I was reading this article on Detecting365 this morning and decided to try this little exercise because I find that most of my coins, even with my etrac and now my 3030 are coming at no more than about 6" deep: http://detecting365.com/exercise-china/
If you don't want to read it, essentially what it says to try doing is this:
Really the idea here is to see what we can do to get a little extra depth or at least interpret a deep, iffy signal that we KNOW is good a little better.
Anyway, the author says that he's hitting a silver dime at 8" pretty easily with an Etrac and an F75. I KNOW that people say new test gardens, air testing, and all that sort of thing don't give you the depth that a long-buried coin will, but hear me out. Full disclosure: I have never built or used a test garden before but I have been detecting for about 10 years or so, so I have nothing to compare this to. So I dug my hole to 9", stuck a clad Rosie in there (and later replaced with a Merc...same results for both). Coin was in there flat. My recommended sensitivity was 18 and I was running auto+3. I couldn't even begin to hear anything at all at 9". I brought it back up to 6" and got nothing. I brought it up to 4" and got a muddy signal finally. Again, I get that I will lose SOME depth on a fresh bury, but even the author of that article is saying he's hitting at 8" on a fresh bury. As I mentioned before though, most of my finds come from no deeper than about 4-6".
Things I tried (one at a time, each time returning to my default settings) to gain depth without luck:
What the heck is going on here? Shouldn't I be hitting stuff deeper than this? It really makes me question everything I thought I knew about this detector in the field....
If you don't want to read it, essentially what it says to try doing is this:
- Dig a deep hole in a clean patch of ground
- Place a target at the bottom at a measured depth (suggested is a silver dime, 3 ringer, etc)
- Cover and see if you can find it.
- If not, mess with the depth until you can start to get a signal and adjust settings to see if you can clean it up at all
Really the idea here is to see what we can do to get a little extra depth or at least interpret a deep, iffy signal that we KNOW is good a little better.
Anyway, the author says that he's hitting a silver dime at 8" pretty easily with an Etrac and an F75. I KNOW that people say new test gardens, air testing, and all that sort of thing don't give you the depth that a long-buried coin will, but hear me out. Full disclosure: I have never built or used a test garden before but I have been detecting for about 10 years or so, so I have nothing to compare this to. So I dug my hole to 9", stuck a clad Rosie in there (and later replaced with a Merc...same results for both). Coin was in there flat. My recommended sensitivity was 18 and I was running auto+3. I couldn't even begin to hear anything at all at 9". I brought it back up to 6" and got nothing. I brought it up to 4" and got a muddy signal finally. Again, I get that I will lose SOME depth on a fresh bury, but even the author of that article is saying he's hitting at 8" on a fresh bury. As I mentioned before though, most of my finds come from no deeper than about 4-6".
Things I tried (one at a time, each time returning to my default settings) to gain depth without luck:
- Jack up sensitivity (even manual 30 didn't hit it but it was so noisy I might have and not known it)
- Wide open screen (even with discrimination there was only very minimal)
- all four audio options
- High trash, low trash, ground-coin, ferrous-coin
- ground balance
- noise cancel
- manually move through every channel
What the heck is going on here? Shouldn't I be hitting stuff deeper than this? It really makes me question everything I thought I knew about this detector in the field....