I used to notch like crazy in heavy trash, but after I lost my settings with the last update, I opted to rely just on full tones for a bit before restoring those notches. I haven't felt the need to go back to heavy notching but I may experiment with it some more. I was mostly using it in blighted parks to notch out the ferrous crap at the bottom of the scale, as full tones can be a bit lively in our mineralized soil and I don't need (or want) to hear where the iron is - it's everywhere. In sites like this, low conductors are almost always trash. On older sites without modern trash I didn't notch at all, as some of those ferrous targets are keepers.
If you want gold, you're going to get pull tabs. If you're not getting pull tabs (or nickels), you're potentially walking past gold. I haven't been able to find a good way around this. If someone has, hopefully they'll talk about it.
My two biggest aids in "aluminized" sites are 4k and full tones. Foil balls and can slaw almost never give a repeatable signal in two different directions, at least at low frequencies. If the target is giving wacky signals in different directions, it could be something good...but it probably isn't. At least, it never has been for me.
Perhaps the two biggest problems with giving advice to others in this hobby is that we can never know for sure what we've walked past, and when we do bother to dig iffy signals, we tend to remember the outliers, not the usual results. I try to combat this by digging a few signals that I've pegged as aluminum garbage every time that I'm in a trashy park after calling them out as aluminum garbage, but that reinforces my views on aluminum if anything; I don't remember the last time that a crap aluminum signal resulted in something other than crap aluminum. But again, those were only what I dug up. I may have walked past the find of a lifetime. I'll never know.
