MX Sport Question - Need Help

[Twinkletoes]

BACKGROUND
I've owned a Whites MX Sport since 2017. I use it mostly for water hunting and have found hundreds of rings and jewelry, and uncounted coins. Recently I was asked to teach a newbie to metal detect. Since we will be doing mostly parks, I wanted to know what depth I could expect from the MXS. I have gotten 10-12 inches air testing a quarter and 9" on a freshly buried one.
I've had so much fun with I decided to put in a depth test garden at home. My yard shows all bars for the mineralization and reads in the high 20' and low 30's when ground balancing. I checked for an area free of any targets with all-Metal Mode and then buried a 16-inch-long x 1 1/2-inch diameter PVC pipe straight down into the ground. My intent is to lower targets into the pipe and use a metal detector to check for depth.
PROBLEM
I lowered a quarter into the pipe and can only get a broken signal at 3-4 inches. A quarter laid on the surface of the ground it will air test at 10-12 inches. The detector was ground balanced before each test.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
It has rained here in North Texas heavily for days. The ground is absolutely saturated! Could this be affecting my results? Any helpful input is welcome. Thanks in advance, Tt

 

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[Tpmetal]

Deepest I have hit a few silver quarters with my my sport is around 14 or so inches. There are too many variables with soil and such for it to reliably hit that depth at multiple sites though. My experience is around 10 to 12 is more like the max average depth. These are wild coins as well not fresh buried in a garden, which always seems to hit just a bit shallower.

 

[Twinkletoes]

Thank you Tpmetal, that's very helpful. I don't know how much the wetness and ground mineralization affects the MXS depth, but your comment lets me know that I can expect good depth under various conditions.

 

[pepperj]

Hundreds of times I've had the target in the loose soils at the bottom of the hole, coil doesn't pick it up, but the pin pointer would.
Whites, Minelabs, Deus it don't really matter it seems they don't like air (meaning from ground to target) out of the hole like you stated the air test shows a good distance.
The why this is....

 

[Twinkletoes]

Thanks pepperj for your very thoughtful response,
I found the problem...operator error...kind of...
I pulled the PVC pipe out of the ground and re-dug the hole. I found the source of interference...a direct burial wire was running along the edge of the hole about 10 inches down. No metal detector on earth, current, past, or future could pick up a coin 1 inch from a 110-volt direct burial wire. But now I'm amazed that the MX Sport could detect a quarter 4-3 inches deep and almost directly above it. Who would have guessed?

A special thanks to everyone who read this thread. Tt

 

[TORRERO]

Hundreds of times I've had the target in the loose soils at the bottom of the hole, coil doesn't pick it up, but the pin pointer would.
Whites, Minelabs, Deus it don't really matter it seems they don't like air (meaning from ground to target) out of the hole like you stated the air test shows a good distance.
The why this is....

Also remember, a lot of times as we dig, the item we are looking for falls into the bottom of the hole, and then the machine can't see it, now being too far away.. If I get a good signal that suddenly disappears, I dug out the bottom of the hole

 

[pepperj]

Also remember, a lot of times as we dig, the item we are looking for falls into the bottom of the hole, and then the machine can't see it, now being too far away.. If I get a good signal that suddenly disappears, I dug out the bottom of the hole

Yes that happens also, though after digging and the PP indicates it's still in the undisturbed soil, or off to one side, thn it's the air factor.
Though air testing it will detect it sometimes double the distance, for some reason the ground hole changes it.