Some errands to run this morning, early afternoon weather called for powerful rain and thunderstorm, wind warning. It arrived shortly after we arrived back home.
Lots of water on the ground everywhere.......by 6PM decided to do some extensive Air Testing, to better understand the detector and how it will function. Glad I did!!!!
These favored settings will be what I will start with at my first hunt, hopefully tomorrow.
==================================================================================================================
Overall the Vista X favored depth wise these conductors Lead, Gold, Brass, Copper over Silver.
These were used for testing.
Gold rings, nuggets, coin.
Silver coins—sterling/coin silver, silver rings, silver charms, 3” sterling silver dish
US, Canadian, Australian, European and middle east coinage in various metal compositions and sizes.
Brass bullet casings, lead musketballs, lead seals, copper dog tag
Trash—wrought iron nails large and small, canslaw, foil, bottle caps, various pull tabs, other steel junk and bolts-screws, juice bottle liners, pencil eraser casings, etc.
After about 3 hours, came up with settings that favored my hunting style. A good learning experience finding out how the Vista X can be set up and what happens at different settings.
I feel better prepared when I go out for my first hunt rather than going blind as I would have today. Due to some errands and rain this afternoon todays hunt was postponed.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Found these settings to be a good gold jewelry hunting and overall coin hunting program.
2 Tone Gives a mixed high low tone in Disc 1, high tone in Alt 2 –--on small thin gold rings and foil. Also on many of the modern Canadian clad coins lying flat mixed tone, if on edge high tone on Alt 2.
Disc 1----- set at 3.3
Alt Disc----set at 25.6
Iron Volume ---set at 5.0 (max)
Headphone/speaker volume--- set at 3.0, headphone volume then controled by headphones
Threshold----set at 3.1
Gain-----------set at 5.0(max)
Also, seems to get a bit better depth with
Threshold ---- set at 35.8
Gain------------set at 34.9
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ground balancing to a plastic penny tube full of black magnetic sand. Found the Vista X sees high conductors right thru it when placed on the vial—gold rings, coins. No appreciative loss of air test depth. No downgrading of higher conductors towards the iron range or low tone. Remains high tone.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Keeping all the above settings except for Threshold and Gain
Threshold----set at 5.0 (max)
Gain---------- set at 0 (min)
Runs with somewhat smooth stable low volume background noise. Saturated audio to about 6” on a gold ring, then modulated to about 12”. Seems to provide about a 2” boost in depth.
Shallow Hunting to about 6-8” on a gold ring
Threshold----set at 0 (min)
Gain------------set at 5.0 (max)
Shallow hunting to about 6” on a gold ring, detector runs totally quiet
Threshold---set at 25
Gain----------set at 25
