I try to hunt with the factory coil or the 8" coil when using the Golden. I want it's ID to be as accurate as possible while giving it the best possible depth.
The real trick to the Golden is to gather up some trash and some gold bands (women's in particular) and play around with the narrow notch setting and the notch width dial. If you understand, at least in general, what the notch does and what the notch width dial is doing, it will help make you more effective with the Golden umax. You can dial the notch width dial upwards until troublesome trash items disappear or no longer produce a solid tone (they beep, but it is broken). I think that you will find that some of the gold will disappear too, but that most of it will remain detectable by the Golden.
The intent of the Golden is to allow you to go into a fairly trashy area and to eliminate a lot of the lower conductivity trash items. If you dig 35% less trash while filtering out only 10% of potential rings in that same area of conductivity, it tilts the odds in your favor. I only use the notch when the trash is so fierce that I have decided that I will not otherwise dig targets in the pull-tab range. The Golden can make the job more manageable in these situations.
The best I have done in terms of depth with the Golden is 6.5" to 7" on a silver dime and it was a really sketchy dig in the sense that most folks would have rightfully walked on. I'd say that 6" is pretty close to the end of the Golden's realistic range on dimes. I think that the detector is intentionally numbed down a bit so it doesn't sound off on micro-trash. It is able to get into trashy spots that would drive you insane with some other detectors and go cherry pick most of the good stuff. But the trade off for not being fooled by small pieces of trash is that it's depth isn't going to blow you away.
Anyhow, these features all combine to make the Golden umax a fairly effortless trash hunter. It is also a very fun, enjoyable detector to use because it keeps you out of most of the really frustrating recovery situations. You will almost never be combing through grass roots looking for a speck of aluminum trash - the Golden just cruises on by.
About the only tip that I have for you is to listen to the threshold for a little bit when you first turn it on. If the area has some EMI problems, you can probably hear it in the threshold. The Golden does a good job of filtering all of this out once it is in discrimination mode, but if you notice EMI while in all-metal, you will probably want to slow your sweep speed down and work a little slower than normal.
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