Questions For Steelphase

[Condor]

I know you guys want to keep your trade secrets, but can you shed a little light on the effects of your "filters".  I've read elsewhere that in retrospect your choice of the term filters was probably misplaced.  We'll stick to the same terms so as not to confuse people.

I've been running your enhancer for about 12 hrs total and have experimented with the settings some.  My particular choice in running the Z machine has always been with absolute minimum threshold and low smoothing with as much Sensitivity as I can get away with.  Rarely if ever do I use Difficult because it has proven time and again to miss small deep targets in the relatively mild ground of the Desert Southwest of Arizona.  

I started out with your enhancer on "filter" 2 which seemed to be a nice "bright" kind of tone, but the more I struggle with hot rocks and variable hot ground I've taken to "filter" 3.  Filter 3 as first seems to have an overall dulling effect to the entire sound spectrum, but I'm starting to think it rounds off the high tones enough to extend my detecting time from hearing/sensory overload.  Maybe I could have reached to same goal by playing with the Z tone control, I just haven't taken the time to experiment more.  As always, individual hearing is all subjective, and perhaps this is just an unintended affect on my hearing and is meaningless to other people. 

Can you share a little more of your theory of how these enhancers were intended to work, whether or not you achieved that goal. 

[SteelPhase]

Well I can certainly clear it up a little without giving away too many secrets. 

As you said before, the term 'filter' isnt entirely accurate in this situation but it was the easiest for people to understand (and short for labeling purposes). The sP01 works by basically 'squeezing' a section of the signal (a bit like an audio compressor) which will in effect put an edge on faint broad signals. It does also amplify the signal but thats secondary. Now the section that needs to be altered will vary with the threshold tone that the user has set. The 'filter' switch selects a band of frequencies to manipulate. These bands do overlap so if you are not using the optimum band for your threshold tone, it has the effect of damping the signal slightly. 

Hopefully that explains it a little for you.

On another note - I have a friend who does tuition on the 7000 in Western Australia and used to run the minimum threshold/high sensitivity (Bogenes settings) - very similar to what you're running. Not long ago he spent a lot of time doing testing and found that using minimum threshold he was missing some difficult targets ie thin wiry gold set vertically etc. He found that by running threshold at 3 or 4 he still had the advantages of low threshold but he wasn't missing targets. 

regards Pat

[Mike C...]

Hi I dont have that many hours yet with the sp01-But I run mine at 2 as well because 3 seems to be a big jump in the dampering effect-I would like to have complete control over the filtering instead of the presets how hard would it be to just put a rotary pot there instead or maybe even a 3 turn pot that way we could fine tune it to our liking -Thanks for a well built product-Mike C...

[SteelPhase]

3 hours ago, Mike C... said:

Hi I dont have that many hours yet with the sp01-But I run mine at 2 as well because 3 seems to be a big jump in the dampering effect-I would like to have complete control over the filtering instead of the presets how hard would it be to just put a rotary pot there instead or maybe even a 3 turn pot that way we could fine tune it to our liking -Thanks for a well built product-Mike C...

Because its not really a filter the circuit doesnt lend itself to using a pot. The circuit selecting the bands doesnt just rely on changing values of resistance. There are numerous components that need to be switched to select each one of the 3 bands.

The damping observed is really only a by product of not having the optimum band selected but customers have found it useful when they encounter very hot ground. It can be used in addition to the detector controls to quieten the signal.