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Mr. Ladd did you use the F 75 in Culpepper

B

B sperty

New member
Just wondering what your advise is in the bad ground.I have the small coil and i am thinking it will see LESS iron.
 
I didn't enjoy that soil with the DD coil. BuckeyeBrad came up with a method of lifting his coil off the ground & did well.....maybe he can comment. I brought too many coils and detectors instead of trying to master 1......
 
When I hunt, I try to take some time early on to try different settings over a target before I dig it to see what is working best. My "discovery" certainly wasn't original, as it's been said many times before but it goes against our experiences we see in good ground when hunting in God awful ground. I found that running the detector in all metal (required if you want to do your best in bad ground) at about 50 on the sensitivity and running the coil off the ground at least 8" to 10" or more produced the best. That gives you a perfectly good monotone threshold which is CRITICAL in order to keep your mind engaged to hear actual good targets instead of getting burned out trying to decypher threshold fluctuations caused by the hot ground. I was amazed that I could actually hear good targets deeper with the coil lifted as I mentioned better than if I ran the coil on the ground or an inch or two up. Now a lot of times a target won't ID running like this but when you hear it, you can investigate further by dropping the coil down and or raising the sensitivity, either which would result in an ID. Keep in mind that most of the ID's came in as high iron no matter if it was a button or a bullet, but after awhile you know that is different than what a nail reads and given that you're in all metal, you can tell if it's a longer narrow target (nail) or a small more concentric target. The info provided by the confidence gauge was extremely helpful also in determining whether to dig or not. Not rocket science but it worked for me. A friend of mine was just getting his feet wet with his new F-75 and was struggling the first day. When I told him how I was running mine, he changed tactics and he was finding good targets left and right for the rest of the hunt. Another thing is when you're hunting these sites that have been night hunted to death over the years, finding an area that is producing and STAYING there and working it slowly and hard usually pays big dividends over the strategy of thinking "the grass is greener" elsewhere and meandering all over the place. I got all my targets on one hillside that had been a camp and it'd been hit hard in the previous hunt at this site. The good stuff was still there, just too deep to find easily with conventional settings and tactics. Hope this helps and good luck!
 
I meant to say the information provided by the confidence gauge AND the ferrous gauge was helpful. :)
 
that this post is talking specifically about hunting on the worst of three sites I've been to around Culpepper, VA. This is NOT to imply this is something that will work the best everywhere, quite the contrary. There was a fellow that PM'd me wondering why I'd hold the coil up that high and I suspect he'd probably never hunted in ground that bad of before. I'll include my reply to him and maybe it'll help if anyone else looks at this and missed the premise.

Hi Marke,
BELIEVE me, I understand your raising (no pun intended) this question. I usually hunt around here in ground that is 50 to 75 in ground phase with a very low ferrous mineralization content but with a lot of iron trash and this tecnique I mentioned is typically not the thing to do in ground like that. The post I made was referring to the ground encountered near Brandy Station Virginia. That dirt has to be experienced to be believed. It usually shows a constant reading of .3 to 1 on the ferrous meter of the 75 and that's just when you swing the coil. Pump it and the reading goes up from there. It's nasty and it can change significantly in just a couple of steps!!! You can have a detector that is ground balanced and put a bullet on the surface and not be able to hear it in the discriminate mode! I mean it when I say that that place will humble the typical detectorist that is set in their ways and try to hunt it with the coil scrubbing and even worse in discriminate. So unless you're trying to hunt in that sort of extreme ground, my post is about 180 degrees off. :) Hope this answers your questions.
take care,
Brad
 
Good stuff Brad. I agree that most people have never hunted the red clay. I'm up here in NYC and have no ground problems. When i go back to TN and hunt the red dirt it takes a different style of hunting most people are not used too.
 
Yep I'm Smack Dab in the middle of the NC red clay country..But not all is red like Brad stated..Sometimes experimenting is the best answer..
 
I think you could almost simulate raising the stock coil by putting on the little white coil? I had it in my car too!
But, your right about finding a spot & staying put! I took the "runaround" approach for the first 2 days.......& the grass was not always greener at all! Add in that I kept switching detectors to try to find the best one and it's amazing I found as much as I did :) Tony in NC also used an F75 and did real well staying in one 20 ft. square area. While we was out walking for miles hoping for a hot spot, he was digging like 15 buttons in a few hours.....
I DID eventually find my hot little area......problem was it was 30 min. before the BBQ......That's just my luck:)
HH,
Bill
 
I believe you're right on the coils, Bill, although I didn't use my small coil there either. :wacko: Should have taken some time to try it out cause I know it'll do amazing things! I've tried the wandering mode for about half a day at each hunt in the Brandy area and only once did it pay off. More often, at least with me, it didn't. However I did find some good prospective trash pit spots that I mentally made a note of just in case we ever go back there and the surface hunting ain't gettin it. Speaking of going back and your finding a good spot late in the hunt, bet I know where you'll be heading right off the next time. :)
 
...to the fact that you could not rely on the ID AT ALL. And that was my mistake. Early on day one we headed to a new back field that actually wasn't that bad. Had dug about 20 square nails and small pieces of iron and they all were IDing at 8-12. Then dug two three-ringers back there and they came in at a solid 45-55. Clear difference....dug about 20 more small pieces of iron and square nails, as everyone said you've got to dig everything, so I did regardless of ID numbers.I dug a button back that once again ID'd properly in 50's range. So, I get lazy and the day goes on and start believing that the ID is right, I started leaving SEVERAL repeatable signals that came in at the 12-13 range...they sounded good, but I thought at that point I could trust my machine and the numbers it was giving me. We'll by Saturday afternoon I had found a hut and was digging that, and was not really surface hunting at that point, but I believe I had talked to Tony too, and they had been working an area we were in the day before, and he had pulled several nice buttons, including CS out of....he said they all ID'd 12-13!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What did I leave behind. Guess I'll never know...the hut was productive however. I'll certainly have a different approach and mindset whenever we return to the beautiful read soil.

Greg
 
Just wondering, what mode were you guys useing? Discrim or all metal?
 
PI's ruled the roost at Div- that new whites PI is going to be a big seller. fisher better get moving on a PI, we dont need anymore of the same design with a few less options
Mike
 
The soil we were hunting was the worst soil I EVER have searched in by far. It's a nasty orange clay full of iron that warps the ID. So what Greg was saying with the buttons that read a 12......that was only because the soil was so bad. They were regular eagle button that should have read alot higher in normal soil. Also the question before.......99% of us ran in all metal mode.
Hh,
Bill
 
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