Need some discriminating advice

[Kevin B.]

Hope everyone has had a great weekend. It's good to see people posting some good finds. I have found a few wheats this weekend. They are fun to find. Keeps the confidence level high. Now to my question: This afternoon, after church, I planted 3 mercury dimes in three different holes after sweeping the area for renegade iron and electric interference. The buryed silver dimes are 4 inches. 6 inches, and 8 inches. I packed dirt back on real good and was pleasedwhen my E Trac detected all 3, although I had to kick the auto sensitivity up to plus 2 for the 8 inch dime to be detected. I swung over each dime and read the numbers. About what everyone has posted, around 13-44. The 8 inch dime gives ferrous numbers in the lower 20's frequently and rarely settles on the 13 fe number. I learned something with that. BUT.......lets introduce a rusty roofing nail. I layed it on top of the ground a little off to the side of the buried dime. This severly hindered my detector from noticing the dime. If I hadn't known the silver dime was there, and was detecting in normal mode using a slow swing, the silver dime would have remained in the ground, unfound by me.
Most of the places I hunt have trash in the ground....rusty nails and so forth. Did I perform a fair test of real world conditions? I am concerned that I am discriminating out good targets. Does anyone have any advice on how to pickup good targets when nails are causing masking??? Thank you. Kevin

 

[NebTrac]

Kevin,

My personal opinion is to not worry about the nails. Concentrate on learning the tones and how to get those signals to repeat. For the most part its REPEATABLE SIGNAL. Allow the E-Trac to let you know when something is down there. There have been too many finds documented with nails and what not in the hole to worry about your machine. As to the FE number being that high, that is normal and Andy confirms that in his book. When you start getting down deep (over 8+ inches) the numbers go nutty, but at least your machine is hitting it.

I will tell you this. In my garden, I can't get an 8" IH to hit on a real slow swing WHEN in Auto +3. In manual yes, but not Auto. I have to use my normal 2-3 second swing and I can hit that coin just find. I'm still fairly new and pretty much only used Auto +3 last year. I felt I was getting good depth, finding First Settler Era Coins. There are a couple of places I'd like to venture into manual and do some testing.

One swing style that does work is to work the area with the "wiggle" (short 1" back and forth movements). This is done fairly quick swipes, but your are covering the area slowly. If the iron would happen to be that bad, I'd be more inclined to go to the TTF setting as to better utilize my detecting time.

Do a LOT of digging. You'll learn much by digging a lot of "iffy" one way hits. I know you've already experienced some good finds, thats the icing on the cake.

NebTrac

 

[Kevin B.]

Thanks Nebtrac. That sounds like good advice and I think I'll take it. Hands on experience in real world conditions.