Detector Sensitivity

[schlooppy]

This might be a stupid question but does increasing your sensitivity give you any extra depth detection? What about lowering your discrimination, or both? Thanks for any input.

John

[Jeffro]

Depends on how mineralized the ground is. I run my sensitivity as high as I can without a lot of false signals. If I get a lot of falses, I turn it down until they go away. Increasing sensitivity in highly mineralized ground can actually lose depth, I have heard. Too much in the ground for the signal to bounce off of.

As for discrimination, I run mine as low as I can get away with. I discriminate iron only. I'm not anywhere near a civil war zone, or any other battlefield, and I've already dug more than my fair share of farm implements, so I could care less about Iron. Unless, of course, I'm at a Ghost Town.

A really trashy park you may want to increase your discrimination to notch out pulltabs and lower. Keep in mind you may be giving up a gold ring for this, but you'll dig less trash. Depending on your detector, it may also lose some nickels too.

Too get the gold rings, dig 'em all. Maybe a thousand pulltabs or so to each gold ring, maybe a hundred, who knows? But if you notch tabs out, you will probably miss gold rings.

[Sandman]

right on Jeffro. At some areas, you actually can get more depth by lowering sensitivity to near half and the use of a bigger coil could also lower the depth from max. but more than makes up for it in area covered per sweep. Turning up discrimination can lower the depth too.

In grass or on any land, digging pull tabs is a pain, but 90% of the gold rings are in this area. There are less pull tabs in the water swim areas and lots more gold rings so you have to scoop these sounds to see if it's a ring.

HH,
Sandman