coin pirate said:
The only thing I'm trying to get away from, is having all the buzzzzz while detecting in a hot mode AM, I know air test and fresh dig practice gardens aren't as exact as a find that's been buried for years, but what if you pop out a big enough plug 8+ inches and just drop a coin in the bottom and return/stomp the plug, would that be closer to real life, sure would make setting this up a little easier when it comes to coin shooting.
curently running'
AM
+3
75%gain
gnd bal as needed
3-4 tones
running the disc up to tab to confirm target id's
Excellent...just one of 1,354,208 setting combinations possible on this thing give or take.
I just read your manual so a few things seem to compare to my F70, a few do not.
Some observations and ways I like to set mine up...might work the same on yours maybe with the same effects, maybe not but something to try sometime if you feel like it.
As I keep saying I am a big tweaker and experimenter but eventually I settle down with some favorite settings I know work for me and just hunt.
I always attempt to set mine up with the goal in mind of getting the most responsive signals with the most information in tones and display behavior while cutting down the mental fatigue issue as much as possible.
Some combinations might work well but if listening and dealing with certain ones out of my comfort zones I tend to get mentally tired quickly and maybe even get a headache if listening too long...not fun for me.
I see you don't have a volume control on yours, a shame because using some noisier and busier settings I can go much longer with lower volume than high like when listing to that constant threshold tone in AM.
A set of headphones with a volume control can go a long way to dealing with these issues.
I see you have 4 different pitch settings in AM...don't know what they do but would try them all, you might like one more over the others.
AM hunting for me is the preferred choice in heavy iron, sometimes in heavy regular park trash too but I do sometimes use disc in iron heavy sites and lately for hunting in extreamly trashy foil, can slaw and tab filled parks...a much quieter way to hunt that still seems to work well with the right settings.
Mike Hillis's ideas he put down in that F5 bible go into the gain and thresh settings way more than I will ever be able to do but I can tell you this about the thresh on mine.
Supposedly 0 is considered an open door where you can hear most targets but and small, positive numbers increase the sensitivity and the lower you go into negative numbers the more the smaller targets will be cut out.
Even though -2 and -3 are common for me to use in disc, definitely in multiple tones but even in monotone, I have flowered that setting down to -4 to -6 to quiet my rig down in heavy EMI filled sites and I still seem to be picking up ridiculously tiny targets.
I plan on more experimentation tweaking the gain and thresh settings in the future.
On AM I usually still push the threshold into the positive numbers because it does affect the volume on mine but the pitch and tones not so much.
I used to push it all the way to plus 9 all the time, lately I have it down to +4 to +5 and it still works well.
On mine the threshold and gain work as separate entities, different combinations will do different things plus it seems the higher I turn the thresh up the louder the threshold tone seems to get in AM, also the higher I turn that setting up the more it changes and skews the tones in disc using multiple 3 and 4 tones to pitches I don't like.
They aren't as sharp in multiple tones is the best I can explain it.
After years using an F2 and multiple tones I used multiple tones most of the time at first when I got my F70 but now I use them mostly when doing faster sweeps in parks looking for coins and jewelry, mostly shallow but multiple tones can get deep too.
I usually can forget about the screen and just listen to the tones and only look at the screen when I get a good one, a faster more fun method for me.
Most other times nowadays I use the lower tone selections, I guess D1 and D2 on yours comparatively.
I have monotone which is a current favorite with a single tone on all signals with no modulation on targets of different depths and I watch the screen close.
This is a much less mentally fatigueing setting for me to listen to and gives me the best response and most information than most others.
D1 seems to be similar except you do have that modulation.
I sometimes use 1F and 2F on mine which is kind of like D2...hearing that low iron growl can sometimes be helpful when hunting in a lot of iron.
Another thing I noticed is on mine the lowest tone selections seem to be more stable in high EMI situations than the multiple tone selections...again D1 and D2 on yours.
Less jumping, less noise overall, easier to notice and pick out good targets both shallow and very deep with practice.
Might be similar on the F5 and with no DST option like on the flagship F75 we both have to find the best, deepest and most responsive settings in disc which is also called silent search.
I rarely turn my sense down low enough to experience true silent searching except in a few specific circumstances, but even though I can deal with a massive amount of noise due to my years of experience if I had a choice I would rather hunt as quietly as possible if I can.
Just some observations I noticed after a couple years of experimentation that might transfer over to yours that you can mess with sometime if you like.
You seem to be doing great so far even though this is all so new to you...keep going.
