Threshold Question

[wingmaster]

Going slow will help the chatter and find more coins in higher trash area's as well, of course if your like me it's hard to do when you want to hurry up and find some good stuff. HH

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

Agony and Death on a Gold Rush Steamer: The Disastrous Sinking of the Side-Wheeler Yankee Blade - Grab it through Amazon!

[04jeep]

I was using the White's D2 coil (the 10"DD coil), just make sure when you start the detector have your coil waist high and turn it to the gain setting that your going to use (I was using +2 gain) you want to adjust the threshold while at that gain setting as well then lower your coil and ground balance in a clean spot. If your in a high EMI area you might not always be able to run that hot without too much threshold background noise but you want the threshold barely audible and at +2 gain it will probably be a little erratic but you don't want it too bad. If you can run that same gain setting the next time out you probably won't have to adjust the threshold, and a good set of headphones is a must for those whisper targets as if you use a cheap set your probably going to miss a lot of those whisper targets. HH

when I purchased my MXT, I came on this site and asked questions on how to setup my machine, what coil to buy, for deeper targets and headphones to give me as much of an advantage as possible. With all the recommendations, I purchased the 13" ultimate coil, already had the 6 x 10 DD, killer bee headphones and I run my machine on the relic mode trigger forward at the +2 setting, threshold barely audible. I also turn on the MXT and setup at waist high before ground balancing. I guess the questionable part to me is, what is acceptable roughness/smoothness to the threshold? And if I turn the threshold level to high to smooth it out, I'm afraid the volumes to high. When it comes to deep targets I don't believe I should be listening just for the high tones, based on air testing. Am I right? If this is true, the roughness in the threshold makes those sounds harder to hear than the high tones, on deep targets. HH

 

[wingmaster]

When running a higher gain the threshold won't be totally smooth and don't try to turn it up to smooth it out, just run it where you can barely hear it and you can start by turning it silent then just where you start to hear it stop. I've heard some say they run it all the way up on the gain, calling it running on the ragged edge for max depth but to me too high and I worry about the threshold being way too erratic and not hearing those targets on the edge of range. Some coils you can run all the way up without as much threshold noise like the 4X6DD coil, which will give it more depth and will be as stable or more so than the D2 coil. The D2 is very sensitive which is why it's very prone to EMI but it's why it picks up those deep targets good as well, don't worry too much about the threshold being too study though just barely audible when going for max depth targets especially. With the trigger forward in relic mode you should really only hear one tone (the high tone) as everything under the discriminate should be silent for the most part, you will hear stuff a little under the discriminate trying to break through but it won't be a study repeatable high tone. Whisper targets are the same high tone just barely audible and some will sing to you that sweet sound when it's a good target and you get used to hearing it, some I pick up are even too deep to get the pinpoint to work on and in these cases I just use a small wiggle back and forth to get the center of the target and these are the ones you won't pick up at all once you disturb the ground, just make sure and pull at least 12" of dirt out and a good pinpointer will help make sure you don't miss any of these targets. HH

 

[04jeep]

Very good info on threshold volume. Makes more sense to me now. I believe, I've been running the threshold a bit to high to try and get some smoothness to it and thought it would help in picking up the deeper targets. I also think that in doing so I've been over riding the deep targets. Thank you and HH.

 

[wingmaster]

Made a slight adjustment to my statement I meant running a higher gain in the first part of the statement. HH

 

[wingmaster]

You can get a study threshold by running normal gain or slightly more but you won't get max depth, I try and run at +2 gain if I can but high EMI area's might make me back down some so the background noise in the threshold isn't too bad. When you adjust the gain you will need to adjust the threshold as well, the higher the gain you go the lower you'll have to turn the threshold, I don't like to go lower than +1 but sometimes you might have to in bad EMI area's of course anything lower than my normal +2 and I'm afraid I'm missing some old good deep stuff. HH