Bounty Hunter Wader advise required

[coin1921]

Hi all,

I have been trying my hand at water detecting recently, using a Bounty Hunter "Wader", and seem to be digging a lot of bottle caps. I have the discrimination set at "1". If I set this to a "2" or "3", will I run the risk of missing gold rings?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Greg

 

[Tom_in_CA]

I'm not familiar with that particular machine, but based on my experience with a multitude of other machines and brands, I'd bet that if you increased the disc. enough to knock out crown caps, you might indeed risk signals off of very lower conductors. You can certainly test it out, by some air tests: raise the disc. up to 2, then 3, and sample small pieces of gum-wrapper type foil. If they get "knocked out" by those levels of disc, then you risk loosing teensy thin gold bands (like the kind ladies have those big solitaire stones in sometimes ) or thin gold earings, tinsel thin chains, etc....

Some machines are weak on the crown-top bottle caps, because they are not 100% iron. They have some sort of coating on them (anodized or tin-coating or whatever) that doesn't break down until they are very disintigrated over time. But there IS enough iron in them that, even for machines that tend to get fooled by them, you can still tell them apart in this way: Momentarily speed up your swing speed over suspected bottle caps. They will react in a different way than a conductive target will They tend to "break up" with a momentary speeded up chop. But if it's a coin or other conductive target, the signal does not break up or weaken. This trick may work for your "wader", but as I said, I'm not familiar with the nuances and electronics of that particular make. The trick works for other brands though.