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digger1955

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  1. Thanks...if there is one life lesson that affected me the most and had a significant effect on all that came after was this one. Ten years ago when I started I found a lot but without realizing it from the get-go I was always swinging too fast. I found plenty of targets but one day at a site I hit many times and thought I drained and I was finished with it, a large parking lot at a high school divided up by many grass filled islands, I went back for the last time just to see if I could find just a few more targets. The difference in this hunt is I decided to slow down to half the speed I was swinging before and I had an eye opening experience that shocked and humbled me. The site came alive with targets and I mean an unbelievable amount like never before. Not only did I find three times the coins I found on any previous hunt but other things started to show up. I continued to come back many times after this and eventually found about $40 more in clad, 4 or 5 silver rings, two silver chains and 2 gold rings plus a ton of fashion jewelry, school medallions and pins, tools and a whole lot more. On my first several hunts I covered all of these things per hunt, after I slowed down and concentrated on covering maybe just 1/2 of one of the big ones instead the magic started to happen. I still swing a bit too fast if I don't watch myself, the targets from my lawn proved this, but when I control myself, have patience and do this right some great things can happen.
  2. Thanks! To illustrate the point and pile drive it completely into the ground here is a family pic I gathered up several years ago from a few finds I dug hunting around my most favorite site of all to hunt for jewelry...the perimeters of just 9 basketball courts. These tend to be one of the trashiest sites you can come across, just the new ones are usually totally trashed out but try hunting one that is decades old and the amount of trash you might deal with could be...daunting. Bottle caps galore, tabs of every age, kind and flavor, foil and can slaw that can dive you nuts and so much more. Just a byproduct of the kind of activity that happens around these things. Another type of target you can find hiding among the trash might also be jewelry because many players take that stuff off and stash it in small piles of clothes they tend to deposit around these perimeters, shirts, coats and whatever, to keep it all safe so they won't lose it when they are playing. Luckily for us many times these players forgot they hid their jewelry in these piles and it falls out when they pick up those clothes or it falls out somewhere along the way on the paths they take walking back to their vehicles in the parking lots. These were all found after mounting a sniper coil on only one of my old detectors, the great and usually very underrated Fisher F2. I got the 4" sniper in a two coil deal when I bought the thing and only used the 8" coil for over a year because the sniper was cute but looked so small I thought it was a joke. One day I mounted it as a lark and went back to a trashy picnic site next to a pavilion I thought I had hunted to death but the site came alive again and I found a shocking amount of coins and targets I missed with the bigger coil due to masking issues. After that the sniper became my prime weapon on all my detectors most of the time unless I am looking for the deepest targets. I hunted basketball courts with the bigger coil at first, found several coins and a few other things but none of this kind of quality stuff or the many that came after showed up until I switched over to the sniper. I am mostly a sniper guy still to this day...no apologies and never a regret.
  3. Smaller coil for hunting around and inbetween the massive iron and trash deposits I usually hunt in. Works great, always been a big fan and all my detectors have sniper coil options because I have always been a dyed-in-the-wool jewelry hunter and as such tend to hunt some of the most trashiest sites I can find because that is where an awful lot of jewelry tends to hide...or tries to. Snipers just make it easier.
  4. Thanks! Found another big general service coat button hunting a curb strip next to a small park about 10 days ago, probably around WWll vintage or so because I find them here and there pretty regularly especially in private front lawns and always a nice find but no longer all that exciting for me. When this thing popped up I saw it was different and after I cleaned off the crusty dirt I saw the anchor. Always nice to find a first...anything.
  5. Watched this vid then went out to the most scoured and hunted to death place I know...my tiny front lawn. Not saying everything he says or does in this vid is gospel or will work in all dirt everywhere but he has his theories and what he does the way he does them works for him and he manages to find some great things in a few very hunted out parks so I got inspired to try to find just anything in my very difficult SE. mineralized devil dirt. After several years of scouring this tiny patch of land for many hours with 6 different detectors and tons of different coils and digging all decent signals I am down to the the odd, weird, strange, severely masked and incomprehensible ones only. I watched this vid, got inspired, and went out to try to find one decent target using some of his advice...just one. I didn't do exactly everything I saw done in this vid, that turning thing and examining targets from more than one angle always worked well for me here but my dirt is way weirder than his and I tried a few things but the most important point I attempted to do and prove to myself was just slow down...examine targets a bit more closer, don't just blow off jumpy signals or others that don't make sense. Not that I really ever do that but on this hunt I looked at each signal I got with a more critical eye and attitude than usual. Could still be junk hiding down there, could be wasting a bit more time over some iffy targets but none of my hunts are timed events, I just go out and get signals and decide whether to dig....or not. If it takes a little more time to figure out a confused signal, site or situation so be it. The rewards for extra patience might be nothing but maybe, just maybe...they could be great. My Nox had the sniper mounted, I did a factory reset before the hunt to start with a clean plate and didn't modify too many of the factory settings. I hunted in 5 tones, Park 2, usually I use Field 2 but changed it up a bit on this one....I left the horseshoe on through most of this short hunt. Fe was at 6, recovery at 5, switched to Fe2 after awhile and eventually maxed it out along with the recovery but didn't find much else after these four targets showed up. All these targets were found in Multi...single frequency hunting just doesn't seem to work very well around here at all with the Nox. It wasn't all peaches and cream, I still got fooled on a couple of rusty nails and a few small and crazy tiny pieces of iron but not all that much, dug very little trash that wasn't iron so I was happy with that. The 1953 nickel was the absolute first target dug, short, sweet, jumped a bit from 11-13 and a bit iffy unlike most of my usually solid nickel signals but when this thing popped up first thing I was actually shocked and thrilled. The lead hem weight was an older one, #4, nice and heavy and really jumpy initially but solid once I dialed the coil into its location. The dime is modern but hiding in a tiny crack vertical between the grass and the curb. The older Naval button was the prized treasure of this hunt, the only one I have ever found. Faces to the left so pre WW ll as they changed the eagle from looking left in 1941 to looking to its right. Don't believe civil war and could be anywhere from 1850 to 1941...but I am thinking maybe around or a bit later than WW l on this one. Mower hit but sweet find never the less. Kept switching between 4kHz and Multi checking out many targets, other frequencies too, I still don't see a whole lot of advantage to me in my sites using 4kHz or any other single frequency but I still switch to them to check some signals and will continue to do that until I see something positive or just lose patience and give up. Basically, my point of this post is just to urge you to look a bit closer at some of your signals, with a bit of extra attention and coil manipulation signals can change from initially good to bad or, hopefully, from initially bad to good. Also to thank this hunter for taking the time to make this vid and I enjoyed seeing another hunter's thought process, experience and skill on display. If any of us take just one thing, idea or insight from watching the vid that could make a difference for any of us even on just one stellar piece of future treasure it will be 49 minutes well spent.
  6. Hey, if it was super easy everyone would be doing it and succeeding. Glad it isn't...I also love a good challenge!
  7. I also use a Mojave once in awhile and I still pull out my beloved F70 here and there. I am extremely good with that one after 7 years and thousands of hours standing behind it. If there is a possible setting combination I have probably tried it and reported back on several forums about my positive results so much so that I have been called a master of the F70 by many, but I don't think anyone really masters anything...I have just tried more things than most and have good observational skills. I went over that same exact spot with the Fisher more than once, I assure you, but never got a signal on that lighter that triggered me to dig. Probably the iron overwhelmed it despite the fact I have used all metal and all the different tone choices and different disc settings while hunting in that area. I still enjoy using it more than the Nox because I am used to it and understand it so well and it isn't so compressed in the number range which I enjoy more but the Nox just deals with my masking issues a bit more easily in my devil dirt. It makes things easier to notice...like that lighter hiding over massive iron. Could be the low 12 sense helped on that one, but who knows? Serendipity...I will take all the good luck I can when hunting because it is us against the universe out there...and the universe can be sly and likes to play tricks on all of us.
  8. Don't believe so, I have hunted for thousands of hours around here in every kind of dirt imaginable from rare black stuff up to and including at one site where the red dirt was exposed and my F70 GB'd at an insane high 80's with the mineralization meter pegged and have never come across any dirt that affected my pinpointer like that there, before or since. It was weird but weird and strange is what I deal with almost every day. Something real thick and heavy like a metal bumper off an old car could have done it if it was just below the area I stopped digging..I talked to a guy while I was walking around hitting curb strips a few blocks away a few years ago and said he was digging in front of his house to plant new bushes and dug up an entire vintage metal bumper buried there so I assume nothing and just deal with things as they happen. Sometimes strange things happen and I just shrug and move on. See enough weird things and you just get numb and don't bother spending the energy looking for answers about why...it just cuts into my digging time if I do too much of that. I used to, but now I am just too old, tired and jaded, I guess.
  9. Yes, the 800, I am big on tweaking and experimenting so I wanted all the features to see what might work in the mineralized devil dirt I hunt in. I have used them all including the gold and beach settings...they all seem to work pretty well.. About 3" deep. I dug down past 7" to find whatever huge thing was under it but no luck. ..it was big and it might have been very deep. Usually I hunt way higher, high teens, low 20's up to max if it is not too noisy but the bulk of the old stuff rarely lies too much deeper than 5-6" around here so even 12 can get me to where I need most of the time. Once in awhile I still experiment and go real low after this experience and still seem to find most targets in my usual range. I think. You are probably correct about those Bama Zippos, might be as prevalent as bottle caps around here but I never found one before so...yea me.
  10. Once, using my beloved Fisher F2 years ago I was doing some testing using some clad and silver quarters. Clad quarters all tested at one number consistently while all silver quarters tested at one number higher which was nice to know. Then I tested two quarters together of each kind and then 3 quarters...in each instance I got up -averaged numbers higher than single quarters which was expected. The last thing I did was run my coil over a full roll of clad quarters...every time on every pass that roll showed up as iron, not a hint of any high numbers at all, just iron. Was this a bug, no, just the filtering system going bonkers over this particular type of target...at no time did I get upset believing there might have been who knows how many rolls of buried quarters out there I might have been missing on my hunts. Years later I just updated the Nox to the new firmware with the F2 iron bias profile so I went over to my local park in my neighborhood to test it out and see if I could find just one good target. The area I hunted was a site I have hunted literally hundreds of times in the last few years, this park is 1/2 block from my home and my go-to site when I don't have time to travel far and despite the fact that it was considered hunted out years ago by most hunters I spend so much time here I still find something great here and there because it is an old park and I spend so much time there. In my area depth is pitiful because of the red clay mineralization but more than that we have massive issues with iron masking because we have heaping helping of extra iron from tiny to huge at most sites because of the history of the major iron and steel industries that built this city and tons of slag that for some reason seemed to be mixed into the fill dirt that was used when the city was being built...even in the lawns of private homesites. Most of my public hunting areas where sites where at least a few old homes if not entire neighborhoods were knocked down to make these public parks and sites and most are all still littered with nails, screws, copper tubing and sites and all the other brass, steel and iron junk you find at typical old homesites. Add to that this specific area I was hunting was situated not to far away from a part of this park that was a known garbage dump...I had found and dug up too many old car, parts, motorcycle parts and a slew of other large pieces of junk that had no business being there, otherwise. Still, despite all the issues in this area I also found a Barber quarter here a few years ago and a Peace dollar before that right near the edge of where that dump was supposed to be so I scour this area regularly just in case the severe masking issues are hiding something else great. Those that gave up hunting this park thinking they got it all years ago were wrong, there are still great targets here but they are few and far between and most are masked to the hilt so they were missed for many decades by myself and so many others. I rolled over one small area with the Nox, an area near where I found that quarter and where I had hunted previously more times than I could count with a Vaq and 3 different coils, an F70 with 5 different coils and a Compadre, too. The Nox was in Field 2, 5 tones, Multi, F2 iron bias on 0 or 1 with recovery speed on 1. Sense was on 12 because I put it there to quiet it down when I was checking it out in my house after the firmware upload and I forgot to turn it up again when I went hunting. There was noise and jumping galore, I got a pretty decent very short but still consistent high tone hit as I moved my coil around one square foot area with tons of high tone falsing that was a sure indication of iron in that area too...a lot of iron. The iron was deep and massive, I know this because after I was shocked to recover the sweet target that gave off the actual high tone I ran the Nox with the horseshoe on all over the site and it went crazy with a large iron hit and then I widened the hole and dug pretty far down and ran my pinpointer all around the area and all over the hole as I dug deeper and deeper looking for what this huge thing could be because I was curious. A very loud and solid signal...no matter where I moved or pointed my pinpointer or detuned that tool would not shut up. To this day I have no idea what that thing was that set my detector and pinpointer off so loudly over such a big area, might have been an entire car down there for all I knew...or at least it seemed that way at the time. Didn't matter, in an area that defined the term masking the Nox was still able to sense a great target laying directly over that massive iron whatever and could give me enough information to trigger my digging instinct enough to go after it. What I found is in the pic below...another great Zippo lighter and I love finding me some Zippos anytime and anywhere. After I realized it could do this great thing in such challenging conditions I am not ever going to worry about such a rare possibility missing an odd dime that might be masked by a wild nickel. As a matter of fact I have found at least two coin spills with both dimes and nickels in the same hole so I continue to hunt happily and confidently...and probably always will.
  11. I was leery about whether 4kHz would make much of a difference over 5, had no idea what stability enhancements actually meant. This video convinced me to update and see what it could do for me here in the mineralized SE.
  12. Thanks. I am known as digger27 on most forums, REVIER on FM, I sold tons of F2's for Fisher after many read how deeply I explored that one, I coined the phrase "Church of the Compadre" after starting a thread that kind of went viral, I have been called an "expert" by Dankowski and many others because of what I discovered and posted about how the F70 works and the huge amount of settings I have experimented with. I am no expert...I just have the patience to explore new ideas, (mine and others), and the curiosity to keep at it until I get them to work...or find out they don't. The Nox is new to me and with so many settings and adjustments available I will be happily exploring them for awhile. Experimenting with these out of the box and all settings are great fun for me, about as much fun as finding great treasure, but there is another reason I am forced to try so many things attempting to be successful. I live and hunt around Birmingham Alabama, we have the mineralized red clay soil, the black stuff is also highly mineralized, we have all the ingredients to make iron and steel naturally occurring in our soil and that causes us problems, the iron and steel industries were everywhere and were predominant from the 1800's way into the late 20th century and they dumped slag into landfills for decades for some reason and that infested dirt was spread out all over the city as it was built up in both commercial and residential areas. Then most if the public areas I hunt, parks and such, were old home sites or residential neighborhoods so hunting in most sites is like hunting old cellar sites...millions of nails, wire, screws and iron of all shapes and sizes. Oh yea...Not to mention the 100-150 years of trash because as far as I can tell nobody around here ever understood what a trashcan is or how to use one. We have massive masking issues, major depth issues, a huge amount of trash and iron issues and hunting around here ain't for sissies. I wish things were different but they are not so what are you gonna do....we either deal with it all and figure it out or quit the hobby.I lived and hunted for 3 years out in the almost perfect soil out in Kansas and Missouri, I started here then moved out there and thought I was in heaven...but we ended up moving back a few years ago, I cried when I realized I had gone from hell to heaven and I was going back to hell again. Short of using a PI to combat our devil dirt, an option I considered and then rejected because digging tons of trash just ain't my thing anymore, the only other options we have is to pick tools that seem to work decently and then learn them to the extreme in hopes we can get just a little deeper or unmask just a few more hidden pieces of treasure. THAT is why I got an Equinox and so did a couple of hunting buddies. It seems to deal with our challenges better than everything we have used before around here. It goes quite a bit deeper or at the very least ID's targets better and more accurately at deeper levels, it unmasks better, it seems to be finding us more than the Garretts, Whites, Fishers and Tesoros we have experience with not to mention other Minelabs like the E Trac...it makes it easier to find the great stuff, anyway. I don't know why this tech appears to work better than Minelab FBS tech plus all those others in our dirt but it does. To us this thing is no hype, I never even considered getting one until a friend got one and I saw it do some pretty shocking things right in front of my eyes...till then it wasn't even on my radar. If I still lived in Kansas I never would have thought twice about this thing, out there everything worked and worked well but here any tiny advantage we can get might make the difference between success and failure. Game changer...maybe, I really had my eye on the new Manta technology that FTP is working on. A true PI with a working discrimination feature and ability, that really might change things for us around here but with just with few hours standing behind the Equinox I have been shocked and awed...and that is saying something. Now my job is to figure out how best to utilize this thing, find the optimum settings, learn the language better than just well and dive deep into this thing as best I can to see what it is capable of.Like I said this stuff is fun for me, luckily I am still finding great things on this journey as I learn and I expect that will continue as my journey continues. I read all posts I can find about how other owners set the tools up that I am attempting to learn and what they know and discover and I can't tell you how grateful I am for that. I learn from others and that really speeds up the learning curve. I consider it a privilege so I have always paid it forward and posted about anything I think can be helpful to the community and help the next guy out. It takes a village...and the metal detecting community is a great one!
  13. Mostly Gold 2. I tried G2 once before but yesterday I used it for a whole hunt. I was using the sniper coil, also. I have mineralized SE dirt plus a ton of extra iron everywhere that comes in all forms from microscopic to nails of all sizes up to horseshoe sized and even larger. I opted for the 800 over the 600 primarily because I didn't know exactly what settings would turn out to be optimal for my challenging sites and wanted to have all available options possible. I would rather have settings and not need them then not have them and need them. I am a mad scientist of sorts and I am not afraid to try some very outside the box settings on my detectors and the patience to keep at it. I am just starting to experiment with the possible settings, I have used a few of the factory settings, park and field 1 and 2, tweaking them a bit here and there and good things are happening and yesterday I messed around with the two gold settings for the first time. I like it, it seems to work pretty well here and I got used to the super amount of data overload very quickly because of my past experience using my F70. I found out using my Fisher lots of settings work well but the best and most productive set up I ever used is when I have it in all metal, the threshold setting set to max and the sensitivity also maxed out plus with the speed on SL...boost, most of the time. Noisy, jumpy, schizophrenic...you don't know the half of it. A friend watched me go right behind him and find targets he missed completely and asked what settings I was using once so I let him see and hear what was happening using these settings as we walked around. He was flabbergasted, he asked me how in the world I could make any sense at all out of the shear wall of sound and jumping numbers and I told him it took hundreds and hundreds of hours over the last few years practicing to be able to do just that. I like hunting quietly too, way less mentally fatigueing that way, but when it counts here in my strange devil dirt I would much rather get data on everything that is happening under my coil and use my ears, brain and experience as my prime discriminator. When I switched to the gold modes it took very little time to get used to it...it almost felt natural and like home to me. I was using the small sniper coil through all of this hunt, not thrilled with the small footprint but masking is my most challenging problem here so it will be staying mounted on the bottom of my lower rod for the foreseeable future. On these modes I used factory settings but made sure to set reactivity to 6. So exactly what were my observations using the gold modes looking for normal coin and jewelry targets... 1...This mode can sense the smallest targets, it seemed to lock on some very tiny pieces of foil all day pretty solidly and accurately even fairly deep like at 5-6". I can see why gold hunters would use this, extreme sensitivity. Using these settings I watched the screen pretty closely most of the time but I was listening for some solid good tones with sharp ends even closer. 2...Depth, even with the small coil depth was very good even in my devil dirt where sensing anything accurately past 6" is usually a gift. All I really need to hit is the 6-7" level because that is where there is a layer of great targets that have been missed for years by huge amount of hunters with all kinds of detectors because of masking, however there are some targets deeper in some areas and it would be nice to be able to go deeper if possible. On this hunt I got a very jumpy signal that went from lower numbers up into the 30's and that usually means iron falsing around here but I got a deep depth reading so I got curious. In the hole I opened there were a couple of rusty nails on my way down, common around here, but there was still something pretty big deeper so I kept going even though I knew it was probably going to be junk. I finally hit it and I didn't measure but this thing had to be at a minimum of 10"...could have been a bit deeper. I am still shocked I hit this thing that deep with the sniper coil. It is pictured below, a very old nozzle that had to be down there for many decades because it has fallen completely apart past the screw on end part. I think it is probably a water nozzle, it seems too big to be for gas or anything else I know of but the metal that is just above that end is thin, brittle and falling apart. Only extreme age and a long dirt nap can do that to metal. Conclusion...if I was going relic hunting I would probably be using gold modes instead of others to get the deepest in my mineralized mess. I still have to compare to other modes but what else can I ask for when looking for deeper targets? 3...Coins on edge. I can't say for sure but on two coins I came across, in areas I have scoured in the past by the way, I hit the tightest, smallest, quickest signals I can remember getting so far but they sounded so good I stopped in my tracks and had to dig them. One was a quarter that came up when I flipped up the plug and the second was a Susan B Anthony dollar coin that literally flew out of the dirt when I flipped over that small plug. I am pretty sure both of these were on edge, the dollar coin almost definitely but I can never know for sure. On the dollar coin I did try a few other modes and to me it did not seem to hit that coin quite as well as the gold mode did but I did not try them all and I might have not been over the exact area of the target with the others because I didn't suspect I was swinging over an on-edge coin at the time. All I can say is in gold 2 even with the small coil and over this unusually tiny signal I was able to hit it easily and get 29-30 numbers to show up very solidly from more than one direction. I wasn't going super-super slow either...I was not crawling but moving the coil at my normal speed ant that solid quick tone really stood out every time I passed over that spot. On both these coins it was the tones that alerted me to them first, I didn't even look at the screen and see the good, repeating quarter numbers until I stopped and examined the area after I heard those tones. At this point I still don't know exactly what will work the best here or what will be the best setting combinations to make it the easiest for me to notice targets but I do know that these all in gold settings, especially gold 2, with a bit faster reactivity is definitely something that isn't the easiest but definitely can produce once I get some more practice. More to come.
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