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Wow, Steve; you sure do a bunch of work and thinking for this forum and all the others you contribute to.

Nice job explaining these various facets of detecting.

I find the higher the sensitivity on my 3030 the jumper it gets;plus many more spurious signals. Also every change in the settings affects the readouts more or less...and finally, my ears tell more than anything else whether I will dig or not. All exactly as you wrote.

thanks

fred

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Great post Steve.

I am new to this forum, but not to detecting. I am primarily a jewelry hunter. 

I Live by the VDI numbers. They are invaluable when you hunt with 0 discrimination. The information contained in those numbers are staggering. Only many, many hours in the field will give you their full benefit.
But they are still, as any type of discriminator, only a guide. There are so many variables on any given day, that nothing is written in stone. 
I use them more to tell me what groups of metals may be tripping the bell at that moment and what I might expect to find when I dig out the target.  

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Hello plidn1,

Welcome to the forum. Jewelry is my main gig when not nugget detecting as I like gold any way I can find it. There are lots of VDI strategies a person can employ when jewelry detecting. My favorite book on the subject is "DFX Gold Methods" by Clive Clynick. It features the DFX but the methods apply to any target id detector. Just so happens my DFX with Bigfoot coil is my favorite turf jewelry detector but the CTX is catching up.

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I am also new to your site. I have a Gold Bug DP and am interested in any information because it came with a small booklet of info. I will be hunting down that book you had mentioned by Mr.Brockett. I just joined a gold prospector club last month because of my detecting intrest. I do thank you for all your effort devoted to this site.

Goldguru

Hi Goldguru,

Welcome to the site. Thank you. The truth is the site keeps me from climbing the walls when I am unable to metal detect. If I can't go metal detecting the next best thing is yakking with like minded people about metal detecting!

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Steve,

 

Great read!   I intend to try some of your tips.  Especially lowering the sensitivity.

My F75 is a case in point.  Now I am getting somewhat of a handle on this machine, largely because of the tips you shared on using it in the goldfield with success.

 

Thanks for  your very interesting post, and all you do to make our detecting time more enjoyable as well as (hopefully) productive.

 

Gary/Largo

Hi Gary,

If there was ever a detector put out that needs a light touch on the sensitivity it is the F75.

I really do not like detectors that are kept "safe" by the manufacturers limiting the sensitivity control. They are the ones you can just run anywhere anytime at max sensitivity. That is like owning a car that you can drive anywhere any time with the pedal floored. Nothing extra, no extra speed, just slow and safe all the time.

The reason manufacturers do that is guess what? You give people a sensitivity control that runs to max and they max it out all the time when they should not. Which leads to complaints of unstable performance and noisy detectors.

The F75 is a machine with all the stops pulled off, so you can run it flat out if conditions allow. But the only time I have ever used mine where that was possible was running all metal mode in rural locations free of electrical interference. All metal mode generally runs smoother and is friendlier to high sensitivity levels.

But get the F75 into town and instead of running at full out 99 sensitivity I am running in disc mode and more like 60-70 on the sensitivity. I seem to have a lot of electrical interference in my local area and the ground is pretty hot in Reno, so the F75 can get pretty chatty if I run the sensitivity too high. And the bottom line is if you experiment with it you only lose little or nothing for depth coming off max sensitivity. Getting rid of all the noise makes it easier to discern real targets, though they may be a bit fainter in response than at higher sensitivity levels.

Another good tip is that smaller coils tend to be quieter and tolerate higher sensitivity levels than large coils.

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Hi Steve,
 
A couple of years back, I had borrowed an F75 from a friend, to help me decide if it was a machine that I might be comfortable with, the result was, I found two silver rings as well as some other trinkets. I do have a good range of coils for my F75, a small round, a 9 inch elliptical, as well as a 11 inch dd, which is the stock coil.  Find out how pleasantly easy the F75 was to negotiate, easier than my White's XLT, which I liked very much, I opted to purchase a like new F75 Special Edition.  The machine is so well balanced and screen easy to negotiate in either all metal, or discriminate... Plus it runs for HOURS /up to around 40, or so, on four AA batteries...  Don't you wish the SDC 2300 could do that??
 
I have been trying that new F75 SE a little bit, at a city park near me.There are unforgiving power lines running along the street, so that adjacent lawn near to those power lines very likely don't get hit by higher end detectors, so that area might be a better target for a machine without all the bells and whistles, such as my Troy Shadow with a small coil.  It has a neat and unusual feature, a coin check button, which can tell you with good certainty, if a signal in the coin range is or is not a coin.  So, I will be taking both machines to the park.

 

Sorry for the convoluted subject matter...

 

Gary/Largo

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