Jump to content

Greetings From The UK


PimentoUK

Recommended Posts

Hi to you all. I'm from the south of England, I mainly detect farmland, woodland, and a bit of park hunting for something different.
No prospecting, and I've yet to beach hunt, but one day I must try....

I mainly post on a UK Forum, but sometimes contribute to Dankowski's Forum, as user Pimento. I'm an engineer, who likes the technical aspects of the hobby, so that's where my contributions are likely to be. But it's always good to read what others in the hobby get up to, and Steve seems to have created a nice Forum here. So I'll be checking in regularly, even if my posting is infrequent.

Thanks for reading.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites


Thanks for the welcome, guys.

I should've mentioned I use a Fisher F75 as my main machine, an F2 as a backup, and as a fun project, a vintage White 2/D hip-mount in need of some love.
All my kit is tinkered with, needless to say.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hmmm ... shoulda kept quiet about that.
It's a short-ish list of what's been done, and a long list of potential projects, none of which I have any time for, currently.

It's on a custom shaft. It was originally simply a project because I wanted to do it. So I did the groundwork research, planning, obtained some suitable metalwork, then it all went quiet.
Until my original shaft snapped in half, unimpressed by FT's engineering, I have to say. Then it became a more urgent project, which I'm now finally finishing off.

There's a self-built cordless headphone link built into it. Though it works OK, I'm not convinced it's perfect ... as a fall-back I have a couple of sets of TurtleBeach cordless gaming 'phones I could hack.

The RX gain has been increased, originally to bring the 5" coil alive, though it also benefits non-motion hunting, like hoard-hunting and detecting overgrown wild areas. It has no readily observable effect using the stock coil, except perhaps on dry sand or a freshwater beach?. I was intending to make it switchable stock / hi-gain .... some time.

Backlight on/off control is a half-done project. I rarely use/need it, so I permanently disconnected it. But on occasions I wished I could turn it on, so came up with a design, but never finished it.

Among the 'projects' are some coil builds. A very large ( approx 18" x 12" bi-axial ) and a two-box conversion. Both really for large-target/hoard-hunting, though the 18x12 would still get coin-sized stuff.

I worked out a plan for an all-metal/disc-mode toggle circuit, but that one will probably not happen.

With almost no changes, it's possible to run the machine on a single AA Li cell, I was going to do some experiments into the viability of this.

It's also been fiddled with for scientific measurement purposes. Raw target and ground signals can be measured internally. A DVM will give useful data, but a data-logger would be better. My first attempts involved a laptop PC sound-card. Fitted with an external chopper circuit, using SpecOszi logger software, and a QuickBasic program to process the data. It wasn't that good, the next attempt will use a recently-purchased external USB sound-card suitably modified, and Audacity software to do the data capture.

And I haven't mentioned all the pinpointers and their mods.HeHe.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 hours ago, PimentoUK said:

Thanks for the welcome, guys.

I should've mentioned I use a Fisher F75 as my main machine, an F2 as a backup, and as a fun project, a vintage White 2/D hip-mount in need of some love.
All my kit is tinkered with, needless to say.

Welcome, Pimento!  Nice to see you appreciate the antiques.  ?  And there are quite a few of us here who like to tinker with our detectors.  You fit right in.  Share some pics of your finds.  Your part of the world has in-ground history over 10 times as old as ours, as I'm sure you know.  Even your 'new' stuff excites many of us.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That old Whites was picked up for 10 Pounds ( about 13 US Dollars ) at a car boot sale ( like a flea market/garage sale event ). It took a while to work out what was up with it. Several things it turned out, but in the course of refurbishment, I've made it better that new, the residual background hiss is much reduced. This may make it more sensitive, or just nicer to use, I don't know yet.
I had some ideas related to tinkering with the audio, which is pretty simple and hence easily changed. And there's lots of space inside that big box for add-on kludges.
A curious machine, with the ability to do reverse discrimination, which I understand is for location of black sand areas. Not likely to be much use to me, though.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 hours ago, PimentoUK said:

Hmmm ... shoulda kept quiet about that.
It's a short-ish list of what's been done, and a long list of potential projects, none of which I have any time for, currently.

It's on a custom shaft. It was originally simply a project because I wanted to do it. So I did the groundwork research, planning, obtained some suitable metalwork, then it all went quiet.
Until my original shaft snapped in half, unimpressed by FT's engineering, I have to say. Then it became a more urgent project, which I'm now finally finishing off.

There's a self-built cordless headphone link built into it. Though it works OK, I'm not convinced it's perfect ... as a fall-back I have a couple of sets of TurtleBeach cordless gaming 'phones I could hack.

The RX gain has been increased, originally to bring the 5" coil alive, though it also benefits non-motion hunting, like hoard-hunting and detecting overgrown wild areas. It has no readily observable effect using the stock coil, except perhaps on dry sand or a freshwater beach?. I was intending to make it switchable stock / hi-gain .... some time.

Backlight on/off control is a half-done project. I rarely use/need it, so I permanently disconnected it. But on occasions I wished I could turn it on, so came up with a design, but never finished it.

Among the 'projects' are some coil builds. A very large ( approx 18" x 12" bi-axial ) and a two-box conversion. Both really for large-target/hoard-hunting, though the 18x12 would still get coin-sized stuff.

I worked out a plan for an all-metal/disc-mode toggle circuit, but that one will probably not happen.

With almost no changes, it's possible to run the machine on a single AA Li cell, I was going to do some experiments into the viability of this.

It's also been fiddled with for scientific measurement purposes. Raw target and ground signals can be measured internally. A DVM will give useful data, but a data-logger would be better. My first attempts involved a laptop PC sound-card. Fitted with an external chopper circuit, using SpecOszi logger software, and a QuickBasic program to process the data. It wasn't that good, the next attempt will use a recently-purchased external USB sound-card suitably modified, and Audacity software to do the data capture.

And I haven't mentioned all the pinpointers and their mods.HeHe.

Your technical abilities vastly exceed my own ???

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...