Never Too Old To Learn A Thing Or Two

[RLOH]

I have been using Explorers since they came out and up until today I thought I had dug just about every signal conceivable. This morning I was detecting a spot where my oldest find was a 1883 Indian Head. This is a large park and there are three parts of the park where I have found coins over a hundred years old. We got 5 inches of rain this weekend so the ground was finally saturated. I went to the section where most of my oldies have come from and decided to hunt a small area thoroughly. I found a wheat penny and a bunch of junk when I got a signal in the iron mask screen that was close to the blacked out part of the screen and down a square from the top. Just about every Indian I have ever dug was upper right, but not to the top right corner. It was a very clear, repeatable signal and since it was a slow morning I dug it. From 7 to 8 inches comes an Indian. I found the date immediately as it was in better shape than most Indians I find. 1865. This is by far the oldest coin from this park. I got to thinking how many signals like this I have ignored as it was not your "classic" Indian signal. I routinely hunt four spots in my area weekly and though I am not finding a bunch of oldies, I have now found the oldest coins from these spots this year. This year I have been experimenting with different settings and have had some success with some of these new settings. I have an Explorer 11 with a Pro Coil. Air testing on an Explorer is not one of this fine detectors strong points. I have had many Tesoros that will air test better than my Explorer, but when I started changing settings, deep in ground targets started sounding off. I think Bryce uses semi auto sens and a high gain and he finds many old deep coins. I always have used a high manual sens setting with my gain at 5 or 6. I do find deep coins, but I also dig much rusty iron. Semi auto 22 with 9 or 10 gain seems as deep as my old setting of manual 24 sens and gain or 6, but I handle iron much better. I also always ran with fast and deep off. Last week I started turning deep on and though the high tones of copper and silver were still distinguishable, they sounded slightly different. I experimented in trashy spots and did pretty good on deep wheaties along with a couple of mercs. I guess the moral of the story is you are never too old to teach an old dog new tricks. In years past, I was afraid I would miss something good if I strayed from my successful settings so I never changed anything. Live and learn. R.L.

 

[LabradorBob]

Yep,I agree,i have done the same,it is good to experiment.
one place i hunted i got better definable target sounds with fast off!

LabradorBob