REVIER
Well-known member
You guys have been sharing your settings in difficult soil with me, I have been reporting back to you so here is the latest.
This past week I drove south about 17 miles and hunted one of my old favorite sites.
I discovered that the soil is still difficult, being southern and all, but the more shallow stuff from 1" to about 3" or so, maybe 4", seemed to be normal.
Zinc cents in the low 60's, copper cents about 71-72, dimes slightly higher at 74-75.
Why, it was like old times and targets were still a bit jumpy and the numbers still rise when you get deeper to the 5-6" area but I was still pulling them out pretty well on the few deeper ones I came across.
When I lived here before and hunted with the F2 most of the time I was living in the shallows up to 3, maybe 4" and numbers seemed pretty stable, if I did come across the deeper ones at the time I didn't know about instability at depth and this problem with numbers rising as you get deeper.
The F70/F75/T2 platforms just live at a deeper level than that F2 in this soil.
It appears that the local park I hunt at almost every day and do most of my experimenting and the few others I have hunted near me since moving back, some curb strips included, all have a certain something around here that other outlying sites don't.
We have the southern red soil, lots of regular trash, some extra iron infused into the soil and a ton of iron big and small at depths from shallow to deep which seems to throw off everything and make most signals unstable unless they are 1" or less in depth.
On top of that slag from the local steel refineries and other garbage from landfills seem to have been distributed all over the areas I hunt in the city proper, too and just adds that extra dimension of difficulty and instability so lucky me.
Actually, I am looking at this as a blessing in disguise.
Just like a new surfer learning for the first time in heavy surf, a newbie golfer stepping on a course for the first times dealing with heavy winds, a new bowler attempting to play on overwaxed lanes with ill fitting house balls, I am attempting to learn to hunt deep under extra special difficult conditions.
Man, I now figure if I can learn to hunt in this garbage and do it well and be productive the sky is the limit when I start roaming out to better sites in the future.
In the last few months I have done well and made great progress here in the city, yesterday it all seemed to come together for me the best so far.
The only reason I am excited about yesterday's results is because as much as I am proud of what I have found so far in the older coin arena most of them were found in areas that were either new sites to me or new areas in older sites I have been to before.
On this hunt I was in an area I have been to many, many times before and hunted with not only my F70 but 3 other detectors and several coils and had no idea I had missed so many targets.
I found about half a dozen coins, most were modern and at depths only up to about 4" but still pretty jumpy and slightly masked due to the iron all around this area...even a nickel came in at the 70's.
Not a big deal but I missed all these coins before and by watching the screen looking for higher numbers, small blocks of higher numbers that repeated from another angle, I dug down and found coins instead of trash.
The big surprise was the target that showed up at 6" on the depth numbers, bounced a little to 7", and when I dug down to get this one I took a little breath when I saw it was a silver merc.
All this work, experimentation and practice is paying off and I am thrilled and gaining confidence using disc and not just all metal knowing now I can get deeper in this soil which is great because I prefer to hunt in disc if I can which is way quieter and more enjoyable for me not listening to that constant threshold hum in all metal at the high settings I usually use.
My settings at that time were...disc on 1, sense at 80, DE speed, thresh at -2, 4H tones.
I tried using 0 sense which I know you guys use 0 but I found that there is a huge difference in noise and chatter between 0 and 1 and depth does not seem to be affected as far as I can tell.
I did experiment a bit on one of these other coins at about 5" and turned up the disc to almost 30 and everything got more unstable and jumpy.
I have heard that turning up the disc is not supposed to affect depth so much on this platform but in this iron infested, trash filled southern red soil area it did.
After that I tweaked the settings a bit and hunted the area a little more and then moved around to others and I think I might have found my standard settings I can use most of the time from now on.
Disc on 1, sense at 80-85, thresh at -2, mono tone, SL speed most of the time unless it got too noisy.
All day long I had the sniper DD coil mounted and I probably will leave that on awhile because I seem to get pretty accurate and more stable ID's over the bigger DD coil.
The standard elliptical coil seems pretty great here too but I am not sure about depth compared to the small DD so more experimenting to do in that area.
I don't mind noise all that much but if I can hunt quieter it seems to be a bit less mentally fatigueing and I think I am getting just as deep as all metal with these settings or as deep as I need to be to find older coins around here, anyway.
You have to listen to the tone and watch the screen to notice the higher numbers that are different than the million iron numbers that flash by hunting in this kind of site but when I saw small blocks of higher numbers that repeated and were deeper than 4" I dug those and only found rusty iron once or twice.
Those iron objects were a bit more jumpy so not exactly the same as coins but I dug them anyway just to check them out.
I also dug a few higher signals that were at that 6-7"area that were crushed screw on caps but again a bit more jumpy than coins I have found at that same level.
Still, every piece of metal the coil passed over showed up on the screen if I moved the coil at the right speed in SL and got a great picture in my mind of what was going on down there.
The soil was moist after some rain, really dry soil this could all be different.
1F or maybe 2F could work and give me a good idea about shallower targets due to that extra modulation in the tone although I think mono tone is still a little less mentally fatigueing but still more experimenting to do.
Again this is what I am settling into and getting pretty comfortable and confident in...
Disc 1, SL, sense 80 or higher if not too much noise, mono tone, small DD sniper coil.
Using most of these I managed to find that deeper little silver beauty below.
Maybe it won't be so bad living here in the south and this rotten soil after all.
This past week I drove south about 17 miles and hunted one of my old favorite sites.
I discovered that the soil is still difficult, being southern and all, but the more shallow stuff from 1" to about 3" or so, maybe 4", seemed to be normal.
Zinc cents in the low 60's, copper cents about 71-72, dimes slightly higher at 74-75.
Why, it was like old times and targets were still a bit jumpy and the numbers still rise when you get deeper to the 5-6" area but I was still pulling them out pretty well on the few deeper ones I came across.
When I lived here before and hunted with the F2 most of the time I was living in the shallows up to 3, maybe 4" and numbers seemed pretty stable, if I did come across the deeper ones at the time I didn't know about instability at depth and this problem with numbers rising as you get deeper.
The F70/F75/T2 platforms just live at a deeper level than that F2 in this soil.
It appears that the local park I hunt at almost every day and do most of my experimenting and the few others I have hunted near me since moving back, some curb strips included, all have a certain something around here that other outlying sites don't.
We have the southern red soil, lots of regular trash, some extra iron infused into the soil and a ton of iron big and small at depths from shallow to deep which seems to throw off everything and make most signals unstable unless they are 1" or less in depth.
On top of that slag from the local steel refineries and other garbage from landfills seem to have been distributed all over the areas I hunt in the city proper, too and just adds that extra dimension of difficulty and instability so lucky me.
Actually, I am looking at this as a blessing in disguise.
Just like a new surfer learning for the first time in heavy surf, a newbie golfer stepping on a course for the first times dealing with heavy winds, a new bowler attempting to play on overwaxed lanes with ill fitting house balls, I am attempting to learn to hunt deep under extra special difficult conditions.
Man, I now figure if I can learn to hunt in this garbage and do it well and be productive the sky is the limit when I start roaming out to better sites in the future.
In the last few months I have done well and made great progress here in the city, yesterday it all seemed to come together for me the best so far.
The only reason I am excited about yesterday's results is because as much as I am proud of what I have found so far in the older coin arena most of them were found in areas that were either new sites to me or new areas in older sites I have been to before.
On this hunt I was in an area I have been to many, many times before and hunted with not only my F70 but 3 other detectors and several coils and had no idea I had missed so many targets.
I found about half a dozen coins, most were modern and at depths only up to about 4" but still pretty jumpy and slightly masked due to the iron all around this area...even a nickel came in at the 70's.
Not a big deal but I missed all these coins before and by watching the screen looking for higher numbers, small blocks of higher numbers that repeated from another angle, I dug down and found coins instead of trash.
The big surprise was the target that showed up at 6" on the depth numbers, bounced a little to 7", and when I dug down to get this one I took a little breath when I saw it was a silver merc.
All this work, experimentation and practice is paying off and I am thrilled and gaining confidence using disc and not just all metal knowing now I can get deeper in this soil which is great because I prefer to hunt in disc if I can which is way quieter and more enjoyable for me not listening to that constant threshold hum in all metal at the high settings I usually use.
My settings at that time were...disc on 1, sense at 80, DE speed, thresh at -2, 4H tones.
I tried using 0 sense which I know you guys use 0 but I found that there is a huge difference in noise and chatter between 0 and 1 and depth does not seem to be affected as far as I can tell.
I did experiment a bit on one of these other coins at about 5" and turned up the disc to almost 30 and everything got more unstable and jumpy.
I have heard that turning up the disc is not supposed to affect depth so much on this platform but in this iron infested, trash filled southern red soil area it did.
After that I tweaked the settings a bit and hunted the area a little more and then moved around to others and I think I might have found my standard settings I can use most of the time from now on.
Disc on 1, sense at 80-85, thresh at -2, mono tone, SL speed most of the time unless it got too noisy.
All day long I had the sniper DD coil mounted and I probably will leave that on awhile because I seem to get pretty accurate and more stable ID's over the bigger DD coil.
The standard elliptical coil seems pretty great here too but I am not sure about depth compared to the small DD so more experimenting to do in that area.
I don't mind noise all that much but if I can hunt quieter it seems to be a bit less mentally fatigueing and I think I am getting just as deep as all metal with these settings or as deep as I need to be to find older coins around here, anyway.
You have to listen to the tone and watch the screen to notice the higher numbers that are different than the million iron numbers that flash by hunting in this kind of site but when I saw small blocks of higher numbers that repeated and were deeper than 4" I dug those and only found rusty iron once or twice.
Those iron objects were a bit more jumpy so not exactly the same as coins but I dug them anyway just to check them out.
I also dug a few higher signals that were at that 6-7"area that were crushed screw on caps but again a bit more jumpy than coins I have found at that same level.
Still, every piece of metal the coil passed over showed up on the screen if I moved the coil at the right speed in SL and got a great picture in my mind of what was going on down there.
The soil was moist after some rain, really dry soil this could all be different.
1F or maybe 2F could work and give me a good idea about shallower targets due to that extra modulation in the tone although I think mono tone is still a little less mentally fatigueing but still more experimenting to do.
Again this is what I am settling into and getting pretty comfortable and confident in...
Disc 1, SL, sense 80 or higher if not too much noise, mono tone, small DD sniper coil.
Using most of these I managed to find that deeper little silver beauty below.
Maybe it won't be so bad living here in the south and this rotten soil after all.
