than the ring showed when I got it out of the ground so it was up-averaged due to that iron in the vicinity, but those numbers did repeat and that was my cue to dig and so glad I did.
Heavy trash.
As Ed said above the great thing about turning down the sense while using the big DD coil is it seems to have the effect of shrinking and reducing that big scanning field to a very precise and laser-like instrument.
When hunting parks I might come across those wide open large areas using the big DD, but I also might wander over to areas with super heavy trash also on the same hunt and I just don't want to go back to the truck and change to the sniper coil in those situations because I am inherently lazy.
In those cases I just turn the sense down to maybe the 30-40 range and use the big coil and I still have supreme confidence I can pluck out the better targets in a sea of trash doing it this way.
Depth is still great, I can hit a dime at 5" easily with my sense below 20 so at 30 or above I can get to the depth needed for most of my targets without a doubt.
Using this technique I have found many coins and other great targets like jewelry in trash so heavy you would have thought I was crazy to even try that with a coil this big...but that is just one of the amazing abilities things the upper end Fishers can do.
At one old park I did just that and found myself in front of a waiting area at a decades old tennis court.
Park benches were here, grass areas to sit on while waiting for a court and it was right on the edge of the park near parking spots so lots of traffic walking over this grass.
I can't describe the heavy amount of tabs of all kinds, foil, can slaw and pop tops among other garbage this area had after years and years of people dropping that stuff all over the site because people are basically just pigs.
I pulled several clad coins out of that mess easily, avoided most of the trash and still dug a few junk rings but also a silver beauty that looked like it might have been pretty old with a gorgeous large elongated stone.
Using that same technique over on the other side of the park near the very busy entrance with that heavy EMI and even more trash if you can believe it, so far I have managed to find and dig at least 2 silver dimes so far, an older Rosie and a Merc also using that big DD coil both times.
When I say this thing is a chameleon and is several different detectors in one with any coil I mean it.
Want to know about iron?
Last summer at a site so horrible that it sent many others with high end machines screaming into the night after one visit, I figured out not just one but two ways to hunt the most iron infested site I have ever come across...lessons learned that will help me for the rest of my career.
This was an area with an older farm house taken over by a park that was knocked down and carted away but somehow the park people managed to leave every nail and bolt used to build this dwelling not to mention lots of other bits and pieces from that house along with tons of other iron and farm implements and tools from huge targets down to very small like uncountable tiny bits of rusted wire.
Very rarely did I ever open a hole that did not have 3-4 and even 5 pieces of nails or other garbage in it or more along with any good targets I could manage to find.
Using the big coil I tried something crazy I called the blast through method with all settings maxed and slowly moving the coil around areas looking for some solid and repeating
blocks of numbers that weren't false thrown off by all the rusted iron.
There were never any solid numbers here, too many signals hitting any coil I used from every direction.
It was difficult, confusing and frustrating at first with all the tones and severe jumping on the screen, but after a few hours I began to see patterns develop that I could notice and soon started to dig way less iron junk and more good targets...targets that many suspected were here but the severe masking problems prevented anyone with any detector from even seeing let alone identifying.
Over time with several hours of practice I got to the point that I could dig all the non ferrous targets at will and leave most of the iron in the ground.
I also tried another method using disc on 6 and 1 tone that seemed to work equally well and plucked a few more goodies out of this site on other visits when the great finds got scarce.
Out of everything I learned using the F70 these techniques might be the ones I am most proud of and could have the most useful applications for me in the future because it not only works in heavy iron but that disc 6 and 1 tone method seems to work in other sites with regular heavy park trash as well.
Below is a pic of the best stuff that came out of that site I eventually and lovingly named "The Iron Mine".
One more thing, the pop top issue using the DD coils and one of my most hated enemies in the war against trash in the garbage filled parks I usually hunt.
Everyone knows this is a problem because DD coils seem to want to identify these things as pretty solid dimes or quarters on every detector out there.
Just the nature of the beast using these type of coils.
Still, not a problem when you know your detector well.
Using the wiggle pull back method I have found that about 95% of these things, all kinds, brands, flattened, rusted and whatever else, will actually drop down to lower numbers when you get the edge of the coil over them as you pull back.
This is called rimming the coil and works on most brands but it really works well on the Fishers.
When that number drops I know I am over a pop top and not a good target because coins and rings don't drop like this.
I still dig a few that slip by, some of the older flattened rusted steel ones won't drop and a few others too, but cutting out 95% of these things is huge in the grand scope of things and I can wade into a sea of pop tops with this big coil and have confidence I can still dig the good stuff and spend way less time wasted dealing with these stupid things...something that frustrated me to no end using a large DD coil on the Vaquero.
The rimming thing works on that one too but you have to manipulate the knob to figure it out which takes to long for my impatient tastes so this Fisher with the screen info is the much faster and better way to go.
Again, the concentric coils are a bit better for this task but I have gotten very fast and efficient figuring these things out with the DD so if I end up in a place with a ton of these and that big DD coil I can deal with them very easily...nowadays.
To sum up...
Fisher F70...good.
Any coil used on it...good
The amount of big DD coil applications...probably a few more than the others overall and also good if not great.
Only my opinion, of course, but all the targets you see in these pics below are the very reasons I formed that opinion and that is just a few because I have many more than this.
You should sell the 10" I posted mine here and got some money for it, I think I listed it for $80 and it sold in a few days...
'Coil hop' is where the speed is...you will never use the PP button again once you start coil hopping..
I was getting worried, up until an hour ago the tracking status was unchanged from Saturday the 4th. But they finely updated it and it shows it was delivered @11:00am. So the F70 has landed at FT service department.