One of the more important things everyone needs to do to be a successful treasure hunter…
is to know the detector your using, know how to set it, know how to tweak it and understand what it’s telling you.
Before I start explaining what I mean let me say that anyone, using any detector, in any hunting condition can find good stuff. It’s just a matter of how long will you hunt and how many bad hunts will you need to endure before the good targets show up.
Knowing how to setup your detector is important, if you have a manual ground balance and can’t balance it well your not going to find as much or hunt as deep as you could. Threshold, discrimination, gain, even the volume plays a roll in how effective the machine will be for any given condition. Get to know what each knob or button does to the way your detector reacts, and just when you feel you have it mastered play with the settings a bit more, you may be surprised what else you learn about your detector and how it reacts to a different setting.
Understanding what your detector is telling you, by the way no matter what you think or what someone tells you your detector doesn’t lie to you, even when it’s confused about what’s under the coil there will still be subtle differences in the way it reacts to different targets. There will be a time when you can tell a pull tab from a gold ring , most of the time, just by the subtle difference.
Each detector type, brand, model, individual detector and each person swinging the detector is different. What works for one may or may not work for another.
OK so now you may ask “how do I get to know all this stuff about my detector? Do I read the instructions? Do I read a book about it? Do I watch a video? Talk with someone that metal detects? Search the net?” The answer is Yes to all of them but the most important, no the only way your ever going to know your detector is to get out and use it, than use it some more. Experience has no shortcuts, that I know of anyway.
The more you know your detector the more stuff you find. It wont take too long before your hearing the whisper of a target below the coil that you didn’t hear before.