Sensativity question.

[Eddie in Poulsbo]

I have a Explorer XS and I have a question on how much or too little sensativity to use. I have noticed that at some of our club hunts where I know these sites have been pounded to death including by myself, I have dug silver coins at only three or four inches. How can these coins have been missed by so many other fellows I ask myself? I have played with different levels of sensativities to maintain a constant threshold and my question is if you are using a higher sensativity will you possibly miss some of those shallower coins? I have read many stories on the forum where the Minelabs are still finding those deep coins at hunted out places, but finding the shallow silver coins makes me scratch my head in wonder. Any ideas or thoughts on this would be appreciated. HH.

Eddie

 

[jb]

I think you answered your own question Eddie!! At a club hunt with so many detectors set at different sensitivities someone has to hit it. The answer is nobody got over it from the correct direction to hit it. If you grid chances are good you'll find it, if your a roamer like me and others on a club hunt chances are you'll miss it. I hunt with the maximum I can get and depending on area use either deep or fast recovery. I still get shallow and old coins in areas I've hunted for 10 years and at club hunts other clubs have just been to the week prior. Hope this helps. I assume your in the Bremerton Club, the only thing I'll say about the Minelab is that it is slow on recovery resetting, now we get into speed. Not sure if this is the answer but my opinion of my hunting with the Explorer XS

 

[bunn leonard]

Well i hunt as high as i can in man i also hunt in deep swing slow with the wot coil, thats what i do in fields,and to answer another question about -16 i may have done it a couple of times looking for a structure once i begain to find iron i switch to my programmed pattern witch the xs is designed for but if you like to dig go ahead,if i wasnt relic hunting i may switch to a more stable sens and switch to fast recovery for parks and stuff and lose the wot for the stock coil.just have to play with it. if it nulls its iron if your not using your own programmed screen for silver

 

[cachenut]

Increasing sensitivity should not make the shallow coins disappear. It will bring in more targets from under and around the coil so coins may be inside the larger mess. More sensitivity may make it harder to determine where the coins is and if one is there. More false positives and harder to get the detector to ring in over just over the target.

Increasing sensitivity can make everything harder to find in the noise so coins may be hidden in the mess. I find that many hidden coins appear when I increase sensitiviy but so does 5 times as much junk. And the hidden coins are usually iffy coins and readings so it is harder to decide to dig or not. Lincolns at 3 inches that read 18 30 etc and say 10 inches ??? ...

 

[Joe G]

I'd hunted my front lawn countless times. One day, I just decided to lower my sensitivity and raise the gain a bit. Took 2 swings and heard that sweet sound of silver. Sure enough, around 4 inches down was a 50 something Rosie... Made me think... Was it just a lucky angle or was I just missing it all those times because of all the junk under and around it?

 

[Chris(SoCenWI)]

Eddie,

The reason you found shallow silver at pounded parks was probably because you were the first person to put a metal detector with a DD coil over the target. Almost all of the earlier detectors used concentric coils. They emit a differently shaped field and some targets that are impossible to get with concentrics because of masking by adjacent trash are easy pickings for your minelab's DD coil.

Almost every heavily "pounded" park came alive again when the explorers first came out. I've hit many sites that I found a pile of silver, every hit was not quite perfect; there was trash nearby that caused a less than perfect ID, but still an easy hit for the explorer. After they've been pounded by explorers the finds get tricky, but I can still guarantee that there are still many coins still there that are hidden by trash.

Sensitivity- Just set it just below the cusp of instability. Some sites this will be 15 or less, some sites much higher. If you are tuning to get a stable threshold you are doing the same thing as Auto sens does. Generally this means turning the sens much below the instability point and many of us believe this is way too low. This summer I has a chance to keep working a constuction site near my house. There should have been lots of seated and barber coins here, but because of trash and running low sensitivities because of power lines I didn't find many. So yes turning it down will cause you to miss coins, unfortunately many times you don't have any choice in the matter.

Chris

 

[Eddie in Poulsbo]

Re: Thanks Chris for your explanation as I'm sure you know more about the Minelab Explorer than I do. Makes me wonder just how much silver is still out there that other machines have missed. More and more of my detecting buddies in my club are getting Minelabs, so the competition is getting tougher. I was the first in our club to get the Explorer XS and now there are eight of us and two have the Explorer II. Thanks again. HH.

Eddie

 

[John in Florida]

If there is iron beneath or next the coin and the sensitivity is set too high, it may mask out the coin.