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This coil thing is really bothering me...

jbow

Active member
Why would Minelab sell me a 1K detector with an inferior coil?? Why should I have to buy a different coil to make it stable??

Yesterday, in order to get a reasonably stable threshold I had to run the sens on 10 in manual. (I was swinging about 1' per second) I could run the sens up to 12-14 and keep most of the threshold but above 10 I had to constantly stop and check falses. Besides that, I have had the SE for about a month and have found less than 5 bucks in clad... and that is ALL... I always find good stuff with my F75 but not wit hthe SE. I keep trying, hoping that something will "click" and I will start finding good stuff with it. I've tried AM/ferrous, smartfind-coins/conduct, i've been trying all sorts of things but I can't seem to get it...

Sorry... I am just frustrated. I don't know how many holes i've dug just to find nothing... I keep thinking that maybe I just haven't swung the coil over a good or deep target. I find shallow clad easy enough but I can do that with most any machine.

OK, ...i'll keep trying... are you sure it really is a good machine?

Maybe it's the ground... yeah, that's it... it's the ground. :rage: :stars:

Julien
 
My SE came with a fantastic coil. Great depth and minimal chatter. It may be that you are jumping around a bit too much with settings. Start basic and run that way for a while. It does take a bit to get used to the SE.
 
Everyone say's it take's some time to learn it. Everyone say's it is a great machine. I wish I had one of the earlier coils to compare it to... have you never been frustrated trying to learn a new machine?

J
 
Not at all. Any advanced machine is going to take time to learn. Unfortunately, we live in a fast food, fast cars, instant gratification society. Slow down and take the time to really learn this great machine.
 
Julien, I do understand your frustration, when we buy something new, we expect it to be in perfect working order. I have read some posts where some are having trouble with the new coil, that is veteran users who are very familiar with the Explorer series. Now I have to guess that there is a problem with some of the new coils, how many and to what extent I don't know. Whether one pays over 1K or whatever, we expect a new product to work. I hope you keep in mind that all the brands that have put out new models over the past couple of years have had their share of coils and other components not working properly so it isn't just a ML thing going on here. If you have someone closeby with any Explorer perhaps you could temporary put on their and see if there is a diff. or have them to operate yours a little to see what they think, short of that you may need to contact by phone Minelab and see if you need to send it in.
It may be in your interest also to see if you can locate a used stock or some other size coil and see how it works on your Explorer. Some new users opt for the 8" or another small coil to learn on.
I can assure you that the Explorer series is a great detector but I am biased of course.
I do hope you can get this resolved, hang in there and everything should work out.
HH,
Steve
 
I will tell you when I first got a Explorer that the first year it came so close to be wrapped around a tree, trying to get used to it. Seem like I understood it one day and then the next it was completely different. Wasn't the Explorer giving the problem, but me trying too many setting I was reading about on these forums.The setting that work for some will not work with others in their area, so you first need to get used to the Explorer and what it is telling you as it take way more Patience's than the Sovereign ever did because it can be set so many different ways with some of these setting only going to make it harder to learn. Minelab recommends the factory presets for the first 40 hours or more as it is a good starting point. After you see what these controls do then you can tweak them to suit your type of hunting and the area you are at.
One of the things I feel Minelab should have done right from the beginning is put the 8 inch coil on them with the 10.5 the optional coil as for most the 8 inch will do a great job plus so much easier to use and understand as the separation is great. I feel I learned more using the 8 inch Sun Ray coil about the Explorer that I did with the stock coil.
Now I am on my 3rd SE as I sell my demos after I have used them for a while and every one of them have had good coils on them as I can run my sensitivity higher than I ever could on my XS or the EX II and still have a stable detector. I do know of one new one I sold the person thought the SE was not as stable as his EX II was, so it is possible he has a bad coil or trying to set it up like his EX II was. I let a couple of guys up here with the EX II try my SE and they like the way it worked and though the deeper targets respond better with the SE, but what the SE could see they could get their EX II to see the same target, but not as good of response.
The Explorers are a different beast thats for sure, so have no problem learning them while others can not, but i would recommend the factory presets, smaller coil and to go to area where you can find clad if nothing else, but stay away for well worked area as you may only dig trash and have a hard time learning the SE, once learned then go to many of these well worked areas and go slow and listen.
If you can find someone in your area with the Explorer that does well will help you too and if you feel the SE is bad or the coil is bad be sure to contact Minelab to make sure it is OK.
 
I found all the noise and chatter to make me nuts at first. But I thought that about the CZ 6 when I first tried it years ago. Anyhow, with the SE, I decided I wanted silver coins and didn't want to mess around digging a bunch of pennies, so I took a handful of silver quarters and dimes and made a "learn" pattern for them. Went out with it at an older school and my second hit was a silver quarter at 4"... kept hunting picked up a bunch of clad quarters and clad dimes.

Why was this good? Because I got super familiar with that high coin sound... training my ears what to listen for. Plus I did not get frustrated digging a ton of junk. I did dig some... but more coins than trash. Did I get deep silver from sites I had worded before? Yes, even with high discrimination.

As you learn what good stuff sounds like, you can back off the discrimination until you are hunting with no discrimination and using your ears to tell you what's good. I know I used high discrimination on the CZ for quite a few months until I felt confident enough to back it off and listen to the barrage of sounds.

Discrimination can be evil if you use it all the time, but for learning a new machine and learning what good targets sound like, it is a great tool.

If you have another detector to use in the meantime, and you think there is a problem with the coil, do send it in. I did that with an XLT I had a helluva time with, and turned out the coil was bad and I wasted all those hours trying to make it work and just getting myself frustrated.
 
My first SE was horrible. Sweep a target and the display would go bonkers requiring a shutdown-restart. Sweep a clad quarter, it would ID below penny. Falsed like crazy, poor depth. The display was fine on the second SE but it falsed high on iron to the point that I was ready to snap the machine in half across my knee. I have dug thousands of targets in iron with an Explorer XS and II so I'm no stranger to iron fasle signals but this second SE was an order of magnitude worse. When I backed off the sens to settle it down depth went to hell. Both of these first two SE's were within a few hundred units of each other serial number wise.

My third SE was a very noticable improvement over the first two and about 6000 later in serial number. Still that slimline coil was more prone to falsing on iron and was quite sensitive to bumbs and I found it to be quite annoying. Then I put an Explorer II coil on this third SE and PRESTO it was instantly an entirely different machine. In terms of operation and falsing it ran like an Explorer II. Far more stable, ran all my old settings just fine, plus I had all the advantages of the new SE features.

Question: If someone buys a malfunctioning SE like the first two I had and its their first Explorer how would they know its malfunctioning?

Charles
 
Like I said, I have no point of reference. People are saying that the slimline coil is junk...

I don't know what to think. I need to try it at some better sites. Most of mine are trash, iron, and mineral...

It's raining today... finally. Later this week I am going to try it at some different sites.

I really don't think it's a bad coil. I went through something similar when I first got a T2. I didn't have the coil cable screwed tight into the box and I used it like that for three weeks... determined to learn the thing, I found stuff too. Finally I called CS and the first thing they said was to wiggle the cable at the box... DOH!! I tightened it and it quietened down... No, I think the coil is ok, I really think it's the ground I am hunting. I had to set my Sovereign sens on 4:00 to get a stable threshold, the SE I had to set the sens on 10 manual to get it to be stable and not false. It was stable to 12/13 but would false above 10. Since both machines were having a hard time... I think it's the ground. Thankfully I have other machines that work well in those places. I really bought the SE to try and find older and deeper coins. That lead's to another problem... there are NO old schools or parks in our town. I need to drive to some just haven't done it.

Thanks,

J
 
Question: If someone buys a malfunctioning SE like the first two I had and its their first Explorer how would they know its malfunctioning?


That was the question I was trying to ask in my obscure way. Thanks.

I went out for about an hour on Saturday and dug nothing good. Admitted, I have hunted this site hard for two years and there is not much left but there is some stuff. The F74 found two more bullets last week.
Saturday the SE found one very small piece of lead and four pieces of square nail. The pieces of nail were 1" and less and the crosshair ID was pegging the right side of the screen, and off it. Not all the way to the top but close. There are many more nails there so...

I was running IM 24, conduct. I also ran some in AM and ferrous but I don't remember which I was in when I dug the bits of nail. I had to run the sens on 10 to stop falsing, 12/13 I could keep a threshold but it would false. My SovGT also has a real hard time there. I have to run the sens on 4:00 to keep a threshold on it. So, it's bad ground. I am going to keep trying and I may have a hunt this weekend in Dalton witha friend who uses a Quattro so I will get to compare the coils.

Thanks,
Julien
 
I am tempted to ignore the talk of the slimline coil being junk. It's a new coil, it's not the old coil. It will act different... it's a different coil. And no two coils are even exactly alike. I think the people who are saying this are comparing their old Explorers to the new Explorer and the old coils to the new coils. They're different, and they are not going to be the same. No two Explorers will be the same either. Plus there are all the variables of user settings and hunting conditions, etc. So people may prefer their old coils or old Explorers, mainly because they've learned THAT SPECIFIC MACHINE, but the new ones are just as good IMO... just DIFFERENT from their specific machine/coil.
 
Thanks, I am certainly going to give it some time and in time I will know.

I tend to agree with you.

J
 
stay away for well worked area as you may only dig trash and have a hard time learning the SE


Rick I think this has been my biggest problem. Good advice, i'll take it.

J
 
I put a Sun Ray 8 inch coil on my SE, and instantly started being able to isolate targets better. You hearing multi tones under your coil is because there are probably multiple targets under your coil at one time, and coming from the F 75, you are probably swinging a little too fast. While yes, you get better depth and ID with a faster sweep speed on most machines, including the SE, the faster sweep speed is also causing you to have to process the tones in your brain faster than you are currently ready to manage. First off, a smaller coil will cover less ground and therefore, give you less to deal with in each pass. The stock ten is basically to big a coil to use in most situations, even after you get incredibly proficient with the tones; put it on a shelf and use a smaller coil. You will end up using it, but at first, it is going to frustrate the living *&%^* out of you. Honestly, you will not be given up that much depth by using the 8 inch instead, however, you will be sampling about one third the cubic footage of soil at one time. That sounds like a huge negative, but it is not, having less to deal with at one time will give you the ability to hear targets independently. You then will be able to learn the good and bad tones faster. You don't learn a language in paragraphs at a time, you learn it one word at a time, or you learn nothing. I own just about every coil made for the SE, from almost every manufacturer, and the best all around size in an area with little to medium dense trash (general all around) is my Sun Ray 8. Some people have complained about the original Slimline tens (Mine lab's stock coil), mine never was a problem, too damn big for most places I hunt but not really unstable. So use a smaller coil / turn your gain down to at least 7 (cuts out allot of the iron falsing) / put your sensitivity in auto until you can recognize falses, I have found thousands of coins in auto, almost never use manual sensitivity unless I'm trying to squeeze an extra inch out of the ID / Volume 10 / threshold-barely audible/ tone variability-10/ tone limits-10/ audio response-normal/ Recovery- turn fast on, deep off (helps to get a quicker response time, separating good and bad tones) and is easier to learn the machine with / use a slower sweep speed when you are in trash, try and isolate or separate the different tones (targets) from each other with coil control (damn near impossible at first with the larger coils) / lastly, to get rid of a great many useless tones at once is your Iron Mask setting- a setting of 28 or 27 will black out about a quarter of an inch of the left side of your screen nulling out most of your iron nails and ferrous-iron junk. This, in itself will eliminate more than half the tones you hear, you can also select out bottle caps (very bottom right corner of your screen) I have never found a single worth while target in that area other than really small caliber old lead bullets, mostly 22's. The advantage of the Explorers are also their disadvantage, their slow response time that allows them to ID better also hinders your ability to use discrimination without potentially nulling out collocated trash/good targets, so eventually you want to be able to hunt wide open all metal, iron mask 32; HOWEVER, you first have to know the tones in order to do that. / put your machine in conduct when using iron mask 27-28 and listen for the high tones, (some people like ferrous tones at this point but then Indians and wheats sound like round pull tabs). SILVER UPPER RIGHT, watch your smart find screen, if the cursor bounces to the left allot, it is probably an iron false or collocated iron and silver, only experience will tell you which. The further right the cursor lands, the better. Concentrate your digs on the targets that hit in the upper right hand quarter of your screen and you will find silver by day two-that's where all quarters, halves, pennies, wheats, Indians, dimes, half dimes, dollars, large gold and square pull tabs and alluminum hit. The extreme top right hand corner is where hot rocks hit but they sound "broken" or scratchy as compared to a silver half that will sound smooth and flutey. The bottom right quarter of your screen is where nickles, small gold and pull tabs hit, far bottom right corner is rusty bottle caps (easy to tell on the Explorers). When you finally get to a point where you know the tones and what they mean you can start hunting in all metal in ferrous tones, and start to separate trash and good targets very close to one another just by tone alone. If you search for my posts on the SE October 2006, when I first got my SE, you will find I had the exact same problems you were having, I don't have those problems anymore and there wasn't a thing wrong with my machine. Most important of all, to much discrimination on the SE and you will become a shallow clad hunter. Always noise cancel according to the way the manual says to do it, and every time, clean the dirt out between your coil and coil cover. And lastly, pick a less than maximum trash area, in really dense trash, even the 8 inch is a hard coil to get by with, never mind that beast of a ten it came with. That will be $9.95 please :rofl:
 
n/t
 
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