New situation for the E-trac and I

[Viking]

Hey all,

I've been looking at old topo maps, researching places to hunt now that I'm in the Dallas area (from Denver). I found a small neighborhood on a 1959 map, with only 2 structures remaining (appear to be from the 1920's or so). With a huge area that once held about 10 homes, and with it being on city property, I am excited to spend some time there.

Before sunset tonight, I headed over there to do a little scouting with my E-trac. I probably have 50 hunts with this detector, but tonight was strange because there was no constant threshold hum unless I had the unit stationary. When I would swing the coil, the detector was completely silent, unless I went over something very shallow. A contorted noise would force it's way through the silence, and then disappear. There must be an enormous amount of trash here for the discrimination pattern to be consistently nulled out.

My finds in the 30 minute hunt were fence pieces, copper pipes, a couple of pennies from the 1970's, but really, only the huge pieces were giving strong signals. I was using Angel's discrimination pattern and auto +3. Other settings tonight were Trash High, Deep On, Fast Recovery Off.

I thought I'd been in really trashy areas before, but this is something I've never experienced. For those of you that have, what tips can you give me? It's weird to slowly swing the coil with NO noise at all. I missed the background hum. Will the detector even be able to tell me that there is a good signal in the ground (like a dime at 6), or is it preoccupied/overwhelmed with the nulled out items?

I would imagine that some potential solutions are to lessen the sensitivity (auto +3 was ranging from 19-27) OR run it wide open and deal with the array of noises? I'm not sure how effective TTF will be. The area is quite large, so maybe I'll just walk around until I can find a spot that isn't completely nulled out?

Any help would be appreciated. |) I am planning to detect it this site extensively on Friday, but I don't want to go crazy... Thanks!

[Tony Two-Cent]

I sometimes lose the threshold tone just as you described when I'm hunting a trashy area. All of my settings are exactly the same as yours except I run the standard coins discrimination pattern. The absence of a threshold tone doesn't seem to affect my hunts in any noticeable way, I still find deep coins. I'm not sure if I'm missing the occasional barely audible blip, but it doesn't seem to happen often enough for me to worry about adusting my settings to get the threshold tone back.

However, I'm interested to hear the opinion of more seasoned E-Trac users.

[Epi-hunter]

In my experience it is common to lose the threshold tone. You will still get target signals through it though.

One thing I would suggest (credit to Angel) is to put your sensitivity on manual instead of auto plus three, and set it at around 23, or a lower number than you would push at a less trashy site, because in trashy areas you are more concerned about target separation and not depth. You might actually find a higher sensitivity to be detrimental in a trashy area.

If your sweep speed is slow enough in trashy areas, the recovery should still be set to 'fast'. I don't change mine, I just crawl.

TTF would be a disaster in a park or public trashy area in my opinion... you would have to dig everything. It depends on the trash though. If the trash is mostly iron that may not be the case.

[randy]

If the trash is mostly ferrous, try TTF (make sure response is not set to long if you use TTF). If there is alot of conductive trash, unless your goal is to dig all conductive targets, TTF will drive you batty -- this just depends on the ratio of conductive trash to good targets, and what you are looking for (ie, silver vs all conductive relics). If just looking for silver, try a mostly white screen with FE 27+ blacked out, try multi tones with high variability, and listen for the sweet sound of silver among the noise and go really, really slow.

[Viking]

Thanks for your suggestions everyone. I really appreciate them. I'm going to try to head out for another ~30 minutes or so after work tonight to play with with of the settings/techniques you mentioned, before I head out for a few hours tomorrow.

Stay tuned, I very likely will have more questions after my trip tonight, but hopefully I can get the issue under control. I think the other answer will be to dig a lot and stay patient, and then stay patient some more. lol

[Dinger51]

So being the newbie , I would ask if fast on deep off would be better in those conditions. My thought is that you would get better target separation with fast on? Please correct me if I am wrong. I will be hunting a site next week that I've been told is tough to get a threshold at.

[Viking]

I did another 45 minute scouting trip to this new site today. Wow, what an enormous amount of iron trash! TTF is the only way to approach it, and even then, it's not easy. I feel like I just got honked at by a semi for the past 45 minutes, because of the constant thud of the low tone ferrous!

Anyways, my best find was an eyeball find- a 1935 wheatie laying on a makeshift dirt road. Go figure. I guess it's an encouraging sign though. Silver is a myth to me, as it eludes me like no one else on this site, but perhaps I can snag one tomorrow.

Certainly feels like I can't see deeper than an inch or two with all of this iron trash. It's concerning, but I'll hit it tomorrow for a few hours, nice and slow, and report back.

[Bell-Two]

So being the newbie , I would ask if fast on deep off would be better in those conditions. My thought is that you would get better target separation with fast on? Please correct me if I am wrong. I will be hunting a site next week that I've been told is tough to get a threshold at.

Yes that is what I would use deep off and fast on I think that is what Terry reccomends as well.

[Viking]

Yes that is what I would use deep off and fast on I think that is what Terry reccomends as well.

I'm going to try this out tomorrow. I was reading in Andy Sabich's book about a similar trashy situation, where item separation is more important than depth, and he recommended the same thing (although he was still using conductive tones).