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Too much Sensitivity???

G

Gaz

New member
Thought I'd throw this question into the classroom!!!

Some people swear by running their ETrac's flat out having sensitivity on 30 when the ground conditions aren't right for it.
Forgetting about the pops and chirps, does running a machine like this have a detrimental effect to finding targets and also depth??
I always thought that the only way to get the best from a machine is to run it stable??

Any thoughts?

Gaz.
 
I am with you on not running it beyond stability.And it also depends a lot on the site at hand.If I am sure very deep desirable targets are present I will bump the high end of stability with higher gain and move very slow and methodical.On the other hand if a site is very trashy I find less sens. is to my advantage as I am more able to pick out the slight signals that are often at the very brink of being completely masked by near by trash.If the machine gets to busy and noisy from being over sensitized by max sens. I find it much harder to pick out the faint and often fleeting signals of collated targets.
It is my findings after many hundreds of hours detecting solely with the E-Trac that finesse often trumps raw power in many of our public sites here in the USA.
Remember depth is not always king as is very dependent on any given site.
 
I run my ETrack sens on 30 everywhere I hunt, I hunt in Gaz's 2 tone ferrous mode with only the top line blacked out partially leaving room for large silvers to show, sometimes I hunt totally in all metal nothing discriminated out on the screen. Some of the fields I search are coverd with mineralisation and iron, the other day I hunted a field and the suggested sensitivity showed 10 But I had mine on manual 30, I dug a silver threepenny piece which was at 8" and in the hole was a piece of iron 2"x1" If I was in auto I would not have had any chance what so ever of getting that coin.

Eye eye Gaz mate
 
...wowzers!!.......good going mate!!

Gaz.
 
I always rely on my ears...regardless of what the sensitivity bar graph is showing me.

Like many people...I have 100's of hours on the machine which has led me to my opinion.

I never run higher than manual 26 even if the bar says I can...and I never run lower than manual 26...even if the bar says I should have it set lower around 18 to 20 or so.

To me and my ears the machine is plenty stable at manual 26 even if the bars "say" I should run lower....regardless of what site I'm at.

Even in trash...this has worked well for me and the machine is plenty stable as well as plenty deep.

I want the best of both separation and depth when hunting a pounded, trashy site.

You have to work very slow and pay closer attention to hunt this way...but running lower sensitivity won't help much at most of the parks I hunt because many of the coins are in the 10" range. If you were a successful hunter on the Explorers...then odds are you already know to slow down to a crawl when you encounter some instability or nulling.

My best finds have come from investigating a little "popping" or "chirping"...just as it does on the Explorers.

Some of this said popping and chirping wouldn't even have been heard with a lower sensitivity setting...which experimenting over actual targets has shown me.

The best balance of raw power/stabliity is what I am looking for.

Too high of a sensitivity setting and instability no...but the best balance of raw power while still maintaining stability would be my opinion of how to get the best from the machine.
 
Couldn't agree more Ray. For about four weeks I've been pounding a small area of a park that has silver and wheat's popping out all over the place. Now it's getting tougher to find them. Today I decided to use manual sensitivity to see if it would make a difference. I've been using auto sensitivity since I bought the machine when it first came out and with my Explorers I've always used manual sensitivity.

In auto sensitivity the E-Trac was reading 21 (that includes the +3 feature). I went to manual and bumped up the sensitivity to 24. It was a little noisey but manageable. This place has lots of trash so you have to literally take a step swing, take a step swing, etc... A lot of the oldies are at 7+ but we've found pleanty at around 5 & 6 inches. Think the deepest coins I found today were at about 8 inches. What was interesting is that I when I found a deepie, (more than halfway down the depth gauge. Using the stock coil), I would switch to auto sensitivity and check my target. Every target I found in manual sensitivity I could also hear in auto sensitivity but on the deeper ones the tones weren't as loud in auto as they were in manual sensitivity. I'm pretty sure I would have still found them but if I was moving any faster than I was I'm sure I would have walked right over them.

Think I'm one of the few guys that detect with deep and fast both on. I don't mind those chopped off tones because I move like a snail and know what tones I'm listening for. I feel I can hold my own on finding those harder to find masked coins.

One thing for sure is that if you use good technique, keep the coil to the soil, and move slow the E-Trac will sniff out those oldies that others have missed.

Ray-Mo. said:
I am with you on not running it beyond stability.And it also depends a lot on the site at hand.If I am sure very deep desirable targets are present I will bump the high end of stability with higher gain and move very slow and methodical.On the other hand if a site is very trashy I find less sens. is to my advantage as I am more able to pick out the slight signals that are often at the very brink of being completely masked by near by trash.If the machine gets to busy and noisy from being over sensitized by max sens. I find it much harder to pick out the faint and often fleeting signals of collated targets.
It is my findings after many hundreds of hours detecting solely with the E-Trac that finesse often trumps raw power in many of our public sites here in the USA.
Remember depth is not always king as is very dependent on any given site.
Click to expand...
 
....some great points of view there guys!

Gaz.
 
One thing you will not have to worry about is premature failure of your touchpad by using the same settings no matter what or where :rofl: Dont you ever think about bumpng you sensitivity up to 30 if it would run stable at one of your sites.After all 30 should get a bit more depth than 26 at some areas .I mean if you are moving along at 26 and the E-Trac gets very stable would it not tempt you to bump the sens. up a bit ?
 
After using the Explorer xs's, 11's, and Se's for thousands of hours in manual sensitivity, I started out with the Etrac with the same mindset. But, I have found that auto +3 is just about as foolproof as it gets with the Etrac. Could I squeeze another inch of depth out of it by running in manual? Probably, but without a doubt, this is the easiest, deepest detector for coins in all kinds of ground. I have purposely toggled between +3 and manual to see what kind of difference I can see and I have seen no noticable difference. With that being said, I do hunt some very bad ground and I routinely find coins in the 9 to 10 inch range, with some deeper! R.L.
 
what sounds "stable" to me might not sound stable to someone else.

It just seems to me that when I do attempt to bump it up...I start digging iron

To my ears...sensitivity of 26 and sensitivity of 30 have made no difference in signal strength over deep targets such as 10" dimes....hence no better depth.

Manual vs auto does make a difference to me though....which is why I stick with manual most of the time.

Gain is what makes the biggest difference for my ears depthwise for some reason.

Lots of times over 10"+ deepies with the E-Trac...I start dropping gain to see what happens for me. Once gain drops to 25 and under...many of those deep signals disappeared to the point where I would not have stopped to investigate...just as it is on the Explorers for me.
 
I have read many of your posts concerning gain and to be honest, I never fiddled too much with the gain on any Explorer that I have used. When I started with the Explorer, I kept the gain low and had no problem hearing a deep faint signal. I have had tinnitus for the last ten years and in the last year or so, it has got much worse and I don't think I hear the faint signals as well as I use to. I have been hunting an old school that borders an interstate highway and even with the high end phones I use, I am constantly hearing the semi trucks rolling by. To offset this backround noise, I raised the gain on my Etrac a couple of digits higher than the factory preset. When I could hear the deep signals, I started digging many coins deeper than 10 inches and I had no trouble hearing them. With the gain set at 22 which is the setting I use to use, I could not hear these deep signals very well. Since the Etrac holds the last setting, I had it set up for the noisy freeway area and forgot to reset it when I moved to a different spot. I started digging deep coins in this older fairgrounds and it was then that I remembered I had the gain jacked up. I am now a believer in higher gain! One other note: I made the comment about running the sens in auto+3. In many spots where I hunt the number showing in +3 auto is 17 or 18 and in these spots it is rare that I can find a coin over 8 inches deep. In this one particular spot, I will run manual 23 and I do suffer with some falsing, but it is no problem hearing a coin through the small amount of chatter. I do find coins much deeper here with manual sens compared to the auto +3. The Etrac or any Explorer is flexible enough to hunt just about any spot or any type of ground without changing every setting in the menu. Great to have a classroom forum for all to share.
 
I think you are dead on about high gain for the deep coins.That is one of my settings that never changes at 30.I understand your point of not fooling with your set up once you get it dialed in as I am very much the same. I have found that the more tweeking I do the harder it is to decifer what the E-Trac is telling me on deep stuff:thumbup:
The main place I stray is in the auto and man. sensitivity areas.Also like to play with Ferrous 2 tones at a few of my oldest sites ,Ray.
 
When I am hunting my colonial woodsy areas I crank it up, go all metal and take my time all the while listening to what the machine is telling me.

Fact: More sensitivty = more depth and horizontal detection.

However, with the E-Trac running hot like this, it takes alot of practice to be able to understand all the chirping and falsing, but as soon as you hit a good target you will know (multi tone helps).

Trashy areas are another story all together...
 
Yea, great points. I also run my machine hot (minimum 26) almost all the time. This is because I am mostly hunting deep targets. My testing has proven to me that when you drop below 24, you risk missing the faint, really at-the-edge-of-detection-depth targets.

I will go down to 19-20 sensitivity if the targets I seek are shallow (LT 6 inches) and it's trashy.

HH
 
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