Safari seem to dig up alot of Iron any suggestions

[mlstevens10]

I have been out a few times sicne I got my Safari and with a 33-38 reading I dig up alot of Old Iron ferrius nails with very few targets being coins? I have been in the Coin & Jewerly mode mostly?

Any suggestions on why those high Ferrious nsils keep reading that high instead of a negative -10, -9 etc..

Mike
mpstevens@fuse.net

 

[Des D]

Hi Mike,

Can you say if this is in the Auto Sensitivity mode?
Can you hear a Threshold Tone while scanning the soil?

If the case, Auto might be outputting more sensitivity than the ground can allow thru.
Go into MENU > SENS > use the - minus shift button to take the sensitivity down to a lower level.
Others who have had similar experiences say SENS 16 can help.

es D

 

[Mark ( ohio )]

or.. as you pass over the target for example, one way may be a -2 then the return swing will be the 38 reading...My experience has usually been a iron object when have a minus, then a good reading on the return swing..... But then, heres another thought.......The safari will make a positive id reading with only one or two swings over the object... If you stand there and go back and forth 8,10,12 times over the object, the detector will not give you an accurate id.. it confuses the id for some reason..

Hope this helps.. Mark ( ohio )

 

[mlstevens10]

I have been using auto sensitivity so I will lower down then number.

I did switch to All Metal and go over the target and it reads -10, so I did not dig thoise targets.

One other note I have been experiencing in All Metal mode a consistent -10 reading and tone while hunting in the woods. Do you think the detector might not be working properly?

 

[Des D]

I did switch to All Metal and go over the target and it reads -10, so I did not dig those targets.
One other note I have been experiencing in All Metal mode a consistent -10 reading and tone while hunting in the woods.
Do you think the detector might not be working properly?

Hi,

What you [may be] hearing is the Threshold which is a tone as you described.
But, working in All Metal that threshold tone can be exagerrated into a ground noise because all metal is just that, the detector will respond to all metals and due to [possible] mineralisation in your area is causing the ground to sound off as a target = ground noise.
Suggestion: 2 things
# 1. Select All Metal and reject ONLY -10 (minus 10)
# 2. Reduce Sensitivity - reduce this before you try # 1 above.

I'm thinking this [could cure] the issue?
You can make [ the noise] go away by juggling the settings in the detector...

Des D

 

[hershey1]

If you don't want to be bothered with iron signals try coin or coin/jewelery then the iron will be discriminated out with factory settings. Just a thought. HH

 

[Jeffro]

I've noticed that I sometimes get get -10 & +40 for the same piece of iron.

 

[TomH]

I have noticed that very rusted iron, especially bent nails will give a fleeting good signal. Nice tone but TID numbers that jump all over the place. Straight larger pieces of rusted iron can read 32-38 and bent nails give a solid 18-20 (just like a brass button).

Depending on where I am digging I will either dig these signals or walk away. If I am in and area where there are deep relics and am running higher than normal sensitivity I dig just in case.

Try turning down the sensitivity to avoid these false signals.

Just a humble opinion,
TomH

 

[Prep1957]

The Safari takes a little getting use too.Do these bent nails look hand made,square,3 to 5 inches you may not be able to get rid of them because the old black smith that made them may have melted several metals including copper, brass,tin or what ever he could find.Number one do not noise cancel like the manuel says noise cancel at the height that you are going to hunt at.The preset programs are good but I think you would do better to get rid of Icons its just one more thing the processor does not have to do too many cooks in the kitchen is never a good thing.To get rid of Icons and still be in CJ mode or set up your own program if you want.Go to CJ and push button until custom(*) symbol comes up. Now go to relic or all metal and hold down button till saved appears on screen 3 to 5 seconds.You will now be in Conductive with no Icons to make sure it will tell you each time that you are in CO in upper Right Hand corner of screen.Remember you are walking around with a radio in your hand do not whip up a good target meaning the faster you sweep the better a bad target may sound and processor will be fooled.You may be also charging up a target with to much radio signal the first 2 or 3 sweeps one direction then another 2 or 3 from another direction to much coil time over a target will make it read better remove coil off target for a few seconds the try again.Having said that to get super deep coins in open field with little junk you would make more sweeps to get depth and charge target and penetrate ground resistance.Make sure you noise cancel often I think if you do these things you will be able to get rid of about 80% of nail problem.

 

[TomH]

Prep1957,

Thanks for the input and yes, I am talking about square/cut nails and very old, massively rusted chunks of iron.

I do noise cancel at the height I am going to detect. I scrub the grass so I noise cancel on the ground.

I use All Metal/Ferrous or a modified All Metal with -10 to -7 and + 40 scrimmed out and I swing slow and steady. I understand about "forcing" a good signal out of a bad one and this is not the case here. In really mineralized ground these nails sound great and give good TID numbers right from the first pass. On one dig I had a perfect button signal (18 with a perfect flutey tone) but had been digging nothing but trash all morning. A gent swinging a MInelab 4500 came over to say howdy and I asked him to check the signal before I dug. He said it sounded like a button at about 8 inches, exactly what I would have thought from the TID/tone and he told me to dig. He walked a few feet away and called back that he had one too. I dug a crooked nail, he dug a straight one.

I have noticed that increased ground moisture or higher mineralization increases the chance that these bad targets will sound good. Turning down the sensitivity reduces or eliminates the problem, but when I am in an area that is producing relics I don't mind digging a few pieces of junk if it means that I don't miss the good targets.

Tom Henrique

 

[Prep1957]

The age of your nails means your in a nice old spot maybe find really old coin.Cutting your sensitivity and raising your coil will get you horse shoes,old tools,they seem to bring more money than coins and eliminate smaller Iron objects.Its nice to here that Safari is as good as 4500 that is a real deep machine.

 

[Prep1957]

Prep1957,

Thanks for the input and yes, I am talking about square/cut nails and very old, massively rusted chunks of iron.

I do noise cancel at the height I am going to detect. I scrub the grass so I noise cancel on the ground.

I use All Metal/Ferrous or a modified All Metal with -10 to -7 and + 40 scrimmed out and I swing slow and steady. I understand about "forcing" a good signal out of a bad one and this is not the case here. In really mineralized ground these nails sound great and give good TID numbers right from the first pass. On one dig I had a perfect button signal (18 with a perfect flutey tone) but had been digging nothing but trash all morning. A gent swinging a MInelab 4500 came over to say howdy and I asked him to check the signal before I dug. He said it sounded like a button at about 8 inches, exactly what I would have thought from the TID/tone and he told me to dig. He walked a few feet away and called back that he had one too. I dug a crooked nail, he dug a straight one.

I have noticed that increased ground moisture or higher mineralization increases the chance that these bad targets will sound good. Turning down the sensitivity reduces or eliminates the problem, but when I am in an area that is producing relics I don't mind digging a few pieces of junk if it means that I don't miss the good targets.

Tom Henrique

Tom you will know more about hunting in ferrous. I hunt in conductive are you finding silver coins?Do they read in in the upper 30's.Do you know that when you are in CJ mode the Safari is programed to find steel coins in FE and CO that is why newer beer caps show up as good even higher at disc or a nice washer.When in FE it detects high ferrous as low tone and low ferrous Items as high tone.this has nothing to do with silver,gold, coins,lead,buttons,non ferrous items.The nice old rusted nail that you found may have not been a high ferrous item when it was made or has rusted so bad that it is no longer a high ferrous item and will read up high and give a high tone and reading the Safari is doing its job and raising disc and lowering sensitivity may not help at all.The reverse will happen in CO but raising the disc in CO helps a lot but excessive nulling becomes a problem.I will still dig some larger nails that may have been made with other items than pure iron.You are right about soil moisture it will make me dig more items CO because the moisture now makes some targets more conductive or in your case low ferrous.I am not a relic hunter but I find quite a few nice civil war items each year I think they were brought back as trophies to Illinois.I noticed that since I was using Safari for about a year I was not pulling up as many lead bullets while looking for lost gold ring I lowered my disc to Zero on an old mansion and boy did I start finding lead,civil war hat pins,old toys,old buttons and a ton of old nails I cannot tell you about anything about being at -10 never been that low but I have never found anything good at 40 always been junk. Your best target ID for is in low trash.I still say the Safari is the best detector on market and is equal to Etrac,the 705 Is good also.It took me about 100 hours to get good with Safari and I am still learning at least what you are digging is deep I hate to tell you how many fruit jar lids I have dug to 2 feet.

 

[coindgr]

I spent five hours out today with my safari,only my eight time out but longest hunt,ground is very moist from all the heavy downpours,went to a very old school house and didnt do to well in good finds,two cld nickles and two mem.cents,several pull tabs,three screw caps and two beer caps,one nickle was next to a beer cap i found gave a solid 15. This school is loaded with so much trash it will make you crazy,coal cinders everyware,got home ane hit the corn feild across the road,feild was muddy,deep nails would give a 35,36,38 but i would hit them from other directions and would give -2 ect,i had to dig a fue to make shure,I was running all metal,low trash,auto sens.,its will take time to get used the safari,but i love it! I found a fue wheaties over in the feild very deep,no joke about a foot deep mixed in with rusted nails gave 36,37 with a mix of -2 ect. my old detector wouldnt hit on them at all,HH everyone,Phil

 

[TomH]

prep1957,

I have yet to find a single silver coin, so I really cannot give any info on what they come in as. The areas that we dig have generally been hammered since the introduction of the first commercial detectors and rarely do you find anything in the top 8 inches unless it is a recently plowed field (which creates its own set of problems). I usually start off in AM, no disc, sens 14 and gradually up the sens to 16 if I can. I run right at the edge of stability to try to get the extra depth, which makes for a noisy machine. Once I determine whether the lowest ferrous numbers (-8 to -10) are accurately indicating small nails I will generally scrim them out. In decent soil, for me -10 and -9 are always small cut nails in various states of decomposition. One thing I have found about the Safari is that it will actually read a rust stain left by a now totally decomposed nail or small iron object. I have learned that a jumpy signal that will not pinpoint is always a very badly rusted iron object.

Brass is another thing all together, always a beautiful tone and generally the appropriate numbers regardless of depth or soil conditions. Two weeks ago I got out to a 17th century farmhouse that has been used and abused by residents, squatters, and small to medium wildlife for a few decades. Some of the residents apparently threw all their trash out the front window and shot deer/varmints from the front door! Every swing had a minimum of three targets, easily the trashiest location I have ever dug in. Since I have a big organized dig in a verified CS camp area coming up at the end of the month I decided to use the time to try to isolate brass casings from the mountain of trash. I found everything from .22 short to .30-06 mixed in the mess (I even found about a half dozen .225, a caliber that I didn't even know existed) and the Safari was dead on, pinpointing the target to the center of my plug every time. The highlight find of my day was a complete fender mounted rear-view mirror assembly from a mid 1940s car! Last weekend I found my first "nickle" .38 Special casing and it read a solid 38 with a very nice tone (higher than lead but lower than brass).

BTW: I did not mean to indicate that the Safari is equal to the 4500 in any way, only that on that particular target in that particular red-orange soil they both saw the same thing. The 4500 is the most incredible relic machine out there and I have personally seen bullets come up from more than 30 inches and buttons from more than two feet. In a recent hunt where the VLF surface hunters were not doing too well and the other PI machines were hitting a few targets I spoke to a 4500 user who ended up with more than 100 bullets and 50 buttons, all from depths that nobody else could get to.

Quick Question: I am under the impression that changing from Conductive to Ferrous does not change the signal sent to the target, only the way that the machine analyses the return signal, mapping it to a different set of tones and adding the icons. Is that not the case? I use the ferrous mode because I like to have the iron targets return the lower tones to allow for easier tone discrimination.

Thanks for the fun conversation,
TomH

 

[Prep1957]

Wow it looks like you are doing well and are getting the depth I am getting.When it gets too trashy I drop down to a smaller coil in CO.Like I said I do not hunt in FE but I switch back and forth on a target once in a while to see what it will read I too have had the Safari read on stained rusty soil in the upper 30,s most times bottle cap that is almost rusted away.From the deep dimes I have dug at about 9 inches the tone in CO and FE are almost the same.The problem I do not understand is when in FE and you find gold which is NonFerrous it should give a high tone and it will not but just think if it did what a great way to find gold read a low number like 7 and get a high tone.I was digging in CO 0 and above open found a signal that read 7 switched to all metal and got a low tone 7 but sounded smooth and the same tone in FE and Co I was thinking .22 bullet out comes beautiful white gold ring with diamond how come in FE that should give a high tone there is no lower ferrous content item than gold.I ran a 4500 one day a friend of mine uses it out west to gold hunt I spent most of the day digging not finding if I remember I was having trouble running the discrimination but it went deep.

 

[TomH]

prep1957,

No guesses on the white gold. The only gold I have found is a thin plate on brass cuff sized Civil War buttons and they all read the same, 18 with a nice high flutey tone. Regardless of the amount of remaining gold all the buttons read the same so I assumed that I was reading only the brass.

I watched a guy with a 4500 at a dig in VA dig a standard three groove bullet at more than 30 inches in the reddest god-awful powdered iron dirt that you could find. Two thoughts, I was amazed at the depth and precision of the machine and I wondered how quick it gets boring to dig a 3 foot fence post hole to recover a $1.25 bullet.

TomH

 

[edjcox]

Well why not custom set a program with your nail finds?

Set one down and see what its at and lock those ringers out..

Or stop hunting in all metal and use coins and jewlery mode..

Good luck

 

[TomH]

edjcox,

I have never used the C/J mode, mostly because I like the lower tones for iron. When I am relic hunting, there are some iron targets that are worth digging, artillery fragments, gun tools, gun parts, etc., so I generally only scrim out -8 through -10 because those numbers are generally small nails. Anything bigger than that is worth digging because you never know if it is farm junk or an artifact.

What are the benefits in running C/J mode?

Thanks,
TomH

 

[edjcox]

Was responding to the original message.

Sry to confuse you.