Tom Dankowski Tips For Low Mineral Ground

[Steve Herschbach]

This thread starts out slow but gets into some good tips later about hunting “carpet of nails” situations. Tom does not mention until late in the thread that the tips are for low mineral soil - not applicable to medium and higher mineralized ground. I just want to highlight that because his tips about using low recovery speeds don’t work well in most ground I hunt. Some of the comments about higher frequency attenuation in bad soil obviously don’t apply in nugget hunting situations either. We both agree about Park 1 though for a lot of hunting. Sort of a mixed bag from my perspective so be cautious always about taking online tips as applying to everyone everywhere. That includes mine!! The real secret is knowing how your machine works not by reading posts but by using it enough to truly understand the detector and adjust it yourself for different situations. But do check it out as food for thought is always good and may help certain people in ground similar to what Tom has.

http://www.dankowskidetectors.com/discussions/read.php?2,166825

[Cabin Fever]

The Recovery Speed info was an eyebrow raiser for me. I pretty much run my detector exactly how he describes with great success except for the 2-3 Recovery Speed.  I hang out from 4-6 but never really gave much of a thought to trying anything lower.  It was interesting to see the EQ is tuned at RS 3 for ultimate performance if your soil will cooperate at that speed..

 I will be doing some testing with that and maybe pushing my sensitivity a bit more to see if I can eke out some additional performance..  Hard to imagine it getting much better then it already is..

Bryan

[Steve Herschbach]

16 hours ago, Cabin Fever said:

 I will be doing some testing with that

Yup, that's the ticket. It is honestly almost a waste of time to get opinions on the internet when you have a detector in hand. Have an Equinox and want to know about Iron Bias? Go find some of your targets in your ground and run through the setting from end to end until you understand it. How it acts on others people's targets and in their ground is nothing more than an aside really. In particular there is a huge gulf in communications that exists between the high mineral folks and the low mineral folks. It's two totally different worlds and what works well in one world almost is sure to fail in the other world. The Florida crowd would be at a total loss in the Sierra Nevada greenstone belt.

[StevenB]

This discussion of using lower recovery speed, 2-3 on the 800, is a bit mind-blowing, as I've never ventured below 5.  I seem to recall that in the early days of Equinox availability, it was pretty much gospel (on this forum and elsewhere) that if you weren't using 5 or above you were pretty much wasting the capabilities of the machine.  Anyway, on my next trip out I'll be lowering it to 3 and slowing down and see what happens!

[Steve Herschbach]

Using recovery speed has always been portrayed as a function of ground mineralization and target density. THERE ARE NO RULES, NO MAGIC SETTINGS. YOU HAVE TO EXPERIMENT TO FIND WHAT WORKS BEST FOR YOU AND YOUR SITUATION.

The recovery speed would not go lower than 5 if there was no reason to ever go lower than 5. I did personally heavily fight the knee jerk concept of lower recovery speed automatically means more depth, and I just as much fight the idea that high recovery speeds are always the answer.

The main reason faster recovery speeds were recommended a lot early on is that people were coming from older, slower Minelab models, and the best advantage Equinox has versus those older models is the faster recovery speed settings. 

It always amazes me honestly when I hear people don’t experiment with their detectors and learn from direct experience what works best for a given location. If there is any rule in detector tuning, that’s the rule. Any faith in online detecting gurus is very much misplaced. There is nothing at all that makes me or Tom D or anyone else somehow magically superior people who have access to information other people can’t access. Everything you need to know is available via the detector in your hands and tests... not books or online sources.

Anybody doing things just because I have said so without checking and verifying... I just don’t know what to say about that except don’t do that. Tips and clues posted online are nice but that’s all they are, tips and clues.... not gospel. Tips and clues are a starting point, not the place where you should stop.

I would never buy a stick shift car and get on the internet and ask what exact gear and throttle setting I should use. I get in the car and drive. When on open road it’s high gear, moderate throttle. Hit a steep hill, may be low gear and more throttle. The general goal is to keep the throttle near a moderate level and adjust with gearing. Very much like a geared bicycle. But in an extreme situation pulling a load on a hill I may need the lowest gear and throttle to the floor. You have to know how gears and throttle interplay to drive a stick shift car correctly. Drive a stick shift enough and it’s all done without thinking.

Canned settings are like putting a kid in the car and telling them to always use 2nd gear and just slip the clutch to get going, all throttle after that.

Metal detecting is a similar mixed gearing/throttle approach and you have to know that when the ground and target mix changes you need to change gears on the fly to match. People who insist on using canned settings will simply never reach that level of expertise.

Now to flip it a bit. If you always hunt the same ground conditions, there is no reason a single combination of settings won’t work well for a person. I am not trying to cast stones or make anyone feel bad. But if you get into all sorts of different ground and targets, this knowing your detector and how it really works is what sets the pros apart from the rest.

Just so people know I think I am a bit lazy when it comes to settings and have been guilty of not changing them as much as I really should. It’s just that my years of detecting taught me that lots of hours and getting the coil over the target is paramount. Extra hours makes up a lot for minor tuning deficiencies. A lot of my detecting success is based more on patience and lots of hours, not perfect settings. I only obsess over settings when hunting small areas that have been hunted a hundred times before. Usually I just get in the ballpark and go, and adjust from there. For cross county detecting I want more behaved settings than I would apply when working at a snails pace and so I get more forgiving with the settings.

So maybe I have been too complacent running higher recovery speeds myself. Would not doubt it a bit!  Equinox is a fascinating machine in that there is always more to learn, and I sure as heck don’t have it all figured out. Many of you people are better than I at various aspects of Equinox now and that’s a fact.

[Cabin Fever]

I’m definitely guilty of not doing as much testing as I should have with both iron bias which I run at 0 all the time and Recovery Speed which I didn’t give the extreme ends of the range 1-3 and 7,8 any chance at all.

Hopefully I don’t make myself look too stupid here, but I think what surprised me the most about Tom D’s Recover Speed explanation that hit me between the eyes was that the settings don’t actually change the actual recovery speed of the detector at all.. just the audio which either gets clipped or elongated..  I knew the audio is different at each setting but maybe I was thinking the detector was actually working differently.

Now I know it’s more about understanding the audio at these different settings and probably the swing speeds that go with them.  

Sometimes you just think you know something until it gets explained to you differently and then it clicks.. Now I can revisit this Mode and look at it differently.. I would have never thought to try ultra low speed in a heavy target situation. 

Bryan

[Lacky]

I really wanted to understand that thread but really most of it went right over my head. Between lots of references to other detectors I don't know and the jumbled writing style I just couldn't follow. 

[ColonelDan]

Great thread Steve....thank you

[Jackpine]

I tried Tom's settings yesterday and compared to Park 2 with the same settings Park 1 was much smoother and more intelligible.  So I have to agree with Tom on that one.  Picked up a few coins and a silver ring in a well hunted spot that were definite good signals, so there's that also.  Based on yesterdays results the Park 2 Recovery 4 settings I had settled on for most of my hunting might well be history.  Will know more after today.

[Mark Gillespie]

Thank you for the reminder.  I remember years ago when the Fisher F75 first came out.  It was, a have to have detector and to start with I found a lot of very good targets in areas where I had already hunted extensively. 

What I'm about to say, don't take the wrong way but I started reading all of Tom's posts on how to get the max out of the F75.  How you needed to run with sensitivity maxed and discrimination at 0 and the next thing I knew I was trapped into thinking (my fault) I was missing out on finds because I wasn't using these settings.  I became extremely dissatisfied and finally sold the detector off.  Bought another one to try and the same issues the machine was just to noisy, sent it in for a check up and they replaced the coil but upon return still to much noise trying to run according to Tom's settings.  Many times the machine wouldn't quite down even with sensitivity settings of 50-60.  Went through several more F75's before realizing his setting were good for where he hunted but in no way acceptable for my medium to high mineralized, red clay of Virginia.  And then I had to take into consideration EMI, yet another story all together. 

It's nice to read about other hunters successes with their machine, using their settings but all thing are not equal from one location to another. 

I know and realize Tom has much more experience than I but there's more to successful hunting than just a particular setting/settings.

Took a long time to realize that.