That's a great machine. If you've got the type with the 950 loop (the flat loop with the hole in the center), you've got a machine that some people, to-this-day, refuse to change from. Good all around relic, beach, demolition machine. Sure there's machines that go deeper today, and sure there's machines that ferrett around trash (ghost townsy) today, but for a general versatile machine, that's a good one.
You did right to start with the presets. Naturally, to get more depth, you can turn the sens. (aka "signal balance") up. If you do, be sure to re-ground balance on a spot of clear/clean ground each time. Another way to get more depth, is to take it out of auto-track ground balance, and put it in "lock". HOWEVER, this assumes you're going to hunt in an area of un-changing mineral compositions. Eg.: flat ground, etc... If you're in a terrain that changes, and/or near water's edges, etc..., then you might want to keep it on "track". But if you put it on "lock", that dis-allows the machine to muffle deeper whispers (that it thinks are just a part of the back-ground matrix). Or if you're in a heavily iron ridden site (ghost-townsy type site), eventually having it in auto-track will make the machine think that amount of rusty composure/iron is a part of soil (iron-rich-soil). In which case, you'll de-tune it so much that ...... eventually ....... you'd only get banging louder/bigger conductive objects in the mess. Thus you want to "lock" it, when getting ready to hunt iron-ridden sites.
As far as whether you'll loose depth when upping the disc, that's a good question. I know on the earlier 6000's, that was indeed true (because they were/are a progressive knob). But with that last generation of 6000's, I forget if that was the case or not. So I'll let someone else chime in on that question. I know if some people say "yes you'll loose depth", it's often not that you actually necessarilly really loose depth, but rather, that whenever someone ups their disc, they loose the benefit of "random bounces" on the really deep ones. You know, like how a super deep one might waffle around while trying to "make up its mind" on where it really hits. Well, if you have the disc. set high, then obviously those lower "bounces" will simply be a null. But the higher "bounces" are not discriminated out. Hence if those first few swings over a target were the low bounces (like if you weren't exactly "centered" over it), then you'd simply walk on, without ever trying a 2nd or 3rd pass to "bring it in". Dunno if that makes sense.
