Hi Rick! I am up in McKinney north of Dallas, and my first detector was the 5900 Di Sl Pro. What coil are you using...I assume the 950. Anyway, proper ground balancing and sweep speed is what you will find to be the secrets. I suggest that you find an absolutely clean spot of ground to balance in your own home yard if you have one. You may need to dig the junk first. Settings set at P. Use your pin point feature to decide it's all clean. In GEB/DISC, raise the coil waist high, pull the toggle and lower the coil. If the tone drops out, increase the Sens a smidgen and repeat. If the tone increases near ground, CCW the sense a little and repeat. Just a little increase in tone near the ground is what you want. That gives you a forward balance.
I would suggest you not worry about the SB setting until you get a feel for the detector. A surface coin should ring out nicely no matter what, which will show you the readings for say a nickel and a pull tab. A nickel reads about 29 and a tab about 39 on my 5900. Dimes and quarters are simple as they pretty much needle right inside the labeled display for 1c and 25c.
Bury a few targets, shallow at first, say 3 inches. Pack the ground down as hard as you can after inserting the target, wedging them in the sidewall is best. What you will find is that the buried targets require a faster sweep speed. Deeper the target, faster the swing. This facet alone cost me about a week before I found a real coin, and then I proceeded to find more coins in my 1970 built home in the country than I ever imagined. After that you will begin to have fun.
As far as the SB setting...roll that up AFTER each GB over the clean spot until you get chatter and then back down until quiet at ground level, and then GB again. Practice with the surface targets, and then the buried targets. You will be off and running in no time. This machine does require a faster sweep for more than surface targets. You will want to get a smaller coil if you intend to hunt parks and such where it is trashy...the 5.3 coil is a cool coil.
I have found that running in the GEB/SAT mode after the balancing is helpful. What that does is run dual all metal and discrimination at the same time, and the all metal tones will tell you to then focus there and swing faster for an actual deflection of the needle. It all takes practice.
PS. Texas soil is mostly hard packed and coins are almost always 0-4. Worrying about the SB control tuned away from P setting and trying to obtain stellar depth will likely be distracting. Texas dirt is hard! Things sink very slowly here.
The 6000 manual may improve on my 5900's GB routine. Good luck! Fun times.
Hope this helps. martin
****I just read your manual and it appears that your Auto Balance feature gives you a different procedure than mine. Focus more on what I said about the sweep speed and coin garden practicing. I presume that you could GB out of Auto. Don't know for sure. A pure manual GB may come in handy. I have a good friend in Commerce Texas that knows a lot more about the 6000 but he's not on this discussion site.
