Kinda Slow Few Days, But Picked Up

[F350Platinum]

11 minutes ago, kac said:

I agree Geof. I've used tracking on my MK and if the ground doesn't vary too much it is ok. It will drift off if I run the gain too high. Not sure but thinking a hot machine is a big culprit of drifting gb. Now I run with tracking off majority of the time especially in disc modes and just do ground grabs as a I go. In the brackish and salt I will work along the shoreline rather than up and down the shore so I can keep the machine more stable as I go..

I've tried auto tracking but really didn't see much difference so I asked the pros!

The river i'm searching is pretty consistent, I'm running the 600 in Beach 2 for the 50 tones, all metal, sensitivity can be turned up as high as 23-24 out of 25. I've never had a problem with noise. I was just wondering because I really didn't see any advantage to using it when the detector is quiet until it's over something. Ground balance is usually either 0 or negative. Really clean conditions and no EMI. For the most part iron has been iron, and the good stuff stands out, except for lead which always gets me.

However, I am going to hit a couple of beaches soon, so I wondered. Thanks for helping!

[kac]

When I used my Gold Racer in All metal mode it does a great job tracking and the iSat does a good job keeping the threshold nice and steady even when the gain is high but that is a high frequency machine so it's response to small changes in the ground seems more accurate. With the Multi Kruzer if I have the gain too high the tracking seems to drift in Gen Mode (all metal). In discrimination modes on both machines the tracking can make the machines seem to skip on targets when it starts to walk. Coming from using my Tejon which was my first machine with a true all metal mode which has no tracking I got in the practice of manually ground balancing often. Buddy mine runs his Nox 800 with tracking on most of the time, I should ask what settings he uses as he seems to be able to keep it spot on most of the time.

[kac]

Curious if the Nox has iSat controls or not. Forgot to mention that in my discrimination modes on the Multi Kruzer for some reason I couldn't set the iSat lower than 1 until I had an issue where the ground phase meter wasn't really showing up so I did a factory reset. After that I was able to put all the disc modes iSat to 0 and found the id's were more stable. Tracking does work better in those modes but again I need to keep the gain down so I am not hearing too much ground, just not running it as hot.

So... if the Nox has iSat control take one of your modes, turn isat off and try the tracking with the gain not so high.

I believe the higher iSat number the machine does a more frequent threshold adjust and if the tracking is in play then it may try to adjust something that doesn't need to be adjusted and will drift. Too low an iSat the threshold may not be steady. Discrimination modes don't need iSat as your not really using a threshold to listen for targets. If I'm wrong on that maybe someone can chime in.

[Chase Goldman]

The Equinox does not have iSAT controls.  It only has an adjustable simple reference threshold tone in the normal discrimination modes (Park/Field/Beach) that blanks when encountering a discriminated target.  On the 800, gold mode has a "true" threshold that can be adjusted to optimize weak signal detection but it is not a  self adjusting threshold afaict.

Regarding the Nox, tracking GB is not all that reactive it would really be unusual for it to drift away from the optimal ground phase setting.  If anything, it is ovedamped and responds sluggishly.  That is why it is best to auto GB to get balanced to the local ground phase and then turn tracking on.