I'm having trouble finding nickles with my u max. I have my descrimination on nickle and im digging "good" signals and so far out of $16 in clad ive found 3 nickles. Am I not listening for the right signals or are there just no nickles out there?
Back off the discrim a little more. Spread out a few nickles and test.
My buddy made the same mistake with his Tesoro. Went to the schools and dug tons of clad but couldn't understand why no nickles. He made the adjustment and BINGO!
Remeber, if you ain't finding nickles, you could be missing gold as well.
Yes, discrimination is key. If you are a hair to far, you will not get nickles. Best way is like above. See where the nickle sounds off and the foil and pick a spot in between. Pull tabs and gold is in the nickle range, so there is no getting out of that unless you play with your discriminator each time. Why do we find tabs anyway? It's not like they are pull tabs anymore, lol.
When I go to a new spot and find more nickels than quarters I assume it's been detected before. Folks who set notches to cherry-pick tend to ignore nickels - they aren't so conductive and usually have a patina that makes it worse.
When I use my Musketeer I carry a nickel and set it on the ground to adjust the discrimination. They run between 28 and 32 on the 1 to 99 scale of my F75.