Shenandoah Digger said:
Highly mineralized ground, like the red clay of a good part of Virginia? I'm sure a lot of the south has the same thing, along with other parts of the country. Most VLF machines ID everything as ferrous, if at all, at only a few inches deep. Hate to have to get a GPX but that may be the only answer. Appreciate your reply.
So far my F70 has been very good to me in ultra challenging devil dirt.
I have been trying to figure out my crazy soil here in Birmingham since July.
Red clay filled soil in lots of areas, on top of that extra naturally occurring iron to the max plus several areas I hunt are loaded with extra iron from landfills.
At first I also thought a PI would be the only answer but I have experimented with several settings, dug a bunch of targets, learned the behavior of non ferrous targets at depth and have become pretty successful at figuring out what to dig and mostly what to avoid.
GB numbers in great soil in Kansas were usually mid 40's to mid 50's with one bar on the dirt meter...if that.
Here I am getting high 60's but more often into the high 70's to low 80's with at least one but more often 2-3 bars on the dirt meter.
That would be even in areas with black dirt and no sign of red clay, too.
I lived here before and using different detectors I found a lot but rarely anything past 3-4".
5" was usually a dream.
In Kansas I could get good ID's on targets up to about 8" and sometimes more.
Audio went way deeper.
Here I get all kinds of signals on deeper targets at 5-7" or more on the screen and lots of them iron because they are iron, lots if iron will come in high most if the time, I am talking into the dime, quarter and half numbers with some drops lower even to iron.
In the last few months I have worked hard to understand signals as deep as possible and I have made it to the 7-8" area, lots of great targets were found at the 6" area at sites that have been hammered in the past and that is now easy for me to reach and read but a couple of targets were deeper at the 7-8" level and those are the ones that dropped my jaw still especially considering they were found with smaller coils including a sniper.
One of those targets was an 1880's nickel, thin as a dime, I still cannot believe the F70 was able to see it in this soil that deep, and I learned enough about deeper possible good target behavior to actually choose to dig it.
A friend I hunted with that day saw the depth of the hole, the thin target and my small coil and just shook his head that we had it in our hands.
I figured out that once you get past 4" here and the deeper you go the higher the numbers will be and if I getting a target with mostly higher numbers, or small blocks of numbers because nothing deep comes in solid, from at least 2 directions with few or no drops to iron I need to dig those and most of the time they have been good older coin targets.
Some of my targets in the past few months have been several wheaties, some back to the teens, some silver dimes, a buff, a war nickel and a silver Masonic coin...all in the 6" level and deeper.
Also a Peace Dollar at 4".
All of them were at numbers that were in the high 80's to low 90's which is past regular quarters including the nickels.
The top line Fishers are designed to up average all target signals around iron and that is what I believe is happening here.
I use this effect to my advantage, I didn't know about this up averaging at first but just noticed the behavior of those deep targets and after a lot of digging I am now to the point that when I dig deeper targets now I usually have a decent non ferrous target at the bottom of the hole for my effort.
I don't know if I am just doing things others usually can't, I also don't know if I could do this or learn to do this with another brand that doesn't tend to up average around iron like mine does but all I know is the combination of using the Fisher in conjunction with the behavior I learned is making me successful.
I am still working to get even deeper but I seem to be hunting at levels that no others I know of have been able to hit in the past.
I had a TDI SL in my sights before I moved back here because I knew what I was going to be dealing with and the challenges but I had no idea I could even come close to accomplishing what I have so far...and I feel this is just the beginning.
The TDI is no longer in the running for now and the foreseeable future.
