REVIER
Well-known member
More insights in case something here might help out others.
I have several different settings I have tried in my really difficult soil that seem to work and get me pretty deep with my F70 but more importantly give me clues about possible good targets that are severely masked.
I have some pretty high mineralization but worse is the amount of iron present in the sites I hunt near my home both tiny and huge.
Naturally occurring iron because of the soil make-up plus garbage spread all over the city when they mixed a bunch of iron slag into the dirt used as landfill as the city was being built in the late 1800's to early 1900's.
Also many areas in public parks had old homes that were knocked down so add to all that the normal rusty nails and trash you find at sites like that and most of the area in my closest park was built on an actual landfill.
Most public sites have been scoured for decades but I suspected if I could somehow figure out the clues there is still a ton of targets hidden that everyone has passed by because of the confusing and very masked signals we all get on everything past 3-4".
Talking to others most say 5" is usually the depth of the targets they seem to find a at the most and that would be at public sites and private homes after door knocking.
From experience most of the older stuff around here usually hangs at that 5-6" level but I believe there is way more at the 6"+ depth than any of us knew about and those guys that don't dig much past 5" might be missing targets...maybe a lot of great targets if they are only digging the for sure dig me signals.
My job for the last several months has been to find some settings and crack that code and dig the good deeper, crazy masked stuff without digging the other too numerous to count iffy signals I get with every movement of the coil.
I just can't and won't dig it all, that would not be enjoyable and would take so much time I think I would ultimately dig less volume in good targets than selectively picking which ones to dig.
Slowly I have succeeded more than I would have thought in my wildest dreams using 3 different coils...a sniper DD, the standard 10" concentric elliptical and the big F75 DD coil.
Settings such as all metal and almost if not maxed out settings work for me using the sniper and concentric and have gotten to the 6-7" level and a bit further.
This is a crazy way to hunt but I have much practice at it so even if I don't hunt this way it is always on program 2 as a final check before I dig.
Tom's suggestions of mono tone and disc at 4 or less works too, Jim in Tenn...the WV bros. suggestions at 0 disc, is too noisy for me but turn it up to 1 and it quiets everything down enough.
I tried disc high at 65 but notching nickels and foil back in so as not to miss gold jewelry and that seemed to work pretty good also with the sniper and the concentric coils.
You can't have too many arrows in the quiver as far as I am concerned so I keep trying new things.
In an effort to hunt as quietly as possible, all metal has that constant threshold hum and hunting at low disc gives me constant and consistent iron grunts around here, recently I tried some new things and I accidentally hit on a combination that seems to work best of all for me so far.
In the last week or so I have recovered almost 2 dozen old wheats, a silver dime and an IH from depths at the 6-7" level and many from areas I have personally scoured before and to my surprise with a little practice this is becoming fairly easy.
This success is due to 3 things, I think...my settings, the coil choice and new observations about some of the more iffy signals I have been passing by...plus some very slow movements of the coil so 4 things.
Settings are disc at 23, thresh at -4, sense at between 75 and 90 but mostly at 90 if EMI is not a noisy problem, SL speed and 1F tones...no notching.
The coil I thought was the best for hunting in this crowded, iron infested soil was the sniper but again I was surprised when the big DD coil immediately seemed to work better.
The new observations I noticed were a bit different than the success I had when I was only sticking to the up averaged high numbered targets that didn't jump down to iron much which usually turned out to be good targets if they were at the 5-6" or more depth.
The deeper the targets here the more they were up averaged because that is what the Fishers are designed to do around iron.
I am not sure if the big coil had a lot to do with this but after switching I started to notice many more signals that were still high but not quite into the high 80's-low 90's good target area but a bit lower into the high 70-80s area.
There was a lot of jumping with these signals, many drops down low and even into iron and not stable at all so I didn't dig them but I found that even with this big coil if I slowly worked that coil around and got the target to the tip and made some small quick side to side movements the numbers stayed high but most of the low drops stopped and there were older coin targets down there especially if the depth meter showed the 5-6" level or more.
Checking these suspected good signals out from a second direction is important but I do get more one way hits on good targets than in normal soil so I am still digging those one ways and not all but most have been coins so far.
The signals that still had a bunch of jumping and drops seemed to be iron and I dug a good amount of these as I learned but less and less as time went on.
Evidently the speed and the way you move the coil around here is really important in this crazy soil, more than I thought, not only to acquire the target at first but how you maneuver it to check out the signal after.
I have to do all of this with my other coils but that big coil is doing the job very well and that longer scanning field seems to be helping more than hindering me which seems opposite logic when hunting in trash and iron filled sites.
The key here seems to be move the coil slow to get a suspected good signal then get it to the tip of the coil to examine it better...why it stabilizes deeper target signals with the tip of the coil rather than the coil center I don't know.
Still more experimenting to do with this and my other coils but I have a small spot next to a little stream in my local park where I am pulling out many of these older, hidden coins so I have a nice little laboratory to work in.
I have been over this area a lot in the past but never realized there was still so much here and how well they were hiding.
I hunted in this soil when I started for a couple of years and then moved to Kansas with that beautiful dream soil.
When we decided to move back I almost started to cry, I remember what it was like and why I became a mostly shallow clad and jewelry hunter.
Now with the F70 and all these coils plus all these lessons I am learning I have gone from dreading my hunting here to thrilled to have the opportunity to live in an area with older parks and lawns to hunt so close.
I never found this many wheats, IH's, any seated dimes or a silver dollar in Kansas but I have here, and something tells me I might beat my best silver coin yearly total by year's end.
3 of those so far for me from just a couple of sites and it is only mid January.
When you get lemons ya gotta learn to make lemonade.
Sometimes, if you learn to do it just right, that can be the best and sweetest drink of all.
I have several different settings I have tried in my really difficult soil that seem to work and get me pretty deep with my F70 but more importantly give me clues about possible good targets that are severely masked.
I have some pretty high mineralization but worse is the amount of iron present in the sites I hunt near my home both tiny and huge.
Naturally occurring iron because of the soil make-up plus garbage spread all over the city when they mixed a bunch of iron slag into the dirt used as landfill as the city was being built in the late 1800's to early 1900's.
Also many areas in public parks had old homes that were knocked down so add to all that the normal rusty nails and trash you find at sites like that and most of the area in my closest park was built on an actual landfill.
Most public sites have been scoured for decades but I suspected if I could somehow figure out the clues there is still a ton of targets hidden that everyone has passed by because of the confusing and very masked signals we all get on everything past 3-4".
Talking to others most say 5" is usually the depth of the targets they seem to find a at the most and that would be at public sites and private homes after door knocking.
From experience most of the older stuff around here usually hangs at that 5-6" level but I believe there is way more at the 6"+ depth than any of us knew about and those guys that don't dig much past 5" might be missing targets...maybe a lot of great targets if they are only digging the for sure dig me signals.
My job for the last several months has been to find some settings and crack that code and dig the good deeper, crazy masked stuff without digging the other too numerous to count iffy signals I get with every movement of the coil.
I just can't and won't dig it all, that would not be enjoyable and would take so much time I think I would ultimately dig less volume in good targets than selectively picking which ones to dig.
Slowly I have succeeded more than I would have thought in my wildest dreams using 3 different coils...a sniper DD, the standard 10" concentric elliptical and the big F75 DD coil.
Settings such as all metal and almost if not maxed out settings work for me using the sniper and concentric and have gotten to the 6-7" level and a bit further.
This is a crazy way to hunt but I have much practice at it so even if I don't hunt this way it is always on program 2 as a final check before I dig.
Tom's suggestions of mono tone and disc at 4 or less works too, Jim in Tenn...the WV bros. suggestions at 0 disc, is too noisy for me but turn it up to 1 and it quiets everything down enough.
I tried disc high at 65 but notching nickels and foil back in so as not to miss gold jewelry and that seemed to work pretty good also with the sniper and the concentric coils.
You can't have too many arrows in the quiver as far as I am concerned so I keep trying new things.
In an effort to hunt as quietly as possible, all metal has that constant threshold hum and hunting at low disc gives me constant and consistent iron grunts around here, recently I tried some new things and I accidentally hit on a combination that seems to work best of all for me so far.
In the last week or so I have recovered almost 2 dozen old wheats, a silver dime and an IH from depths at the 6-7" level and many from areas I have personally scoured before and to my surprise with a little practice this is becoming fairly easy.
This success is due to 3 things, I think...my settings, the coil choice and new observations about some of the more iffy signals I have been passing by...plus some very slow movements of the coil so 4 things.
Settings are disc at 23, thresh at -4, sense at between 75 and 90 but mostly at 90 if EMI is not a noisy problem, SL speed and 1F tones...no notching.
The coil I thought was the best for hunting in this crowded, iron infested soil was the sniper but again I was surprised when the big DD coil immediately seemed to work better.
The new observations I noticed were a bit different than the success I had when I was only sticking to the up averaged high numbered targets that didn't jump down to iron much which usually turned out to be good targets if they were at the 5-6" or more depth.
The deeper the targets here the more they were up averaged because that is what the Fishers are designed to do around iron.
I am not sure if the big coil had a lot to do with this but after switching I started to notice many more signals that were still high but not quite into the high 80's-low 90's good target area but a bit lower into the high 70-80s area.
There was a lot of jumping with these signals, many drops down low and even into iron and not stable at all so I didn't dig them but I found that even with this big coil if I slowly worked that coil around and got the target to the tip and made some small quick side to side movements the numbers stayed high but most of the low drops stopped and there were older coin targets down there especially if the depth meter showed the 5-6" level or more.
Checking these suspected good signals out from a second direction is important but I do get more one way hits on good targets than in normal soil so I am still digging those one ways and not all but most have been coins so far.
The signals that still had a bunch of jumping and drops seemed to be iron and I dug a good amount of these as I learned but less and less as time went on.
Evidently the speed and the way you move the coil around here is really important in this crazy soil, more than I thought, not only to acquire the target at first but how you maneuver it to check out the signal after.
I have to do all of this with my other coils but that big coil is doing the job very well and that longer scanning field seems to be helping more than hindering me which seems opposite logic when hunting in trash and iron filled sites.
The key here seems to be move the coil slow to get a suspected good signal then get it to the tip of the coil to examine it better...why it stabilizes deeper target signals with the tip of the coil rather than the coil center I don't know.
Still more experimenting to do with this and my other coils but I have a small spot next to a little stream in my local park where I am pulling out many of these older, hidden coins so I have a nice little laboratory to work in.
I have been over this area a lot in the past but never realized there was still so much here and how well they were hiding.
I hunted in this soil when I started for a couple of years and then moved to Kansas with that beautiful dream soil.
When we decided to move back I almost started to cry, I remember what it was like and why I became a mostly shallow clad and jewelry hunter.
Now with the F70 and all these coils plus all these lessons I am learning I have gone from dreading my hunting here to thrilled to have the opportunity to live in an area with older parks and lawns to hunt so close.
I never found this many wheats, IH's, any seated dimes or a silver dollar in Kansas but I have here, and something tells me I might beat my best silver coin yearly total by year's end.
3 of those so far for me from just a couple of sites and it is only mid January.
When you get lemons ya gotta learn to make lemonade.
Sometimes, if you learn to do it just right, that can be the best and sweetest drink of all.
