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Settings Help for the F70 in GA Clay
- Thread starter pvc1973
- Start date
REIVER will probably be around and he lives with some bad Al dirt and he swings a F 70. Or you can research for some of his posts of just scroll back and look for REIVER. I have a F 75 and live over here in W Tn and have different ground then over your way. Good luck and welcome to the forum. HH jim tn
REVIER
Well-known member
MI-AuAg said:
jim tn said:
REVIER, REVEIR, REVOLUTIONARY, REVO, REV EM UP....doesn't matter what you call me as long as it catches my attention.
My wife usually calls me "Hey Idiot", a loving term she says but I don't know.
I am in Birmingham Alabama, we have some of that really red dirt/clay here, in those areas I have ground balanced as high as into the mid 80's.
Most of the time that red stuff is laying a few inches down under some black looking dirt but that black dirt is also highly mineralized so it is all very similar to me.
I made the mistake of moving away to the east to Kansas and fantastic beautiful black dirt where it was common to see GB numbers in the 40's with no bars on the meter on the left side of your screen...maybe one bar here and there but that was rare.
Here in our area we are going to be lucky to get just one bar, most times it will be 2 or pegged at 3.
I have used several settings here in the south, most actually work pretty well but a few work a bit better than others.
The problem we have here is not only do you hunt in a very difficult and challenging area of the country but you are using an extremely powerful tool to do it that can be pretty schizophrenic if you don't set it right or too high and on top of all of that you are new to the game so there are basics you still need to learn no matter where you hunt.
I don't know how advanced you are or what kind of coils you are using so when you get a chance let me know, I have used 5 different coils around here, the smaller DD snipers are my favorite but they all work well just slightly differently.
Let's just assume you are very new at this for now and are using either the 11"DD or the 10" elliptical concentric.
A good way to start for anyone using this detector anywhere in the country is the factory settings...they are set that way from the factory for a reason and that reason is they work and work well most everywhere.
If those settings...DE, 60 sense, 15 disc, -3 threshold... are a little too chatty for you by all means turn them down.
You might not believe how deep you can get with even lower settings than these even in our red clay depth limiting dirt.
Turn the sense down into the 50's or even the 40's, many hunt with the sense in the 40's all the time.
You can turn down the threshold too if needed...the lower you go the quieter the rig can get but -3 is a great spot to start...I sometimes go way higher ever all the way up to +9 sometimes but rarely do I go lower even though I could and not affect all that much.
As far as the tones use what is comfortable to you, 3H is default, I usuAlly used 4H when I first picked up my F79 because it was so close to my F2 that I used for a couple thousand hours before this one.
Nowadays I tend to use DP, 1 tone mostly or all metal but I used them all over the past few years and just gravitated to them naturally...just use whatever us most comfortable to you at this point, you can always play with any others as time goes on when using disc on and you will figure out what you like the best.
Again, they all work so it is just a personal preference thing.
The disc, 15 will knock out iron, most if it anyway, you will still get some nice sounding high tones from iron in the ground, these are false but they can fool you especially when new at this, if you turn the disc up to about 20-21 you can cut out a lot of the little foil that can drive you crazy out there.
I have found gold as low as 23 so that us a number I rarely go to or pass when I am in disc but if it is way to confusing for you at first with too many signals hitting you at once turn the disc up higher.
It is way more important to get a handle on how this thing works and behaves at first then worry about missing any gold or any other targets.
If you don't understand what it is telling you there is a ver
REVIER
Well-known member
MI-AuAg said:
jim tn said:
REVIER, REVEIR, REVOLUTIONARY, REVO, REV EM UP....doesn't matter what you call me as long as it catches my attention.
My wife usually calls me "Hey Idiot", a loving term she says but I don't know.
I am in Birmingham Alabama, we have some of that really red dirt/clay here, in those areas I have ground balanced as high as into the mid 80's.
Most of the time that red stuff is laying a few inches down under some black looking dirt but that black dirt is also highly mineralized so it is all very similar to me.
I made the mistake of moving away to the east to Kansas and fantastic beautiful black dirt where it was common to see GB numbers in the 40's with no bars on the meter on the left side of your screen...maybe one bar here and there but that was rare.
Then I moved back, I cried a little because I knew what was waiting for me.
Here in our area we are going to be lucky to get to any GB number below the mid 60's and most times more than just one bar, it will usually be pegged at 2 or 3.
I have used several settings here in the south, most actually work pretty well but a few work a bit better than others.
The problem we have here is not only do you hunt in a very difficult and challenging area of the country but you are using an extremely powerful tool to do it that can be pretty schizophrenic if you don't set it right or too hot and high and on top of all of that you are new to the game so there are basics you still need to learn no matter where you hunt.
I don't know how advanced you are or what kind of coils you are using so when you get a chance let me know, I have used 5 different coils around here, the smaller DD snipers are my favorite but they all work well just slightly differently.
Let's just assume you are very new at this for now and are using either the 11"DD or the 10" elliptical concentric.
A good way to start for anyone using this detector anywhere in the country is the factory settings...they are set that way from the factory for a reason and that reason is they work and work well most everywhere.
If those settings...DE, 60 sense, 15 disc, -3 threshold... are a little too chatty for you by all means turn them down.
You might not believe how deep you can get with even lower settings than these even in our red clay depth limiting dirt.
Turn the sense down into the 50's or even the 40's, many hunt with the sense in the 40's all the time.
You can turn down the threshold too if needed...the lower you go the quieter the rig can get but -3 is a great spot to start...I sometimes go way higher ever all the way up to +9 sometimes but rarely do I go lower even though I could and not affect all that much.
As far as the tones use what is comfortable to you, 3H is default, I usually used 4H when I first picked up my F70 because it was so close to my F2 that I used for a couple thousand hours before this one.
Nowadays I tend to use DP or 1 tone mostly in disc or all metal but I used them all over the past few years and just gravitated to them naturally and practiced with them all...just use whatever us most comfortable to you at this point, you can always play with any others as time goes on when using disc on and you will figure out what you like the best.
Again, they all work pretty darn well so it is just a personal preference thing
The disc, 15 will knock out iron, most of it anyway, you will still get some nice sounding high tones from iron in the ground here and there...these are false but they can fool you especially when new at this but if you turn the disc up to about 20-21 you can cut out a lot of the little foil that can drive you crazy out there.
I have found gold as low as 23 so that is a number I rarely go to or pass when I am in disc but if it is way to confusing for you at first with too many signals hitting you at once at low disc turn the disc up higher.
Turn the disc up real high if you want to from time to time, that will make for a much quieter hunting environment and help you zero in on and notice targets a little easier even though they will all be the higher conductive types
It is way more important to get a handle on and understand how this thing works and behaves at first then worrying about missing any gold or any other targets.
If you don't understand what it is telling you there is a very good chance you wouldn't notice if you swept your coil over anything good especially if it is masked by the soil or other trash or iron, anyway.
Yes this thing will signal over all metal and targets but the behavior you will come to know is quite different and more involved than if you were learning to use this thing, or any detector, in much better soil.
The best thing to do is just get out there and swing, there is no substitute for experience no matter what I can tell you what you read.
Go slow, there is something to be said for moving that coil faster over targets using the Fishers, you actually will get better readings on deeper targets that way, but going real slow has some advantages in our kind of dirt too and you need to learn how to acquire targets and know when they are good ones.
Going fast when you are new at this you can miss a ton so just have patience.
A few things that will be handy to know...
Don't expect solid or even small ranges of numbers on targets unless they are really shallow and I mean on top of the dirt shallow, this kind of dirt just has too many minerals, (iron), in it to let targets behave like they would in nice, clean black non mineralized dirt.
Huge jumps are not good, usually trash in any soil, but you won't get those narrowed down to 1-2 numbers either.
A range of 5-6 numbers is something to aim for, as long as they repeat especially from more than one direction you probably have a solid target under your coil.
When I used the F2 I eventually got very good at getting the F2 to stabilize over targets with only a 1-3 number jump.
Switching to the F70 I thought it would be the same and I would ease right into it...yea, that was incorrect thinking.
There is so much more power in the F70, it got so much deeper and picked up so many more targets and acted a bit more differently than I thought than that F2 that I had trouble calming the thing down.
In great black dirt and on targets that were shallow I was getting number jumps up to 10 numbers wide even though these were on good targets like coins and not trash.
It took a little practice to learn to maneuver that coil better and to zero in on targets and get a much smaller range of numbers but I kept at it and finally got there.
I never did get it down to a 1-3 number range on many good targets even in that better soil but again as long as that range wasn't much more than 3-4 numbers, maybe a few more sometimes, and repeated without dropping all over the place I dug them and they were usually good or at least solid, real targets.
In iron infested sites I increased that range to double that but in those type of sites it still worked.
This is advanced stuff, hunting in extreme iron infested sites, don't worry about that now because you have time to learn to do that when you are ready.
Moving back here to the SE. I had to learn to do this all over again and get a stable range of repeating numbers. Here the numbers jumped all over the place even more and it took practice to learn to reign them in...at least a little.
Super stability in this kind of soil and solid steady numbers are just a dream for us but with enough experience you learn how good targets behave, how much of a range of numbers is ok and how much is too much.
Another important thing you need to know about hunting in and around all this iron oxide is something called up-averaging.
Basically around iron Fishers tend to push up the conductivity numbers on all targets if they are near iron.
Here is a thread where I discuss this very issue and if you hunt in the SE. using Fishers you had better learn to understand it or you will miss out on much.
https://www.findmall.com/read.php?37,2322233
Don't assume numbers that others get on targets will be our numbers and the deeper targets get or the more iron that surrounds them the higher the numbers go.
On the F70 nickels are around 32, zinc cents and Indian cents are around the high 50's to low 60's, copper cents and dimes are the low 70's, quarters are around the low 80's, halves are the high 80's or so and dollars should be in the lower 90's.
I have dug all of those things here and if they are 3" deep or deeper they all have come in at the high 80's to low 90's...even deeper nickels.
A silver dollar at 4" was a solid 99 on every pass and an Indian Head cent I swung over that was laying on the ground in the red stuff where I didn't even have to dig it still came in at the mid 80's...about 30 numbers higher than usual.
This is not a huge deal, just our cross to bear, you can adjust and adapt to this new numbering system just as I have with some experience.
For us the new "normal" is different than what others experience but still easily learned with practice.
I have written a ton about settings on this thing and they are all over this forum.
Search in the Fisher forum under my name using the terms "F70, settings".
Also "method, high thresh, DP" and other terms should bring up more but you have enough to work on for now.
Just get out there and dig for awhile and learn then ask lots of questions, plenty around here use this one, a Patriot or an F75 and can answer whatever questions you have as will I.
HH
REVIER
Well-known member
pvc1973 said:
Anytime.
Kindered spirits, I used to think the Tennessee guys were in the the same boat as we are but evidently most of that state is different than our situation.
The cool thing is for all the problems and challenges you happened to pick up a tool that can handle it all with pretty great abilities...once you learn to understand it and how it acts in this part of the world.
I started here with a Vaquero, a Compadre and an F2 and even though I found a lot none of those could really get as deep or unmask targets as well as they could in good soil...or at least I couldn't figure out enough behavior to excel with them here.
I quickly became a shallow coin and jewelry hunter and did ok, when I moved to Kansas I got way deeper with all of them and everything was just easier.
Then when we decided to move back I actually was planning on getting into a Pulse Induction White's TDI unit.
Those aren't bothered by mineralization but they also have very little if no disc which presented another huge problem...I hate digging trash and the was heaping extras of that around here plus tons of massive extra iron.
I decided to just use the F70 and experiment with all kinds of settings and techniques and see what kind of progress I can make and it took months...plus learning a whole new and different language and range of behaviors than what I saw out west, to finally make sense of what was going on around here and successfully start getting to deeper levels, find masked targets consistently and deal with the huge masking and iron problems that this kind of environment presents.
I have surprised myself, shocked actually, seeing some things I didn't think were possible using this detector.
Some friends I have hunted with, too.
You did good, you have the right tool now you just need a little knowledge.