Took delivery of the Patriot yesterday. Just swinging in my living room I was impressed with the great balance and light weight. Took it out today to a spot very close to a local airport where I found 2 pocket watches from the 1940's and an IH penny unknown date, as well as a few wheatys. I gave up on this site 2 years ago after 3 skunked hunts using Omega V4 and NEL Sharpshooter. I started in default program but ran sens up to 90. ZERO emi interference, even so close to the airport! I was only able to run the Omega at 60-65, even then it was a bit noisey. Turned the disc down to 1 and I liked that better, hearing the iron, even though it sounds like an AK-47 with all the constant iron noise in this super trashy site. Found a .22 shell right away. Not much else, but I did find this stick/hatpin, that I missed with 3 other detectors and several coils. It was a very solid repeatable signal that jumped right out of the surrounding iron. Not sure how old it is, but I am thinking 1930's from the style. I really like the new Patriot. Gonna take some time learning to pinpoint with the large coil, I am so used to the laser like accuracy of the NEL Sharpshooter. Swung for 2.5 hrs, very comfy and I never felt the need for my harness which I used with both my X-Terra and Omega. Got some learning to do, but I am very happy so far!
And this is just the beginning, just wait because it gets better!
That pinpointing thing...I have found that using the pinpoint button on the deeper ones can be surprisingly effective and accurate in location and depth readings.
Look for the little circle on top of the big coil just past the rod connection point because that is the sweet spot for target locations.
The lowest numbers and loudest tones you hear are going to be under that circle when holding that pinpoint button down.
Many times I have gotten signals on targets 7, 8, 9, 10 and a couple even deeper and dug down to the depth indicated to find that target pretty much exactly at the depth it was supposed to be.
From what I have read the F75's aren't all that accurate on the depth readings on the deeper targets and they might be an inch or two off on the good stuff like coins but in my experience my F70 has been deadly accurate on all of them.
This might be odd for this platform, I might be lucky and have some kind of mutant detector that is just extraordinarily good at this but I have come to have extreme confidence in the data I have been given.
Your mileage may vary but even if it does it won't be far off and adapting isn't all that hard to do.
As far as targets that are more shallow, maybe up to the 5-6" area and definitely less I have found the wiggle and pull back method works extremely well and is also deadly accurate.
Get a signal and make some very quick side to side short passes over the estimated target location keeping that target in the middle of the coil while drawing it back.
At the point when the target drops out completely it will be just under the front of the coil where the signal dropped out.
Or just in front or behind depending on the actual depth.
Either way this will narrow the area to dig to about a 2" span or so.
This same technique will tell you if you are swinging over a crown cap with about 98% accuracy, also.
On those the signal is high and usually kinda jumpy and hitting them from 90 degrees the numbers usually change substantially. If you don't want to take time to do that turn pulling back the coil and doing the wiggle the same way right before the signal drops out you will see the numbers drop from the higher coin areas to lower...sometimes to the 30's or 20's but most time into iron under the number 10.
I hunt with very little disc most of the time so I can see this drop immediately but if you tend to hunt with more disc or iron disced out completely you won't notice that drop...however the F70/Patriot still makes this problem trash easy to deal with.
You have program 1 and program 2 on these, essentially you have two completely different machines to hunt with totally different settings if you set it up that way.
Mine is always set up with disc on program 1 and all metal on program 2.
I hunt in one and switch over to the other on all iffy targets as a secondary check with just a push of the + or - buttons because I always hunt with that program icon on the bottom of the screen highlighted so it is quick, efficient and easy to switch between them.
There are other ways to recognise those hated crown caps too by the way.
Some slide the entire length of that coil over them from heel to toe, others use the side edges of their coil or the back end instead of the front, still others raise the coil while swinging over them.
In each case no matter which way you do it coil movement over most crown caps, (that aren't the older ones that are flattened and rusted), will trigger that drop down to iron which coins and rings just don't do.
I just got used to and very efficient at doing it off the front of the coil so I will continue to do it that way.
Nobody ever knows what they are digging until they dig it is more than true but I dug so many of these things learning this stuff and I hunt in so many sites that are infested with these things that I just don't have the patience to dig them at all anymore so if I can have a 98% success rate at recognizing these things I call that a huge victory.
The few I still dig because they don't do the drop thing is insignificant and there is a chance I could definitely miss something good not digging it all but in my head the real world chance of doing that is so small I just won't let it bother me.
I find more than enough to keep me happy and my time, energy levels and patience are not compromised so that is the best way to do it...for me.
If you want to dig way more of these than I am willing to do more power to you.
Everyone is different, everyone has different threshold levels for digging trash and mine just rose to high levels over the years.
This is a big reason why I am on a constant learning curve with all my detectors, I don't really want to miss anything good but there is always that possibility using my high percentage avoiding trash methods so the more I have confidence in my abilities the easier it is to keep those "what if" feelings at bay.
Beware of hunting in trashy areas with this big coil doing this because there is a situation that could pop up in rare cases.
I once had a wheat cent in the ground that was maybe one inch in front of a crown cap so this pull back method showed me the exact same behavior as if that coin wasn't there....high into the copper cent dime area and then that drop.
Ordinarily I would have just moved on but in this case I stopped and dug and recovered both.
Why?
After digging many hundreds of crown caps gaining confidence in this technique I eventually just quit digging them most of the time but on this one there was something slightly different going on.
I was using 4H and the high tone I heard on that wheat was not the same as what I usually hear on those regular, falsing crown caps.
It was different, more solid, tighter, sharper....something that coins do but these caps don't.
It is very hard to explain everything happening on this one, I could never have done this early on but after many hundreds of hours swinging over many hundreds of caps and coins I came to understand there was a slight difference in the tones between the two targets.
As I said hard to explain because it was all instinct on that one but I heard something different in that signal that made me get down and dig...I mean I had to and I was rewarded for the effort on that one.
The screen is great on these and can give you a huge amount of very important and helpful information but the audio on this thing can be even more descriptive than you might believe possible...and maybe even more useful than that screen.
You just have to listen to targets and how they sound for a long time to gain that instinct because this is something you can only learn with experience.
I believe I can cover that screen up completely and just hunt by sound alone and still do very well but again not at first, it took time to develop these skills and instincts but well worth the effort.
Maybe it is my many hundreds of hours swinging Tesoros that helped me along in this stuff but trust me, there is a whole lot more going on if you listen closely to those tones than what you can hear and understand just starting out.
Not just one tone either but all of them from monotone all the way up through DP and including all metal.
I have my favorites but I have spent many hours listening to and learning about all the tone choices in the last few years and I have come to know there are differences and advantages to using every one of them depending on site situations and conditions.
Right now don't worry about any of that because this is advanced stuff, just swing, listen and dig because it will all come in time and you are actually doing well considering.
From your observations and attitude I can sense in your writing I think you are getting it even at this early juncture.
In time I discovered I just seemed to have an affinity for the FTP products and their colorful language.
Hopefully you are on your way to discovering this too.
