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Virginia Mineralized soils?

M

Mach1Pilot

Member
Hello All-

A few days ago I had the opportunity to hunt a farm in Northern VA that had some Civil War activity... being from Central PA we didn't know what to expect, as this was a first CW relic hunt for me/us in that area... We put the Etracs to work with no discrimination, hitting the field areas that we thought had some activity after some research.

It took a while, but we did find a small site near the end of the day, and found some 3 ringers, some Spencer cartridges, a round ball and a gun lever action part along with the usual junk.

The Etrac seemed to work fine to me.... but was it? After reading over in the V3 forum how different detectors react in these soils, I have to wonder if we should have expected/looked for different readings from the Etrac? We did get some depth, as a nail was pulled from 10" at one point. Here's that post on the V3 forum http://www.findmall.com/read.php?66,1133226,page=2

Anyone have any experience with the Etrac/Explorer series machines in these highly mineralized soils in Northern VA? We want to go back... more knowledge would be helpful! :)
 
Just wondering. What was your Auto sens at? Ground mineralization doesn't really effect multi freq machines.
 
The best auto sensitivity number I saw all day was 20. But it dipped as low as 11, and generally ran in the low teens. :wacko: I ran Auto+3... For grins, I tried manual 30 in some of the more silent areas. But I did not notice much of a difference, in either case there just were not many targets.
 
Have you tried open screen all metal in ferrous 2 tones with man sen. as high as can be run stable.This has done very well for me relic hunting.It makes the nails and small iron a low obvious grunt and everything else a high tone.You can pick out conductive targets out of a solid carpet of cut nails this way and once you get used to all the low grunts it is not very hard on the ears and brain.If you go slow you will be amazed at what good targets will sound off in heavy trash,Ray.
 
I personally believe what is happening is the E Trac is seeing several targets in a very small amount of movement. When you come back and swing the detector again you might get what you are looking for. Try this, very slight movements of the coil see different things in the ground, if you are not careful you will be reading something many inches below or maybe above the target.The key to me is to watch the depth indicator for the truth. It will go up and down telling each targets depth. Until I started watching the depth indicator during these times I didn't know what was going on drove me:crazy:The only coil I have that doesn't hardly ever do that is my Sunray X 5. It's not seeing near as much area so no where's near the deviation. Walk around the target very very slow and if you hit that sweet spot and ID # dig, really if you just hit the ID # it will more than likely be something. Actually this is one of the nice things about the E Trac...............
 
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