AM...one my favorite go-to settings I use.
Honestly it took awhile to get used to it, I always had this as a check when I hunted predominantly in disc but one time, in an area of extreme EMI, I discovered it worked better than disc.
This was by accident when I did this for the first time but it changed my life.
Gain up to 99, thresh to +9, even had boost turned on too and sure it was jumpy but less jumpy than in disc, shockingly, but as always when I swung over targets my F70 stopped all that foolishness for an instant and told me.
After that I kept switching to all metal more and more on every hunt.
Ten minutes here, 15 minutes on the next hunt and then kept doing that to get used to it.
Lots of info hitting you all at once, both screen jumping and audio and it was hard to make sense out of it all for awhile because if you don't actually know how much metal is in the dirt we hunt at all depths using this mode you will find out quickly.
This is not like using disc even at 1...0 is close but there is even more in AM and then you have that threshold tone buzzing in your ears constantly if you max out everything like I do and that can tire you out quick.
This is something you have to train your brain to deal with and it is not easy but if you have patience the rewards can be tremendous.
I really started to use this in an insane site with so much iron I never found anything and many others never found much either but I was stubborn and stayed there for hours doing it this way and to my surprise great targets started showing up.
Eventually over time I got very comfortable doing this and it is effortless now, completely normal.
I turn my headphone volume down a bit which was better, I listen close for more solid sounding tones which are there once you get the hang of it and I watch the screen for repeatable numbers or a range of numbers which isn't easy at first to notice but can be learned.
And slow coil movements too or you might miss plenty because the good stuff in crowded sites might be real short and quick.
I must move slow in most of my sites anyway because my dirt is mineralized and I have a crazy amount of extra iron everywhere and anything left in these public sites that have been scoured for 60 years is all masked to the hilt or they would have been found long ago.
In less trashy or iron infested sites it is a lot easier but I found that this works better than disc for me in the most iron, garbage and trash filled sites imaginable, surprisingly.
Also anywhere in my mineralized SE. devil dirt.
I hunted with a friend once in a site with all that plus it was surrounded on all sides by power lines.
I was killing him on finding targets and he uses an E Trac and he asked me what the heck I was doing to find all these severely masked targets in areas he just went over but missed.
I pulled out my phone plug and had him walk next to me as I swung the coil and he listened to the million tones and saw all the numbers flash by so fast on the screen.
He was absolutely shocked...he couldn't fathom at all how I could make the slightest sense out of any of it, it was all utter nonsense to him but he knew it worked for me because he sees what I find when we hunt together.
He asked how I learned to do this and I just said lots and lots of practice.
This is all about learning to deal with the data overload and recognizing when a good target does pop up.
As I said it took time and patience but well worth the effort.
I probably missed a ton while I was learning this but less and less as I got better at it and now it is my most confident way to hunt.
Turning down the gain might still work, sometimes I go to 90-95 and the lower you turn down the thresh the quieter the threshold tone plus if you don't have boost DE is faster and probably a bit quieter and should still work well.
However I learned to do it with everything maxed out and boost and got used to the threshold volume and everything else plus I found so much at these settings I rarely change them nowadays but a little tweaking probably won't hurt you much if you want to do it that way.
I always do this, I usually learn new things using the most ridiculously crazy settings in the most challenging sites as possible.
It's like learning how to swim with a 75lb backpack, if I don't drown once I get the hang of it I can take off that pack and everything is effortless and easy but if you need to ramp up to higher settings and take baby steps from the other direction that is okay too.
As long as you get there and can use this method to find more stuff it doesn't matter which path you take.
I call these my blast-through settings for a reason...high settings blast through and around iron and trash to get me a piece of better masked targets and blast deeper into my difficult mineralized dirt I hunt in now.
On Fishers high gain definitely has better resolution around iron than low gain, I assume trash too from what I have seen...this is opposite thinking than most do, (high beams in the fog theory), and might not work on other brands but it was designed by Dave J. to work this way on this entire platform.
Depending on your soil targets might act normal and pretty stable and have a small spread of numbers but I used this in heavy iron in good dirt and now here in my bad dirt and I don't ever get good solid numbers on anything with a short number jump unless it is really shallow...like on the surface or an inch deep.
They are usually a range of numbers of at least 6-8 or could be more up to 10 or so as targets get deeper and I go after all signals that don't have a lot of drops down to iron.
I hit them from 90 degrees too and look for that same behavior as true iron around here can show up with that turn.
I dig a lot with several iron drop signals too from time to time because there is so much of that here but when I get tired I just go after the ones with little or no iron drops because I have found a lot of great targets that way and 99% of the time when I dig those others with many iron drops it usually has been iron.
Signals that jump way to much, like 60's to 80's or other big spreads are usually trash for me.
A possibility they are not but I dug many hundreds of those kinds of targets learning this and they were all trash so I am ok with passing them by nowadays.
You never know but I just won't spend my time digging everything anymore especially here...I could spend an hour or more digging just junk in a 5'X5' area so I got a lot more picky over the years.
If I miss something so what, I will find it on my next visit I figure.
I have also found lots of great targets in the same hole with iron so there usually is something in those better target behavior patterns that triggers me to dig despite the iron indicators, again with practice.
Also here in my dirt, and in great dirt with crazy iron, all targets up average around iron big time so if you see repeating sets of numbers anywhere and are hunting in these same conditions don't assume.
In good dirt I found a 41 tab gold ring that was sitting between an iron nail on the left shallow and some huge piece of iron on the right but deep and it was a 51, can slaw range in the dirt.
In that same good dirt but an old farmhouse site with a million pieces of wire, nails, nuts bolts and huge iron deeper under everything using this method I found many great up averaged targets and lots of coins but all the coins, IH's, wheaties, copper cents and silver dimes all jumped between the low 80's to low 90's.
A walker half soared up to the high 90's.
Here in my dirt most everything past 2-3" soars into the 80's to 90's...definitely at 4"+ even nickels and every time.
Whatever and however your targets behave in your dirt if you practice this eventually confusion will fade as you train your brain to recognize repeating patterns, whatever they are, and you will start digging more and more good targets.
First one, then another, we learn as we go but that "AHA" moment will hit you and you will know you are getting a handle on this stuff and from then it is just practice to hone your skills from there.
After about 2+ years using all metal as I said it is natural and normal for me now, I don't dig a huge amount of iron or trash but still manage to eke out some great treasure in very difficult well hunted sites...enough to keep me happy, anyway.
I still use disc and experiment with all kinds of settings because I get bored easily and I am naturally curious but when it counts I always switch to all metal because I am pretty sure I will miss less and find more that way.
BTW considering the crazy, crowded, infested sites I hunt sniper coils are the way to go and I use them more than bigger coils but when I first learned to do this and practiced to get good at it I usually had the 11"DD mounted most of the time so this works with all coils I have found...concentrics too.
