Tarsacci Cookbook And Best Practices

[JCR]

I just finished re reading these Usage Notes that I have now printed out for my Tarsacci notebook. It really reinforces things you know, often from a different perspective so it sticks in your mind better.

 One thing the Tarsacci does when set up & running well for the site conditions is processing down those iffy signals after a few sweeps. This isn't discussed much but Keith alludes to this behavior in the stated notes.   When set up right, the machine will hit on a deep/ iffy target with an initial high chirp, not the more rounded "sonar" tone.  If it is small iron/nail/wire just falsing, a few more sweeps over the target will process the chirp out. If it is a solid target the additional sweeps will let the detector identify it as ferrous or non ferrous with the proper tone. The detector needs a good look at the target AND the surrounding soil matrix. 2 or 3 sweeps is usually enough to know what you have under the coil. Don't just zero in on the chirp, take in a foot or so around the hit to get the full picture. In heavy nails modest settings work best & are plenty deep.

 This is more important if you are in Disc Mode because you don't have the the All Metal channel's ramp up/down like in Mixed Mode. If you are hunting in heavy nails this processing down the signal will save a lot of digging falses.  It takes a while to see that you CAN trust the MDT to boil down/process out the immaterial falses AND to see & lock on to non ferrous items in a jumbled mess of iron. Take the time to give the machine a good smooth look at what is under the coil and it will surprise you. This is the part that is "not like a VLF" performance. When you have carefully & repeatedly gone over a good site with your best VLF unmaskers, pulling small good targets out of the nails down to 4 or 5 inches till nothing seems to be left, the Tarsacci can come in & hit the goods that are 5+.  For me several surprises stand out to include a brass curtain rod ring 10+ inches down in the heavy nails of a 1900s house site. And that was with pretty modest Sens & TH settings.

[JCR]

I was re hunting one of my old house sites in some pretty hot red dirt a few days ago. Nothing much seems to be left even in the busy nail areas using my other straight VLFs. I was running Mixed Mode as I came into the busy small nail/iron area so I switched to Disc mode. It didn't take long to get flustered with all the little one way chirps. I realized I was missing the low Iron tone. I had disc set at 0. I re set the disc to -30 and the added low tone immediately put the signals in context. The little chirps now made sense as the Tarsacci processed down the signals as I described in the post above. I ended up digging several period targets at considerable depth. Some relatively small in size, all with plenty of iron close by. The machine still makes you say Wow on most every outing.