New Patriot first flight!

[atomicscott]

Took delivery of the Patriot yesterday. Just swinging in my living room I was impressed with the great balance and light weight. Took it out today to a spot very close to a local airport where I found 2 pocket watches from the 1940's and an IH penny unknown date, as well as a few wheatys. I gave up on this site 2 years ago after 3 skunked hunts using Omega V4 and NEL Sharpshooter. I started in default program but ran sens up to 90. ZERO emi interference, even so close to the airport! I was only able to run the Omega at 60-65, even then it was a bit noisey. Turned the disc down to 1 and I liked that better, hearing the iron, even though it sounds like an AK-47 with all the constant iron noise in this super trashy site. Found a .22 shell right away. Not much else, but I did find this stick/hatpin, that I missed with 3 other detectors and several coils. It was a very solid repeatable signal that jumped right out of the surrounding iron. Not sure how old it is, but I am thinking 1930's from the style. I really like the new Patriot. Gonna take some time learning to pinpoint with the large coil, I am so used to the laser like accuracy of the NEL Sharpshooter. Swung for 2.5 hrs, very comfy and I never felt the need for my harness which I used with both my X-Terra and Omega. Got some learning to do, but I am very happy so far!

 

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[Terry Soloman]

Big gold with your new machine!

 

[atomicscott]

Mucho Thanks Terry!

Big gold with your new machine!

Mucho Thanks Terry! I figured it was like riding a bike, but I kinda feel like I am starting all over again, especially using the new machine. fun dig though, the time just flew by.

 

[aaroncr]

That's good news for me because I took delivery on mine this afternoon right before I left for work. Gonna be next week before I get to do a maiden voyage....but I'm pumped. Thanks for posting.-aaron

 

[atomicscott]

Aaron, you will dig it (pun intended)! As I said, I need to learn the nuances of the Patriot, but I already know it is definitely a smooth running machine and a keeper! Keep us posted, I am excited to hear about your experience and finds with the new machine!

 

[aaroncr]

Aaron, you will dig it (pun intended)! As I said, I need to learn the nuances of the Patriot, but I already know it is definitely a smooth running machine and a keeper! Keep us posted, I am excited to hear about your experience and finds with the new machine!

Will do for sure...ive taken a bunch of notes from digger27...gonna get her together and hit the ground running next week. I'm shootin for my first silver and got a new permission through my wife's family...century old still working farm with house still standing. Can't wait!

 

[Hsimmons75]

It's an awesome machine. Used mine for one season and I can't wait for the ground to melt. I'd recommend issuing settings similar to what you are using to hear everything. I vary my swing speed, slow to hear it all, fast to go deeper. I love the Sharpshooter and I'm working on getting used to the Hunter coil. Both have advantages and no sight seems to be hunted out between the two. Good luck and enjoy. The patriot is great machine for the price. I've had so many good finds in my first year. Saying I'm impressed would be an understatement.

 

[digger27]

I went from over 1000 hours on my F2 to my F70 and hoped a lot of that language knowledge and target behavior would transfer over.
It did, but there was so much more to learn and so much more power to tame and so many more setting options available to me I still felt like I was starting at square one for awhile.
Couldn't get the numbers to stop jumping around and down to a manageable 2-3 like I could with the F2 and the trashy sites I hunted were giving me fits trying to pick out the good from the bad but every hunt I got better at better and understood more and more as the pieces fell into place.
It didn't take all that long before I got settled in and started calling my shots on most targets pretty successfully.
After about 1 1/2 years hunting in great dirt I moved back to the SE. and much different devil dirt and nothing was the same at all, I had to start over at square one, again, and it took me months to start understanding what was happening around this strange place.
I still found a lot through both learning curve experiences even though I had to learn new languages and behavior patterns so I never got really frustrated through it all but it did take time before I settled in and a higher volume of good targets started to show up instead of trash.
It was all worth the effort, one day it all just clicked into place after I learned and experienced enough in both situations and now looking back it seems funny to me how badly I struggled in those early days but I never gave up and now I realized this was just what I had to go through to come out the other side and be as successful as I have become today.
I still believe I was blessed on the day this thing came into my life even though I didn't think quite as passionately about it that way in the early times.

Heavy trash, insane iron, massive EMI filled sites, mineralization...I hunted in them all as time went on and conquered every one knowing I had a capable tool that could do it if I just spent enough time learning what it was telling me with a few favorite and sometimes totally different setting combinations.
Still learning too, with me that never ends and my experimentation still goes on with positive results more often then not.

For those that came from other brands learning a new Fisher language on these very powerful units can't be the easiest thing in the world, I had a big base of knowledge to build on and I was still a little confused and still struggled some despite that, for awhile.
That language is a very rich and descriptive one and you don't have to master it to be successful, a little knowledge goes a long way with these and as you add more and more knowledge and data your skill set will grow exponentially if you just have patience and continue to learn.
Not much good in life comes without effort, luckily that effort and time spent learning this beast is still so much fun and can be shockingly productive...I thought so then and still think so now.

I wish I could Vulcan mind meld with you guys that are new with this thing and pass on what I know and have learned in the last few years but I can't so I post all this stuff I have observed and learned in the hopes it can shorten that learning curve if just a little.
On the other hand I also feel a bit jealous because I remember each and every time I hit one of those "AHA" moments in the early days and can still feel the joy I had when I dug that good target surrounded by trash, recovered non ferrous targets in an ocean of iron, got a real deep signal and dug down to China and actually found a great target down there deeper than I had ever dug before.
Every time that happened I not only had a new piece of treasure to add to the collection but on top of that I realized I had learned something new, something important, some little piece of the puzzle I now owned that was mine and can help me be successful and enjoy this hobby forever more and I was proud of myself every time it happened...and still am even now because it still happens from time to time.
That is one of the best things about this hobby for me, not only digging the good stuff but learning new things along the way that I can quantify and measure against what I knew before.
I have always believed in life, and in this hobby, if you ain't moving forward you are just moving backward...standing still and being satisfied with the status quo just isn't an option for me...there is always more to learn and so much to experience that you don't even know about yet and never will unless you continue to strive for more.

Luckily we are using tools that make that journey we are all on a surprisingly effective and a shockingly pleasurable one.
Put in that effort and you will come to understand this as well as I have.

 

[digger27]

Took delivery of the Patriot yesterday. Just swinging in my living room I was impressed with the great balance and light weight. Took it out today to a spot very close to a local airport where I found 2 pocket watches from the 1940's and an IH penny unknown date, as well as a few wheatys. I gave up on this site 2 years ago after 3 skunked hunts using Omega V4 and NEL Sharpshooter. I started in default program but ran sens up to 90. ZERO emi interference, even so close to the airport! I was only able to run the Omega at 60-65, even then it was a bit noisey. Turned the disc down to 1 and I liked that better, hearing the iron, even though it sounds like an AK-47 with all the constant iron noise in this super trashy site. Found a .22 shell right away. Not much else, but I did find this stick/hatpin, that I missed with 3 other detectors and several coils. It was a very solid repeatable signal that jumped right out of the surrounding iron. Not sure how old it is, but I am thinking 1930's from the style. I really like the new Patriot. Gonna take some time learning to pinpoint with the large coil, I am so used to the laser like accuracy of the NEL Sharpshooter. Swung for 2.5 hrs, very comfy and I never felt the need for my harness which I used with both my X-Terra and Omega. Got some learning to do, but I am very happy so far!

And this is just the beginning, just wait because it gets better!
That pinpointing thing...I have found that using the pinpoint button on the deeper ones can be surprisingly effective and accurate in location and depth readings.
Look for the little circle on top of the big coil just past the rod connection point because that is the sweet spot for target locations.
The lowest numbers and loudest tones you hear are going to be under that circle when holding that pinpoint button down.
Many times I have gotten signals on targets 7, 8, 9, 10 and a couple even deeper and dug down to the depth indicated to find that target pretty much exactly at the depth it was supposed to be.
From what I have read the F75's aren't all that accurate on the depth readings on the deeper targets and they might be an inch or two off on the good stuff like coins but in my experience my F70 has been deadly accurate on all of them.
This might be odd for this platform, I might be lucky and have some kind of mutant detector that is just extraordinarily good at this but I have come to have extreme confidence in the data I have been given.
Your mileage may vary but even if it does it won't be far off and adapting isn't all that hard to do.

As far as targets that are more shallow, maybe up to the 5-6" area and definitely less I have found the wiggle and pull back method works extremely well and is also deadly accurate.

Get a signal and make some very quick side to side short passes over the estimated target location keeping that target in the middle of the coil while drawing it back.
At the point when the target drops out completely it will be just under the front of the coil where the signal dropped out.
Or just in front or behind depending on the actual depth.
Either way this will narrow the area to dig to about a 2" span or so.
This same technique will tell you if you are swinging over a crown cap with about 98% accuracy, also.
On those the signal is high and usually kinda jumpy and hitting them from 90 degrees the numbers usually change substantially. If you don't want to take time to do that turn pulling back the coil and doing the wiggle the same way right before the signal drops out you will see the numbers drop from the higher coin areas to lower...sometimes to the 30's or 20's but most time into iron under the number 10.
I hunt with very little disc most of the time so I can see this drop immediately but if you tend to hunt with more disc or iron disced out completely you won't notice that drop...however the F70/Patriot still makes this problem trash easy to deal with.
You have program 1 and program 2 on these, essentially you have two completely different machines to hunt with totally different settings if you set it up that way.
Mine is always set up with disc on program 1 and all metal on program 2.
I hunt in one and switch over to the other on all iffy targets as a secondary check with just a push of the + or - buttons because I always hunt with that program icon on the bottom of the screen highlighted so it is quick, efficient and easy to switch between them.

There are other ways to recognise those hated crown caps too by the way.
Some slide the entire length of that coil over them from heel to toe, others use the side edges of their coil or the back end instead of the front, still others raise the coil while swinging over them.
In each case no matter which way you do it coil movement over most crown caps, (that aren't the older ones that are flattened and rusted), will trigger that drop down to iron which coins and rings just don't do.
I just got used to and very efficient at doing it off the front of the coil so I will continue to do it that way.
Nobody ever knows what they are digging until they dig it is more than true but I dug so many of these things learning this stuff and I hunt in so many sites that are infested with these things that I just don't have the patience to dig them at all anymore so if I can have a 98% success rate at recognizing these things I call that a huge victory.
The few I still dig because they don't do the drop thing is insignificant and there is a chance I could definitely miss something good not digging it all but in my head the real world chance of doing that is so small I just won't let it bother me.
I find more than enough to keep me happy and my time, energy levels and patience are not compromised so that is the best way to do it...for me.
If you want to dig way more of these than I am willing to do more power to you.
Everyone is different, everyone has different threshold levels for digging trash and mine just rose to high levels over the years.
This is a big reason why I am on a constant learning curve with all my detectors, I don't really want to miss anything good but there is always that possibility using my high percentage avoiding trash methods so the more I have confidence in my abilities the easier it is to keep those "what if" feelings at bay.

Beware of hunting in trashy areas with this big coil doing this because there is a situation that could pop up in rare cases.
I once had a wheat cent in the ground that was maybe one inch in front of a crown cap so this pull back method showed me the exact same behavior as if that coin wasn't there....high into the copper cent dime area and then that drop.
Ordinarily I would have just moved on but in this case I stopped and dug and recovered both.
Why?
After digging many hundreds of crown caps gaining confidence in this technique I eventually just quit digging them most of the time but on this one there was something slightly different going on.
I was using 4H and the high tone I heard on that wheat was not the same as what I usually hear on those regular, falsing crown caps.
It was different, more solid, tighter, sharper....something that coins do but these caps don't.
It is very hard to explain everything happening on this one, I could never have done this early on but after many hundreds of hours swinging over many hundreds of caps and coins I came to understand there was a slight difference in the tones between the two targets.
As I said hard to explain because it was all instinct on that one but I heard something different in that signal that made me get down and dig...I mean I had to and I was rewarded for the effort on that one.

The screen is great on these and can give you a huge amount of very important and helpful information but the audio on this thing can be even more descriptive than you might believe possible...and maybe even more useful than that screen.
You just have to listen to targets and how they sound for a long time to gain that instinct because this is something you can only learn with experience.
I believe I can cover that screen up completely and just hunt by sound alone and still do very well but again not at first, it took time to develop these skills and instincts but well worth the effort.
Maybe it is my many hundreds of hours swinging Tesoros that helped me along in this stuff but trust me, there is a whole lot more going on if you listen closely to those tones than what you can hear and understand just starting out.
Not just one tone either but all of them from monotone all the way up through DP and including all metal.
I have my favorites but I have spent many hours listening to and learning about all the tone choices in the last few years and I have come to know there are differences and advantages to using every one of them depending on site situations and conditions.

Right now don't worry about any of that because this is advanced stuff, just swing, listen and dig because it will all come in time and you are actually doing well considering.
From your observations and attitude I can sense in your writing I think you are getting it even at this early juncture.
In time I discovered I just seemed to have an affinity for the FTP products and their colorful language.
Hopefully you are on your way to discovering this too.

 

[atomicscott]

Digger27, I really appreciate the info, so very helpful as usual. I was actually using the dot that you spoke of as my 'target' to pinpoint. Part of the problem yesterday was the intense amount of iron, so as I used the pinpoint button, I think I was hitting those iron signals adjacent to the signals I wanted to dig. With my Vaquero, I used the 'heel-toe' method to pinpoint, but the Omega's accurate pinpoint combined with the narrow footprint of the NEL Sharpshooter spoiled me! Using the Sharpshooter I was able to dig 3X3" holes to recover most of my targets. Being that the 11" Patriot coil is bigger, it will take me a couple hunts before I feel as accurate with it. I do plan to get another Sharpshooter soon for the Patriot, I really liked it and never took it off my Omega. I have both my Omega NEL Sharp and Sharpshooter coils for sale on another forum.

 

[atomicscott]

It's an awesome machine. Used mine for one season and I can't wait for the ground to melt. I'd recommend issuing settings similar to what you are using to hear everything. I vary my swing speed, slow to hear it all, fast to go deeper. I love the Sharpshooter and I'm working on getting used to the Hunter coil. Both have advantages and no sight seems to be hunted out between the two. Good luck and enjoy. The patriot is great machine for the price. I've had so many good finds in my first year. Saying I'm impressed would be an understatement.

Thanks for your input, great to hear! I am planning to grab a Sharpshooter for the Patriot soon. I used both the Sharpshooter and Sharp on the Omega, but I rarely used the Sharp as the Sharpshooter is almost as good in the trash IMO and offers better depth. Perhaps a Hunter coil will be next on my coil list...

 

[aaroncr]

,......and those big long posts above are the digger man...the virtual encyclopedia of the f70/patriot. Better than any instructions found in any box anywhere in this arena lolololol. You betcha.

 

[digger27]

Digger27, I really appreciate the info, so very helpful as usual. I was actually using the dot that you spoke of as my 'target' to pinpoint. Part of the problem yesterday was the intense amount of iron, so as I used the pinpoint button, I think I was hitting those iron signals adjacent to the signals I wanted to dig. With my Vaquero, I used the 'heel-toe' method to pinpoint, but the Omega's accurate pinpoint combined with the narrow footprint of the NEL Sharpshooter spoiled me! Using the Sharpshooter I was able to dig 3X3" holes to recover most of my targets. Being that the 11" Patriot coil is bigger, it will take me a couple hunts before I feel as accurate with it. I do plan to get another Sharpshooter soon for the Patriot, I really liked it and never took it off my Omega. I have both my Omega NEL Sharp and Sharpshooter coils for sale on another forum.

One more thing...
Don't know if you want to do this because it is hard for most new owners to wrap their head around how deep these things can get on low gain till you experience this yourself and dig something deep with the sense on 40 or below.
It took me awhile myself but eventually I saw enough to believe.
http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/fisher-research-labs/407629-just-hint-power-f70.html


If you are hunting in heavy trash or iron and turn that sense down to between 30 and 40...I usually go down to 30, it turns that big coil into a pretty good copy of a sniper.
The scanning field seems to get honed way down in size, becomes sharper and can zero in on targets effortlessly extremely close to junk with laser like precision.
Don't ask me how or why it can do this it just does.

Can't tell you how much jewelry and how many coins I have found doing this in some of the most garbage filled sites you can imagine and find targets I missed before using that same coil but using higher more normal settings.
I don't usually stop hunts and trade coils when going from wide open areas to areas filled with a ton of junk, (lazy), but using this technique I don't really need to.

If you are concerned about depth with the gain this low don't be and if you are really worried just pump the thresh up high into the positive which should compensate.
Raising the thresh in the numbers lowers the threshold into areas where you can hear smaller targets and see them deeper in the ground.

If you don't believe this watch this video by another F70 owner to get a good idea and understand the relationship between the gain and the threshold.
Hitting an 8" nickel with the thresh in the positive but the sense on one.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KaJG8ohPbjE

 

[digger27]

,......and those big long posts above are the digger man...the virtual encyclopedia of the f70/patriot. Better than any instructions found in any box anywhere in this arena lolololol. You betcha.

Thanks man...just doing what I can for the community paying it forward.

 

[aaroncr]

So if you go by this theory then you would actually want your threshold as high as possible with the sensitivity down enough to keep it quiet,...even if it was a 1?

 

[digger27]

So if you go by this theory then you would actually want your threshold as high as possible with the sensitivity down enough to keep it quiet,...even if it was a 1?

Yes, thresh as high as is comfortable for you or that is how I do it.
I have also experimented with the threshold on all numbers all the way down to -9 and the gain set high, also.
The goal for me always is try to find the exact combination of those two adjustments, plus the disc, to hunt at optimum levels at any site.
There is no perfect combination, things can and do change from site to site for many reasons like soil conditions, EMI, mineralization and whatever else and one way might just work better than another...possibly.

The threshold is described as the audio point where your detector tells you if is sensing something below you.
The higher you go on the threshold numbers what it is actually happening is you are letting in more targets that you can see and hear.
Think of it as a line in the ground, the higher the number the deeper that line penetrates into the soil exposing more targets as it goes lower.
Deeper and smaller ones specifically.
Thinking about it the description most of us use is wrong.
We are not actually raising the threshold going up in the numbers but just the opposite.

A common description is using an open door.
At 0 the door is halfway open and you can see a lot that is sitting on the other side.
Open that door up, (raise the numbers into the positive), and you can see everything.
Do the opposite and close that door and you will see less.

That is just one more thing about this thing that I love, that ability to control that threshold.
It can add a vast amount of possible setting combinations that might positively affect us in the real world.
Do the math...99 steps on the sense numbers an 19 steps on the threshold you can combine in different ways not only to use to find the most treasure but also to control noise and chatter.
In some sites high gain low thresh might work fine and be quiet, in others low gain and high thresh might work better or be quieter.

Nobody says you have to go down to 1 on the gain, ever, but experiencing and actually knowing how little gain it actually takes to go deep with this platform, in conjunction with the threshold control, can be very eye opening and confidence building once you understand how things work.

Again this was a main reason so many sold these things so cheap and so quickly over the years, the pre DST F75's, T2's and the F70.
Not understanding the depth possible and how quiet you can actually get these things by using those controls to their advantage.
They complained about chatter and instability so many of us did them all a favor and bought those problem units off their hands.
Funny how so many second hand owners are still using those same horrible problem plagued units to this day.