It all depends on your soil of course, but I can tell you MY F70 in my Kansas soil goes deep...real deep.
I have hunted in Michigan a few times and I know that soil is similar, and I assume yours in Ohio is the same or close.
I have close to 1000 hours with the F2, I now have an F70 and have read a ton about most F series detectors when I could.
I can tell you they are all way overpowered out of the factory, you can use them that way but turning them down to quieter levels does not lose you much depth.
A certain amount of noise is inherent in these, but that noise and the sometimes twitchy behavior is part of the language and will tell you much if you bother to learn it.
I learned to ignore the extra tones, false signals and extra noise on my F2 and hunted on max power most of the time and did better with it than most think is possible with a "starter" detector.
I could do this because I took the time to learn the language.
Now with the F70 I still hunt with it as high as my settings will let me, lower at some sites, maxed out at others, still get some extra noise but I have found some fantastic targets in my short time with it and I expect much more.
Even on lower power settings this thing still seems to go deep, by the way.
Just because you drive a car with 500 horses doesn't mean you have to use all of them all the time.
I am a member of other forums and there are a lot of us that use the F70 and the F75 and we seem to be pretty successful for the most part once we get some experience, and a few that got that depth in those lower numbers were quite concerned but when they learned to set their units better for their sites and areas that depth level grew by leaps and bounds.
Honestly, if you are looking for a quiet experience where your detector only tones once in awhile and only when there is something for certain under the coil I suppose you can set these things to do just that and still find much and still go pretty deep but most of us don't.
We who love to hunt with the Fishers are happy to put up with a little extra noise on those higher power settings most of the time, we know that doing that puts us in range of either more great treasure, and if you don't want to do that or don't think you will be super happy only hunting using low power maybe you might want to look at other lines.
Me, I can't see myself hunting with any other types with screens than the Fishers.
I am surprised by my F70 on every hunt and yesterday was no exception.
Here is a story about depth since you asked.
Again, you need to know that my soil here in Kansas is great, there is no way I could get results like this when I lived in Alabama where 5 inches or so was the limit on most detectors in my area of the state for several reasons.
I also want to add that even though I have a ton of hours with the F2 I only have been hunting a few weeks with the F70 so I am still very new with this one and all of its setting possibilities and combinations.
The F2 knowledge I acquired transferred over to the F70 so that helped a bunch, but basically I am still a newb but you should read about what I was able to do on this one particular signal.
I was at a park that I have been to before, and once in the past using the standard 10" elliptical coil I was easily able to dig targets at 6-7 and 8" in depth and even acquired a target at 10" with that coil.
I was not using full power at the time being one of my first hunts with it, more like somewhere between half and 3/4's, but I still acquired a target and dug it.
It was a one way hit, there was good audio on that one way pass, nothing at all on the screen which is what the F70 and F75 tends to do if something is at the very limit of it's scanning field, but my F70 told me something was down there and I got a pinpoint depth number of 10".
I dug a hole and at every bit of 10" deep I found a beaver tail tab.
I also own an F75 11" DD coil that was a gift from another hunter that did not need it anymore.
I have read the the F70 is as deep and some have stated even deeper as the F75 when you mount that coil and now I am a believer.
5 days ago at this park I came across a pocket spill at 7-8" in depth with the F70 and this DD coil, one old wheatie and 3 Indian Heads, and I was hot to get back to this site and see if I could find a Barber.
I didn't find any deep coins on this trip but something else happened that made my jaw drop and this is that story which pertains to your depth question.
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Once again out to the old park where I found that tribe of Indians.
Still a bit cold and a little frozen ground in some areas but I have to see if I can find me a Barber around here.
When I got there I get my gear on and discover I left my Lesche at home in the garage.
I make a 4 mile trip to the nearest Ace Hardware and pick up another digger that worked pretty good for the $5.99 I spent.
I get back and start donning my gear and now I discover my Propointer is missing.
That I know I had but now I can't find it so I start walking down to the area I first parked hoping it is maybe there next to the curb but no dice.
I get back to the truck and find it sitting in the side pocket of the passenger door where it had rolled into.
Whew!
Then I pull out my F70, turn it on and pick up the headphones only to discover that something is rolling around in the right hand side.
It was the magnet and now I can't hear out of that side anymore.
"Sigh".
These are my lighter weight phones I have been using for a couple of years, very good for the hotter, summer months and made by Sony for listening to all sorts of media...MDR-XD200.
All other cheaper sets I have tried sound way "muddier" by comparison.
I got them on sale at Sears for about $22, they are usually in the $30 range and in the last few years I have seen the price on these go up to over $50 on some sites...way over that price at a few.
Don't know why, they are good but not top end but now mine are toast so maybe I will pick up another pair for the summer and I found a site I can still get them for about $30.
They actually sound great, clear as a bell and the best cheap pair I have ever tried although the cord is about 8' long but I just rolled it up, left enough cord sticking out that I needed and just used a velcro strap and attached it to the upper handle of my detectors.
I have a set of Killer B's but there is a problem with the plug and it cuts out so time to use the lifetime warranty and send it in, I guess.
This hobby is supposed to relieve stress, not cause it, but my day started out not so stress free with all these problems.
Finally I get on with the hunt and walked over to the area where I found that tribe which is a pretty wide grassy area between the street and a curving sidewalk on the edge of this large park.
Some dirt is fine for digging, some is still a bit frozen so I decide I am just going to wander around this area, hold off on the gridding till spring, and hopefully come across some deeper signals at the 7-8" depth mark or more and just dig those in case they might be older coins.
I was looking for high tone signals in the 70's and 80's, and I was also looking for more Indians which came in around 54 on the F70, zinc.
Silver war nickels or some older buffs would have been nice too, so I was watching for numbers in the high 20's to low 30's, also.
Today I planned on messing around with the settings because we have been having some discussions about the best tones to find the deeper targets.
Nasa Tom says monotone will give you the best audio no matter what the numbers say on the screen, a few other F70 owners have been messing around with 1F and 2F and I have been too and I like those a lot.
I was using the 11" DD coil and my settings were set here because on the edge of this park across the street from some big older homes I was getting some EMI from somewhere and maxing this thing out was too noisy.
Sense at 70-80, DE, thresh at 0 or 1, disc at 4 for a little boost in sensitivity you get below 5, and 1F tones, but I kept playing with those and switched around to 1, 2F, 3, and 4H to examine a few of those deeper hits.
Program 2 on my F70 is set on AT and just about everything is maxed in case I need to examine those deep ones further, but this was really noisy at this side of the park.
I also screwed around with all 7 frequency settings looking for the best, quietest one but they all seemed about the same so I left it on #3 and stuck with that most of the day.
There was a lot of iron here in all sizes, 2F was very handy for hunting here I found out quickly because I could easily hear those iron grunts, but 1 tone and 1F worked pretty well, too, and I am still getting used to looking at the screen while I hunt using all of these lower settings which is different than hunting with my F2 where I never look at the screen till I hear a solid tone.
When coin hunting in less trashy areas I still use 4H and that works well and I can revert back to my old hunting style.
There was a lot of foil and little pieces of can slaw here so eventually I tuned the disc up to the low 20's and don't recall noticing any decrease in depth, I still came across plenty of signals at 6" and way past that.
I never really came across any older coins in this area this time, some modern clad ranging from shallow to about 5" deep, a Pokemon Battle coin, a Nidoqueen, and a few other targets at the 6-8" range that ID'd pretty solid but they were can slaw, tabs or other junk type items every time.
On all the deeper ones I did a little switching between the tone choices and I could not see one doing any better or more exact as another...they all seemed to work well including 4H.
After awhile I got bored with this area and the people staring at me as they walked by on the sidewalk, I also had to answer that same old question about 4 times, "Find anything good?", so I took a walk over into the center of the park where I know from past trips there is less EMI to deal with.
At this point I maxed the thing out to 9 on the thresh, 99 on the sense, still in DE because SL was way to noisy and still continued to use 1F, disc was still low on 4.
Way less signals here but I got a few more shallow ones and dug some modern clad, a few deepies that were tabs or can slaw again, still looking for that one great signal with an old coin at the end of it.
I did dig a bell that was about 8-9" deep but it has some sort of plastic at the top that attached to something so I don't think it is way old and then I came across this signal that is the reason for this post.
This signal was loud and clear and repeated from all angles.
I can't say the F70 actually locked onto it completely because on the screen I saw some jumpy numbers from the low 20's to the 40's, but there seemed to be numbers in the range of 23-26 more often than those others.
Changing to other tone settings I got the same thing, one wasn't any more stable than any other, but those same mid range 20 numbers kept popping up.
I think I moved over to program 2 and used my maxed out All Metal settings and got the same.
Now I know that the F70 can find some pretty deep stuff and might give you a tone, maybe one way maybe from more than one, but at the very end of the scanning range you might not see anything on the screen at all...like it won't even want to guess, but I got numbers on the screen the whole time on this one.
Here is the kicker, when I hit that pinpoint button, depending on slight movements of the coil and from a couple different angles, I was seeing numbers between 10-14 flash on the screen.
Woah, that is deep, and on anything that deep, deeper than about 5-6" anyway, I don't really believe anything I see on the screen at all so all targets have to be dug and extracted to actually know for sure.
Not sure I really believe the screen on any target at any depth but this thing does seem to be pretty good up top about 8"...but being new with this thing I still dig most of them whether it is trash or good numbers to be sure.
This thing was deep, pretty solid, repeated and I just had to see what it was so I laid down my towel and started digging.
The new cheap digger worked well, got a ton of dirt out of the hole pretty quickly and at about the 6" mark I started checking with the Propointer.
Still deeper so I kept digging and checking along the way.
It finally got to the point that the whole pinpointer was in the hole and still I had to go deeper.
Eventually I got down so deep that my whole digger was in the hole, the top of the handle was exactly even with the top of the hole.
Still didn't find whatever this thing was yet but the Propointer said I was real close and another inch of dirt broken up at the bottom, maybe 2, and then grabbed with my gloved hand and pulled out I saw something silvery down there.
Could this be silver jewelry?
I didn't think so with those mid 20's numbers, but who knows what kind of info I would get on something this deep so I stuck my hand in and pulled it out.
NOT silver jewelry but I believe this is the thumb button off an old style bell like kids put on their handlebars of their bicycles.
What the heck it was doing down there so deep I have no idea but there it was, plain as day.
I threw the digger back in the hole and even if the edge went down into the bottom a bit more than where this thing was living there was still 1 1/2 to 2 inches of space between the top of the handle and the top of the hole.
I thought that digger was about 11" long, maybe 12" looking at it but after doing a bit of research and actually measuring the thing this morning I discovered this thing is actually 13" in length.
That means this object was dwelling every bit of 13-14" down there.
I knew the F70 realized something was down there and at the time I didn't believe that 14 number on my pinpointing but now I am dumfounded.
Air testing this thing actually does show up in the 23-25 area on the screen so it was pretty accurate on that too, if I go by the most prominent numbers I was seeing on the screen.
Every single time I go out with this thing it seems to amaze and thrill me.
Now I know that it might or might not give me tons of reliable info on the screen at all times but when it rolls over something deep it knows it and sees it and can tell me in some way.
To see something like this at these numbers at this depth bodes well.
It is a little bigger than a coin, maybe slightly thicker too, but still...
If there is anything including nickels out there lying deep beware!
I know now for sure that I got a machine that can find you.
