Why Has There Been So Little Discussion About The F5?

[Old Relic]

It would seem to be a user-friendly interface with the analog adjustments coupled with the digital TID. I know there was a recall early on; has that killed interest in it?

HH,
Relic

 

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[OzarkTom]

It would seem to be a user-friendly interface with the analog adjustments coupled with the digital TID. I know there was a recall early on; has that killed interest in it?

HH,
Relic

The F5 will airtest a quarter at 14 inches with gain on full blast and chattering, 11 inches when the gain is at 50. F5 has fast recovery like the F70/F75 does.

 

[Coin Digger]

I've owned one for about a month or two now. It's still a fairly new machine and it reminds me some of the Coin Strike. I would say it's more for someone familiar with detectors.

If it where your first detector it would end up in the closet.

The manual that comes with it is less than perfect. It needs more info on the use of it and the relationship of the controls to each other. Most of the manual reads like my F2 manual with a few pages being different.

After hunting with it for a while now I've come to the conclusion it likes iron. It makes a lot of pops and chirps even when iron, foil, and tabs are notched out. It can get so bad you'll mistake a good target for back ground noise in trashy areas. Short slow overlapping sweeps are needed. (The F2 excels in trash.)

I've been working on ways to calm it down. One way is to turn it down. I've noticed that threshold tends to be effected more by trash targets, and gain seems to be effected more by small iron. If that makes sense. (I'm not always sure it does to me.) Once you get the settings right it's a smooth machine.

Recently I've had an idea to get it to run quiet is to set the ground balance slightly negative. The weather is turning crappy fast around here so I haven't had the chance to really try it out.

What I've done is played around with the settings in a very small area seeing what the machine would do and then switched to A/M and dug everything up. That was a great learning exercise.

In A/M mode the machine will go deeper than you'll care to dig. You still have target ID in all A/M mode but at about the 8" mark you'll loose the target ID but it will still sound off on deeper targets. The deeper the target the more likely it will read iron regardless of what it is. Has to do with phase shift which is covered in the manual.

I get overloads on screw caps and large aluminum objects that are close to the surface.

I've had the machine spaz out on me twice now. I mean totally freaking out, the display numbers where jumping everywhere and it didn't make a sound. I turned it off and on and pulled the batteries and that didn't help. What I had to do was turn it off for a few minutes and it was fine. I think it might have been a software glitch.

It's a good machine but I think Fisher could refine it a little more. So far I don't think there's any other coils available for it, but then again I haven't really looked.

 

[Old Relic]

Thanks, 19Blockhead64. I've been interested in the F5, but with so little being reported, I didn't want to jump in blindly. Your post has really helped.

HH,
Relic