slowNsteady said:
If you use jewelry mode, you get foil. If you use coin mode, you can loose gold because it notches out some of the possible gold items. Use custom mode and remove the everything under a nickle with the eliminate button. It'll remember your settings when you turn it off. You can set the sensitivity wherever you like. The machine will respond to the smallest targets, so just get use to that. It's definately not a bad thing. It's a really good thing!
Hey slowNsteady, I did what you're saying, more or less. My custom mode was highly discriminating, so I used a modified jewelry mode that mimic'd your settings. I think once I forgot to modify the jewelry setting and scored some gold. I posted a question in the Garrett board yesterday, and today I tested 3 gold items. All of them bounced into foil territory. Someone else piped in that his gold rings are sounding in foil too. This is a current thread on the Garrett board on treasurenet. For this reason - and I'm newly converted - I'd advise against disc'ing foil.
On "Detuning", John in the the video is doing it whether it's on purpose or not. Anyone with an Ace 250 can do this test:
Set a coin out, and swing your detector over it. It goes ding ding ding.
Now move your coil fully 6" away from the coin and hold the pinpoint button. As you approach the coin the volume and "metering" rise. Pay attention to where the tone starts, how loud it is, and how it changes over the distance until you are over the coin. Now move your coil away and release the pinpoint button.
Compare what you saw and heard in that test with this one:
With the pinpointer off, approach and stop near the target at a location
where you were starting to hear the target in pinpoint mode before. Now, while the coil is not moving, but quite near the target, press and hold the pinpoint button. Notice that it is now silent in a location where it was starting to sound off a moment ago. Now approach the target, keeping the pinpoint button depressed. Notice how much more rapidly the signal rises and falls back to silence!
Try this several times in a row. You'll probably find a location where it never sounds off at all(try again), or (best, listen closely) where the target just barely whispers to you "Here i am". When you hear that whisper you'll know the notch at the center of the coil is right over the target.
Don't worry about getting the whisper. Just as good, and what you'd expect to hear most often, is the detector going from silence, to screaming at the top of it's lungs(with virtually no rise and fall whatsoever), back to silence again in a very short distance. If that distance is much bigger than the size of a coin, then it's likely your target is also. Don't let that stop you from digging them until you have lots of practice with this method.
Deeper targets don't behave quite as dramatically as shallow ones, but you can still get over them quite accurately.
With all that typed out, I still use the method in the video. It's quick and easy and plenty close enough for me. I was just trying to explain "detuning", and included a lab experiment for y'all that have this detector.
