Hi Gary,
Thanks for your reply! I found the Nov finds around where I live. When I first began using the Quattro, I tended to use the coin/jewelry mode with some discrimination. I dug up everything I thought was a 'good' signal, till I got a good idea of what not to dig, dependant on the area I was detecting. I also found that I was often iron masking over good signals, so by switching from the 10.5" to the 7.5" coil, and slowing down the coil swing, it helped. But I was still iron masking sometimes, and felt that I was missing a lot of good targets, and I had some 'bouncing' sounds to contend with. With some advice from other Quattro users, on this forum and the Aussie Treasure Hunters forum, I began to use All Metal Mode with no discrimination. At first, it took a little getting used to. The constant noise in the earphones (because of trashy ground), made it difficult to detect for no more than an hour at a time (had to give my ears a rest, and I also found that my initial success was depended to some degree on the mood I was in.
Months later, I developed my own method of finding relics (mind you, I only started to find the really old coins about 8 weeks ago). So now Gary, this is the method I find works extremely well where I am: I always use All Metal Mode with no distrmination. I rely almost totally on just the signals I hear to determine if it's a good target. Sometimes in this mode I may not get a possitive reading, but the signal I hear tells me it's definitely a relic. So to verify that it is, I then switch to a saved All Metal Mode with -10 to +6 and +40 discriminated against. I discriminate +40 to stop the bouncing. Old buttons and similar sized relics that firstly gave a negative number reading (but good signal), will now read a positive number reading of, for example, +9 or +10. I don't fully understand why this happens, but it has been explained to me: 'digital readings are used to indicate ferrous content and conductivity of targets. Negative numbers represent ferrous such as iron, while positive numbers represents nonferrous targets. But the system is not perfect, so targets in the soil that are nonferrous like your precious metals will sometimes be detected as ferrous so have a negative reading but most of the time are only slightly negative such as from -6 to +40.'
It's a bit of an enigma for me, so if anyone has a futher explanation, I'd appreciate the imput! But, in all cases, this works for me! I try to use as high a sensitivity as I can without falsing or bouncing, even if I can only go 10 to 14. I'm not worried about losing out on deeper targets. Some of the coins I've found were 8" to 10" deep, and one was on it's edge! Another in a hole full of rusty nails! But it's all about listening carefully to the signals, sweeping your coil slowly, sometimes really slow, especially in very trashy ground like here, as the computer is a bit slow to re-set itself. I hope I haven't waffled to much here Gary. Hope I've helped!
Cheers Angela
:O