Back To The Iron Grounds

[aaroncr]

Took the Patriot back to my ol' goto spot. It's an old house in the middle of nowhere on a growed up farm,..some guys I know hunt there. It's been my spot since I started detecting few years back. Not ever found anything of any significance. Some old tools with the tracker 4 that first year,..a kids tootsie car,..old hitch rings etc,..At Pro was last year,..didn't fair any better really. Mainly more junk. The first time I took the patriot out was here,.but I never got under disc 35 or over sens 75. Today was only a couple hour hunt. Just went with intent of if nothing else to explore the SL speed option. So I put disc at 6,..sens was 85 minimum and ran it up to 99 for a bit. Thresh -2 tones 1 notch 35 WOW....tons more signals,..good lord. Also able to separate signals and do a little back and forth shimmy over any particular signal to pick'em out. That was nice.
Good thing is I have new hope to pull at least some sort of coin off this spot. So far it has defeated me. I refuse to believe that there is not at least a few. Was able to get up close around the house and dig some targets which is new also. The At pro would null over really bad,..hard to get repeats. This is the kinda place that when you dig your hole your pinpointer goes off on 2 or 3 more targets (usually nails) in the same hole. The closer to the house you are the worse it is. Lots of roofing and tin and cables scattered. All that stuff gives me the R2D2 sound when I get over it.
Back to the SL speed. Couple of things I figured out. Purposefully found 3 faint barely audible signals. Leaving everything else the same I switched to SL speed. I slowed my speed and Bam! Signals become solid and clear. Other thing that happened was it upped my VDI immediately,..not sure how much but at least by 5. Just like flippin a switch those 2 things happened on all 3 targets without fail. So I'm very satisfied there is something to it and plan to use it in the future.
One of these targets sounded really good plus I had a VDI consistently in the mid to high 90's in SL,..88 to 92 in DE. I pretty much dug to china up to my elbow with my lesche style digger,..never found it. Probably spent 25 minutes on it. Finally said the heck with it and moved on,..so it was either deeper or falsing or whatever because I had her cranked up so high. But this was 25 yards from the house,..lots of scatterd signals out there too but it was still good and clean. I should get a few days next week to go,..ill be back and double check with a shovel.
Ended up finding a crudded up bottle opener ( I think lol),..and some sort of miniature broken fork. Other than that all the old rusty corroded nails you want with some aluminum mixed in. This is a typical haul for this site. Difference was I had a gazillion more beeps goin off to pick from. Old road beds are everywhere,..the At Pro running wide open didn;t really pick up much very far away from the house except big iron or cans. Not the case now running low disc. It's crazy,..So my future sniper coil may have just got bumped to the little 5 incher down the road and I am ready to spend a full day here first chance I get, hopefully about a week. Ill post some pics from my phone........this place is my Arch Nemesis. - Aaron

 

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[aaroncr]

Finds

 

[aaroncr]

The Nemesis

 

[HighVDI]

Sounds like the perfect site for the 5" sniper or a nel sharpshooter! More iron you remove the better the chances of finding non ferrous goods.

 

[G.A.P.metal]

Looks like a good place to hunt...that old Tin Roof coming apart scattering small pieces amongst the iron must be fun !
Keep at it

Gary

 

[aaroncr]

So will all of the F/70 F/75 fisher coils work on the Patriot

 

[digger27]

Yes.

 

[aaroncr]

Awesome...thanks.

 

[digger27]

Sounds like a great place...especially good for experimenting.
Lots of things can work here, your settings and a bunch of others and my favorite way is using all metal.

I would be curious to see how my Silver Shooting Settings would do here.
It might make everything a bit easier to distinguish, here they are if you want to try sometime.
This method is all about keeping a very quiet arena on decently hotter settings so you can pick out the great ones in a sea of iron and trash.

Ground balance over a clean spot in all metal.
Switch to disc and push the disc up to 65, (high disc also mitigates some EMI).
Speed, try SL if you want but also try DE if not really quiet.
Sense, push it into the 90's.
Thresh up into the positive.
1 tone, everything else besides 1F and 2F will give you a pretty nice sounding noticeable high tone over high conductive targets this way and it should be relatively quiet.
If not quite lower the gain and/or thresh till you get to a quiet level and sometimes just switching from SL to DE will do it...If you want to fiddle I might start with the thresh down to 0 with the sense in the mid to high 90's.
No lower than -3 should ever be necessary to get it quiet and stable.
Lower the sense a bit if you need to, it can get deep on all ranges from 1-99 but try to find the optimum combination between the sense and thresh.
No lower than 85 sense and the threshold in the positive is what I aim for, many times I am able to get to 99 sense and +9 thresh which is crazy.
Once I find the highest, best and quietest settings I switch into all metal on the other program and ground balance again then switch back to disc.

Tones, as I mentioned 1 is good but you have to stare at the screen.
If you go to any of the tone choices past 2F you can switch back to just listening and trying to catch good solid tones and the pure solid high tone ones should stop you in your tracks because they will sound unusually tight...hard to explain but you will understand if you try this.
I never liked DP for a long time but after using it more and more it has become my go-to on many sites second only to my most favorite one tone.

Now the fun part...Notching.
You already will hear the high stuff but by notching in just a couple of sections you can expand your target range and you should be able to notice them easier among all of those signals if they stand out.
You should be able to notch in at least one if not two sections and keep it quiet.

I have been notching iron back in lately, didn't at first and it made everything really quiet because I have so much iron, but I found if I switch iron back on and listen in DP tones that iron growl and low and in the background which does t bother me much.
Over any high falsing or most other iron problems keeping iron notched in can give you more instant and accurate info about iffier junk targets.
For instance I can get a pretty solid signal with pretty high steady numbers from one way over all kinds of nails that you found in one of the pics posted.
If I see high one way and low on the backsweep in iron it usually is iron.
If I get high on both way swings one way but turn 90 degrees and get something completely different it is usually something I don't need to dig.
I might hear a high tone around iron when it is in the area but it doesn't usually sound as sharp, doesn't stay in a repeating number or range of numbers and drops down to iron on the end briefly to low numbers.
Having iron notched in can have some advantages.

Even with iron notched in you should be able to notch in at least one if not two more areas.
My choice criteria...

Foil...in areas like parks foil can be smaller gold in many forms, silver chains if you are in a very old site some small older coins and more.

Nickel...decent sized gold area, nickels, other cool and weird things.

Tabs...For gold again, mostly.

Zinc....This could be IH's, smaller silver jewelry, small toy cars, civil war bullets, big class gold rings plus a ton of other stuff including zincolns.


For me hunting in parks, nickel and tabs are a favorite combo to notch in to look for jewelry and coins or nickel and foil, also zinc and one other for sites with the possibility of old coins.

At a site like that where it looks like you have easy access I would visit several time using different combos.
No iron but maybe nickels and zinc back in...try notching iron in and see how you like it.
Next time tabs and nickels back in, then foil and one other.
Use whatever tones you want but DP gives you a range of everything and keeps the iron down to a real low growl that is easy to hunt with, once you get used to DP.
Pretty easy to tell false tones from the real sharp ones in DP but any of the others might be more to your liking.

If everything is too noisy in SL just switch to DE and forget about SL for now.
If you do use notching remember tuning them on and off from the menu screen does not always work...it might look like you got rid if a notch on the screen but maybe you didn't because there us a glitch in the programming regarding this.
Best to do a factory reset if you try some notch but want to change it so some other combo after.
A hassle to start over but it doesn't take long and worth it if you can find just the right combination for that site.

The reason I try to keep everything high as possible is that for this platform you will get much better resolution around iron with high gain rather than low.
This is the way they were programmed to work so I take advantage of that when I can.


I found high thresh also seems to help me a lot when hunting in trash and iron infested sites.

I can use this method using the 11" DD and it works well, some sort if smaller coil would make it even easier to differentiate between targets in crowded sites so either the 5" round or the Sharpshooter coil from my arsenal is usually used in these conditions.
The Sharpshooter mostly.


In SL you had better move the coil slow but in DE you can pick up the speed and even whip it fast which is pretty accurate and can sound off on good things shockingly well.

Try any combinations you like at that site, I bet there is more hiding and they might help you find them.

 

[aaroncr]

All that sounds good Digger,...actually wouldn't have thought to notch iron back in but yeah it makes sense. I'll try the DP tones this next time out. Been kinda saving that one,..I think it is something I'll like. Something is happening in my brain because 3 months ago that post would have sounded like Spanish to me by the time I got to the end of it,.now I catch every bit of it in 1 read lololol.

I work every fri and sat night. Occasional pick-ups through the week. Right now I should have at least 1 day to hunt this week,..possibly 2. So I will be heading back soon. I'll keep you posted man. As always thanks for taking the time share. Best -Aaron