Vanquish 540 question - Ground Balance

[Square_Nail_Oregon]

Hello all, back on the forum after a long long time. No Findmall channel/folder for Vanquish yet, so hoping this is a good place to ask? I recently acquired a Vanquish 540, and i am curious. Does the Vanquish 540 have Auto ground balance, auto ground track, or is the GB preset? Is ground balance resolved during the initial startup - when it scans the channels? Video's i have seen so far don't indicate the ground balance bob/pump in startup. I picked this up for a beach and large park cruiser/cherry picker unit.
I am a multi brand user, the Vanquish is my first Minelab unit.

 

[jmaclen]

The Vanquish models have preset ground balance. They also have just a little bit of automatic ground balance happening in the background but it is not ground tracking.
So how much Vanquish models can adjust to ground conditions automatically is very limited and is a by product of their simultaneous multi frequency operation.

Here in Colorado where I detect most often, the preset ground balance is not sufficient so I get lots of ground noise at the ends of flat swings and when the coil approaches and leaves the ground. The only "fix" for me with the 440 and 540 was to notch out the lowest iron target IDs.

From what I have seen of the new Vanquish models, the 360, 460 and 560, some of them will have user adjustable ground balance.

 

[Picketwire]

From Dave Johnson, metal detector engineer (RIP):

"Many of our products, from the under-$100 BH Junior to the F75, have discriminators which use differentiation to track out ground. In the case of our higher end models which offer phase adjustment, most augment the discriminator with the ground balanced signal as well. In most ground conditions, if you’re searching in discrimination mode, phase adjustment has little impact on performance. And, knowing how forums are, someone will probably want to argue with me that phase adjustment makes a big difference in discriminator performance. In MOST ground, it doesn’t, this is consistent with theory and it is what users report. If someone’s got an exception, well, it’s an exception."

The Vanquish is always in the discrimination mode.