Try it,
The Explorer will pick up a target deeper when swung at a faster speed. And what he says about progressing slowly is also true, especially with bigger coils.
But there are a few buts and a pile of maybes.....
In non trashy areas you can swing the explorer like any weed whacker detector and you will get better depth. The problem is that only twice in your lifetime will you find a site that has coins and is not trashy. Everywhere else you'll need to slow down a bit.
How much is the question. I swing at a pretty quick rate, and because I have only bottlecaps disced out my machine is a chattering fool. I tend to swing faster in less trash, and slow down in more. Sometimes you can get a good hit swinging at a fast rate, sometime you will miss it depending on the location of nearby trash, you might only get a hit swinging from left to right and not right to left. This is one of the arguments for shuffling ahead slowly, make sure that the coil passes over the same ground at least twice, one from each direction.
The other reason for shuffling is that the bigger coils seem to have a sweet spot near the pinpoint area that can sometimes see a coin under or next to trash better than at the front or back. I really notice this with the WOT. Some peeple say they pinpoint by progressively swinging the coil farther forward or back from the target, when they don't get the hit anymore it will be at the front or back of the coil. This is how a DD coil's search pattern should work, with the hot zone pretty much equally deep from the front of the coil to the rear. My experience is that this seldom works in trashy areas; you'll loose the signal as you move the coil front or back, that there is only a small spot where the good target will come through, You need to turn a few degrees and try get the target again and mark the X to pinpoint. Many times trying to get the coin from 90 degress will result in no signal at all, or only iron. So even though you are swinging a 15" coil you really only want to detect a couple of new inches of dirt each swing. Many would be amazed how effective this is for finding targets in trash. The gospel that smaller is better in trash is not always true. My belief is that smaller DD coils tend to behave more like a concentric; ANY target under the coil will mask a deeper good target, while with a bigger coil you have a better chance of seeing under/around trash.
Back to the speed issue. I think there are many issues at play here. There are almost an infinite ways a target can be surrounded by other targets, that is why we still are popping coins out of "Worked-Out" parks.
Anyone who has swung the Explorer has noticed that many times when you swing over a coin in iron you get the extreme upper left and extreme upper right and a few signals upper but in between. My guess is that sometimes the machine locks on the 27 nails near the target, and sometimes on the coin, and sometimes reports an average of both signals. One of the reason that many bracelets can't be detected is that the detector doesn't see the whole mass of the bracelet, only one of the rings at any given time. I think we see the same situation with multiple targets. How many of you have got a confusing iron/good signal and found an old button that has brass and iron bound together? I have noticed a few times that I got a solid non-bouncy target down in the pulltab region, dug it and found a silver coin and a nickel very firmly bonded together, usually you see a clean spot on the nickel where the dime was. It seems that if there is very good electrical contact the machine will average the two every sweep, less or no bond and you will see nickel or dime occassionally and something in between most of the rest of the sweeps.
Sometimes slowing way down and "painting the ground" and hitting an area from many directions will turn up signals that you can not get at speed. I've found many coin spills in trash that have spent a half hour hitting from different angles and speeds and with different coils before I was satisfied that I had dug every decent signal. And even then I bet I left more in the ground. This works, but if you hunted like this all the time none of us would have enough years in our lives to finish our own yards.
This is getting longer and more disorganized that I was hoping....
The minelab wiggle- We all do it, very short quick sweeps over a target, the faster pace means deeper and often you can a better ID on a target than slow sweeps, or a long fast sweep will tell you nothing because all the nearby trash is masking out the signal.
Bottom line is that the explorer does have a finite processing speed, but the oft repeated gospel that the explorer is a slow swing machine is not always or even usually true. Too many variables involved.
Most masking is caused by coil geometry, this is where hitting a site at many different angles comes in. I have another detector that is supposed to be much faster responding than the explorer. It behaves much the same way as the explorer does. My finding is the quicker recover speed is of secondary importance to coil geometry. However, loading your explorer down with heavy discrimination or complicated patterns seems to slow response down considerably, perhaps my other machine does better here, but I generally also use it with minimal discrimination.
Swinging too fast can often leave the machine processing the last signal and not seeing the next. However there are times that a good deep signal will still be heard through all the iron even at a quick sweep that can not be heard with a slow sweep.
Anybody else notice this, that when you are swinging the explorer and then stop quickly it takes awhile for the sounds to die down, almost like the machine is storing and processing signals not in real time? Is there a processing stack?
Enough for tonight.
Chris
