Tarsacci Tahoe Hunt

[Steve Herschbach]

I took the MDT 8000 up to Tahoe this morning for a few hours of wading. Beach is heavily loaded with magnetite sands. There is a lot of deeper sandy material, but also some scoured out areas with gravel and rocks. The sand tends to have few targets. The gravels are the base and thick with targets in some areas, including lots of deeply rusted ferrous stuff, some of it quite large. I like hunting the gravels due to the target density. It however is not very VLF friendly stuff due to hot rocks and magnetite sand.

The MDT struggled to stay quiet in the gravels. Due to the target density I decided to run in 18 kHz DISC for this session, but the high tone pinging was pretty continuous. The good news is I was after mid tone targets so this was not a huge issue. The mid-tone false signals were far less prevalent. Still, I wanted to see what I could do to make the machine run quiet. With Sensitivity 6 I could get a good manual ground balance at 614. I tried Salinity 15, no improvement. I turned on Black Sand mode. No improvement. I lowered sensitivity to 2, so DISC Mode, GB 614, Black Sand On, Salinity 15, Sensitivity 2.... no real improvement on this high tone pinging.

However, at DISC Mode, GB 614, Sensitivity 6, BS Off, Salinity Off, the unit was well behaved on the sandy material. It is just the gravels where it was noisy. The reality for me, since I was not hunting coins was.... I don't care. Rather than dumb the machine down I just ran the higher settings in the gravels and ignored the high tone pinging. Simply chased mid-tones. There was some mid-tone falsing but not enough to be an issue for me. I'm used to running machines hot and noisy and hunting by ear so was actually happy with the resulting setting. Like I say though, a coin hunter might get frustrated.

The results below, all the recovered targets. Nothing was super deep, but that is no surprise here as this is normally the kind of stuff I'd run a PI in. Was getting the right kind of targets and only a few items tricked me, three bottle caps heavily encrusted with rust being of note. There is also one dime and one quarter than came up mid-tone, but I recovered nails with both so I think that skewed the target id. As far as target id numbers, I have no idea. I was just digging any halfway decent sounding mid-tone.

Like I said, I am happy with the mix. I like to see tabs and nickels and unfortunately corroded zincs - all gold range targets. And a 14K white gold cross pendant, breaking a gold jewelry drought I've been experiencing lately.

I'm still a MDT newbie, but basically find the machine easy to run and quite capable of doing what I want it to do. If my mention of the ground noise is off-putting, do not let it be. This is some really nasty stuff, and any VLF is going to suffer here. I thought the MDT did quite well.

[Chase Goldman]

Steve - thanks for the report and pic.  I take it you were running at 18 khz?

[abenson]

Steve-if your high ping falses were in the 28-30 range, which I also get when running in high minerals/salt. You can disc those out and possibly make the unit run a lot quieter. You could set the disc at 28 and actually take care of 26-30 which might help some.

[Steve Herschbach]

13 minutes ago, Chase Goldman said:

Steve - thanks for the report and pic.  I take it you were running at 18 khz?

Yes, I amended the report to note that.

[Steve Herschbach]

15 minutes ago, abenson said:

Steve-if your high ping falses were in the 28-30 range, which I also get when running in high minerals/salt. You can disc those out and possibly make the unit run a lot quieter. You could set the disc at 28 and actually take care of 26-30 which might help some.

Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind. I have to admit I am not one to do a lot more than get to settings that make me happy, and it would be a mistake for anyone reading my report to think the pinging was bothering me. I seem to have a very efficient mental filter that has my ears focused on what I want to hear and the rest rapidly becomes a sort of threshold sound for me. I run my volume a lot lower than most people probably would, which is how I turn noisy settings into a pleasant experience. It also does not hurt that the MDT high tone falls into my high frequency hearing loss range, so does not jump out at me like the mid tone does.

Long winded way of saying I found settings that worked for me pretty quickly and after that just got on with the business at hand.

I’m the first to admit that I am not a settings wizard and I usually hesitate to tell people my settings. They invariably tend to be noisy. A dead quiet machine kind of freaks me out. It’s like I crave some sort of continuous feedback. My only criteria is that I’m seeing the kind of targets I like. In this case targets are not lacking so I just don’t worry about it a lot. But I will take a look at this on the next outing. Thanks!

[Keith Southern]

At first i had pinging..The salinity will cure most and the pinging that's left will start to be dead  flat quick sounding and  the legitimate real high tones will be  sonar echo hits.

I promise they become nothing as you adapt.

The salinity is a life saver and sometimes it takes about upper 20s to calm it down.-2 threshold seems to be the spot with 7 sens to really get adapted to it .still punches like crazy and the tones are easier to hear ping from sonar.

So far Salinity has not caused me to miss even P.Caps and pistol balls at depth.The salinity can actually help pull a signal out of bad soil and rocks when on Vs being off.

The salinity will also make aluminum weird sounding and crown caps.

If you have some of that gravel at home turn salinity balance on and sweep over it and find the spot where it drops out or  acts weak.then use that setting ..It will amaze you at what it will see then around those rocks.

Pinging is the hardest part to overcome till you get it right and learn the language to know what to ignore that breaks through.Not hard but just takes time .Sweep speed helps alot too as does -30 disc.

I at first thought man what's up.then it clicked.I'm a slow learner and it took about 45 hours or so to settle in.then you really start to see it do some things you never though possible with a discriminating unit.

I see you see its doing something as I did too at first few uses,But once its all clicked and jelled look out.

Way more advanced technology in mineral than I myself can even begin to comprehend.

that's a nice looking Crucifix piece!!

Keith

[Steve Herschbach]

Thanks Keith. Like I said, the pinging was a non-issue for me. I was plenty happy for a first run. I simply mentioned it for completeness in the report. I'll take any and all suggestions under advisement for future trips. There is a good chance I'll be visiting with Dimitar soon, and may even get him on this location, so we will see how he thinks he should set the machine to deal with it. 

[Keith Southern]

👍

I might also add if the ground balance is too low the salinity does not seem to help till you set it to 650 or higher.I actually run it up some if its grabbing lower than 650 and I want to take advantage of the Salinity.

 

It's rare in my area as most of my soil is 800s even 950 at times.

But I know in good dirt like 580s and loamy fluffy  if I want it to unmask in iron better I set ground to about 800 and Salinity to about 44.ish.and it really gets going unmasking.

Keith

 

[Dances With Doves]

 You got a tough target in a white  gold cross in a tough area with a machine you are learning. You improvised, stuck to a plan and got gold.I    would say that is a good day in my book.

 

[Steve Herschbach]

All I can say is I barely read the instruction manual, only used the detector twice, for a few hours each time. Found gold both times. I’m ok with that!