Beachcomber
New member
Each time I take the E-Trac out to the beach I try out at lest one thing different than I have tried before just to see how it effects performance and if it helps or hinders the way I like to hunt. If you remember from my last post a couple of weeks I had tried raising the Threshold tone to it's highest level which also causes the entire Tone ID rage to shift upward. This worked pretty well with the exception of making quarters sound very screechy. Oh one thing you should know I always hunt in Smooth Audio Mode as I personally do not care for the Flutey Sounding tones. I prefer cleaner Tonal ID. When I used to use my Explorer I always hunted in Audio Mode 2 which is quite similar to Smooth Mode on the E-Trac.
Anyway this week I tried something something I saw on one of the MLO Videos Posted by a person that was hunting some really iron infested fields. Watching the video and listening to the sounds to me seemed like it was making actually making it harder to pick out the sounds of good targets. But after watching the video a few times I started to hear the good sounds better. And since he was hunting a fairly open the screen which I like I decided to try his method. The change was to do pretty much the opposite of what I had done two weeks ago. The change was to set the Threshold Tone from it's highest setting down to it's lowest setting which I did. I also set my Tone ID variability back up to 30. I had lowered it a little to stop the quarters from being so screechy when the Threshold Tone is set to a high pitch. The really Low Threshold tone took a little while to get used to but was very comfortable to listen to. As expected it shifted all the tone ID's downward. But one of the most interesting things to happen was that really deep Low Conductive Targets instead of giving a low tone they gave a short gutteral growl. I thought of more as what I call a "pip" type of sound. If you try this method you will hear what I mean. Now they may have been short because most of these turned out to be small targets at very decent depths. These are targets that when on the surface would read 21-01 to 12-06 but because they were deep were reading in the 18-01 to 18-06 area. Most turned out to 22 casings and very corroded pulltabs in the 8" depth range which is a very respectable depth for a 22 short. The one piece of jewelry that I did find that gave that pip growl type sound was a thin silver bracelet at 5-6" deep which is quite deep for something that is only detected by individual links rather than as a solid piece of metal. I need to do more testing with these settings but for jewelry hunting or button hunting where you want very deep low conductive targets to give a distinctive sound this may be a good way to go. I will hunt more this coming weekend with these settings and see how things go. Also I was hunting in QM with a setting of 25. The beach I was hunting allowed the Auto Sensitivity to run at around 26 which was allowing me to hear and dig coins in the 12" plus range. The more I use this machine the more I like it. I have found that if it will run with a Sensitivity level of 25 or higher it will go every bit as deep as an Explorer and maybe an inch or two more. But if it will only run around 20 then the Explorer will probably go deeper. I have been lucky. Most every place that I hunt the E-Trac can run at an Auto Sensitivity of 25 or higher with little or no falsing giving me very good target depth.
Hope this helps and gives you food for thought and some other settings to try!
HH
Beachcomber
Anyway this week I tried something something I saw on one of the MLO Videos Posted by a person that was hunting some really iron infested fields. Watching the video and listening to the sounds to me seemed like it was making actually making it harder to pick out the sounds of good targets. But after watching the video a few times I started to hear the good sounds better. And since he was hunting a fairly open the screen which I like I decided to try his method. The change was to do pretty much the opposite of what I had done two weeks ago. The change was to set the Threshold Tone from it's highest setting down to it's lowest setting which I did. I also set my Tone ID variability back up to 30. I had lowered it a little to stop the quarters from being so screechy when the Threshold Tone is set to a high pitch. The really Low Threshold tone took a little while to get used to but was very comfortable to listen to. As expected it shifted all the tone ID's downward. But one of the most interesting things to happen was that really deep Low Conductive Targets instead of giving a low tone they gave a short gutteral growl. I thought of more as what I call a "pip" type of sound. If you try this method you will hear what I mean. Now they may have been short because most of these turned out to be small targets at very decent depths. These are targets that when on the surface would read 21-01 to 12-06 but because they were deep were reading in the 18-01 to 18-06 area. Most turned out to 22 casings and very corroded pulltabs in the 8" depth range which is a very respectable depth for a 22 short. The one piece of jewelry that I did find that gave that pip growl type sound was a thin silver bracelet at 5-6" deep which is quite deep for something that is only detected by individual links rather than as a solid piece of metal. I need to do more testing with these settings but for jewelry hunting or button hunting where you want very deep low conductive targets to give a distinctive sound this may be a good way to go. I will hunt more this coming weekend with these settings and see how things go. Also I was hunting in QM with a setting of 25. The beach I was hunting allowed the Auto Sensitivity to run at around 26 which was allowing me to hear and dig coins in the 12" plus range. The more I use this machine the more I like it. I have found that if it will run with a Sensitivity level of 25 or higher it will go every bit as deep as an Explorer and maybe an inch or two more. But if it will only run around 20 then the Explorer will probably go deeper. I have been lucky. Most every place that I hunt the E-Trac can run at an Auto Sensitivity of 25 or higher with little or no falsing giving me very good target depth.
Hope this helps and gives you food for thought and some other settings to try!
HH
Beachcomber