I have talked about this before, in my dirt DP can have some pretty great unmasking abilities in this mineralized mess I hunt in that is infested with iron.
Tried something new with DP...it worked!
For the last week I have been hunting a neighbor's lawn, a corner house and it has a side yard and a small backyard so a little bit more area to hunt than just the postage stamp size front lawns we have around here.
Still not huge but I will take what I can get.
First time here was with the a Mojave and I found a silver Walker so I am on the hunt for more silver but have not found any more as of yet.
I have found a ton of other targets though so this is as virgin as a site can get.
There is a miner's tag in there, I find these a lot in this neighborhood because there used to be some sort of mine entrance near here long ago, an older tire valve extractor, parts to two toy cars, part of a Slaymaker lock that might go back to the 30's, old keys, a child's thimble but not silver and even an old head stamp that probably goes back to a time before this neighborhood was built in the 20's.
This is most of it but not all, I have several more high tone copper cents, (because I have been mostly cherry picking the high stuff since I got here), and wheaties that are not in the pic plus an old brass hose nozzle the owner doesn't want so I can add that to my collection.
That stuff was gathered up with the Mojave 2 times, I used the F70 and Sharpshooter coil a few times switching between all metal and disc.
In disc I used multi tones plus went back to my usual monotone and all seemed to work and found me targets.
Got fooled a few times by iron nails because even this site is saturated with iron but not too many times.
Those were jumpy signals so a crapshoot anyway but sometimes ya just gotta dig to see what's up.
I took the Red Racer through here with the big DD coil too.
Found stuff, it did ok but the constant overload signals you get on shallow iron and trash is a real drag to use around here.
Now the signals are getting a little sparse in this site, the obvious ones are mostly gone now so I need to use all my powers to look for the very masked ones, the short tones that I might miss if I go too fast or sometimes come at them from the wrong direction.
I have just been wandering around this lawn and I have hit several areas pretty good but now I need to do a little more close gridding in order to find whatever is left here.
That Walker was great and if I find no other silver here I am ok with it but logically I believe there has to be at least a silver dime in this place so I am concentrating on finding one of those if I can.
The other day I switched to DP again, rain came in but in that shortened hunt I found a cool token in an area I hit before.
Yesterday I came back with a slight change in my coin shooting DP settings and it seemed to work well.
Found all these fairly easily, two more wheaties and the prize of the day were two tax tokens in the same hole, 1 mill each, but for some reason someone had cut or ground these things down to the size of a one cent coin.
None of these were obvious, all were quick and short and only found by concentrating on listening to the tones and getting a range of repeating high numbers from two directions when I came across a good solid sounding tone.
Here are my settings and the change...
DP, sense from 60-75, thresh at -2 but pushed it up into positive a few times, even +6-+9, but it didn't seem to make much of a difference...even 60 sense and -2 got me deep enough.
Disc was maxed at 65 but I notched back in nickels and this is the change...I notched iron back in too.
Here I get jumpy signals from iron to the mid 80's to low 90's a lot.
On iron nails you can see the jump, turning they might hit and stay high like coins do but turning you can see the numbers fall and often I get high numbers on one pass in one direction but low iron numbers on the back swing.
Coins don't usually do that, on good targets the signal might be short and quick but the numbers usually stay high in the mid 80's to low 90's from all directions.
By notching in iron I could see that drop on most iron, without it the high numbers would flash by but there would be no drop.
Using these settings I was getting a constant iron growl with every move of the coil because of the iron here, plus the nickel tone is also very low growl in DP but slightly higher so I could notice and I did come across a few targets in the nickel area but they were trash.
The key to this is moving the coil really slow and listening for the high tones when they came.
I got many, as I said lots of iron flashes into the high tone range but they don't repeat so much when you stop and swing over the area with iron near the coil or drop if there is iron and just straight out falsing just doesn't sound so solid and sharp.
As quick as good target signals are you can tell if you get one by listening close.
I could hunt this way without looking at the screen much and only did when I got a more solid repeating tone that piqued my interest.
I think it worked well considering the better targets that are still coming up for me here.
Multi tones might have worked with the same settings too but the high falsing sounds a bit better in that mode and I think it is a bit easier to tell better targets in DP mode...plus previous experience tells me DP might get a bit deeper overall.
Also listening to a constant barrage of signals in multi tones, both real and false, for some reason is a bit more mentally fatigueing for me than those same signals in DP.
Why I don't know but just a feeling.
Monotone could work, all metal too and both did here in the past but I have to watch the screen constantly...this way I didn't need to and I think a bit more efficient.
I will go back there again and try these same settings and see what else I can find but so far I think if there is silver here I have a good shot to find it set up this way.
