Yep.
Turning the searchcoil on edge (i.e., in the vertical plane) and sweeping that way will also provide clues. A shallow coin will usually ID more or less correctly although it may give a double blip, but a rusty iron object will usually drop into the iron ID range or disappear entirely.
You can also use sizing to provide clues. A relatively small piece of rusty iron may produce a high ID number, but since you're detecting it despite its small size, it's shallow. A fast sweep will throw the ID much lower. Sweeping it from a different angle will probably give entirely different numbers. .......A nonferrous target with high ID numbers will usually give just about the same numbers regardless of direction of sweep or of sweep speed. If it's a shallow target, raising the searchcoil an inch or two will produce more or less similar results, whereas the response of a small rusted iron target will be highly dependent on the height of the searchcoil above the ground just as it is highly dependent on just about any other variable you can introduce into the situation.
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With the most recent crop of discriminator-TargetID machines from First Texas Products - Fisher Research Labs, the broad rule of thumb is that targets that give repeatable results are "diggers" and targets that don't give repeatable results are probably trash. Like any rule of thumb, it's a rule meant to be broken by experts, but for those who aren't experts, it's an excellent guideline. You can't master what the machine will do at 8 inches until you've first mastered what it will do at 4 inches. The bad news is that this mere 2:1 ratio represents a 4,000:1 difference in power ratios in the electronics, and that's why cheapie machines in the hands of an experience user will usually beat an expensive machine in the hands of someone who hasn't mastered their machine. The good news is that it's a lot easier to retrieve targets 4 inches deep than those 8 inches deep (without getting busted for damaging turf) and that means you can afford to master what the machine will do at 4 inches.
In another post on a different forum, someone asked what would be a good machine for his 9 year old son. I can already tell you that: the Bounty Hunter Junior. It may not go deep, but it's got an excellent discriminator. It is a real metal detector, downsized-- not a toy pretending to be a real metal detector. ...... I was once in a situation being asked to recover a recently lost in a church lawn (shallow) child's bracelet, and had just about any metal detector I wanted from any manufacturer available for the task. I chose the lowly BHJ for that task. It worked well. Unfortunately I did not find the bracelet, I believe it was lost someplace other than where the girl thought she'd lost it. No regrets on my part, I used the best tool for that particular job.
--Dave J.
