Recovery Deep in E-Trac Seeking Your Input

[Bell-Two]

This is an article from Minelab.com by Phil Beck on using recovery deep.

Treasure Talk
'Recovery Deep' in depth
Phil Beck

The Recovery Deep setting on the E-TRAC, Explorer and Explorer SE detectors is designed to enhance the detection and identification of deep targets. This article will explain the way in which deep recovery mode enhances the operation of the detector and points out those situations when you may not choose to use this setting.

When Recovery Deep is turned on, it only has an effect on weak signals, stronger signals remain completely unaffected. When Recovery Deep is turned on and a weak signal is detected, the identification signals undergo stronger filtering to smooth out the data. This leads to more stable and consistent Ferrous and Conductivity values. Given this, it may seem that as Recovery Deep could be turned on all of the time. Unfortunately, as in all things, there can be too much of a good thing. There are two situations when the Recovery Deep setting is undesirable.

In the case of weak, shallow targets, the stronger filtering of the Recovery Deep setting will cause the strength of these short, sharp signals to be decreased. The grid below shows the effect of Recovery Deep and these different classes of target.

(see chart below)

Also as a result of the stronger filter, signals from weak targets become smoothed. In environments with multiple deep targets relatively close together this smoothing may make adjacent targets start to appear to be merged. In this case the ID that the detector displays may become mixed between the two targets.

In summary, the Recovery Deep setting should be used in situations where you are expecting to find sparse, large, deep targets (sounds like relic hunting) and in these situations you will experience more stable and consistent IDs.

Ok you experts out there does this mean that a shallow target that is masked by some trash that the good signal would be weaker than if the recovery deep is off? Would it be better if hunting in an area where good targets are generally not more than 6 inches or so to turn recovery deep off?

[angellionel]

In my experience the affected targets in the situation you cite would be small, such as half dimes, Canadian five cent pieces, three-cent pieces, etc. Generally, when working very trashy sites I reduce the sensitivity and set Recovery Deep to Off. When working such sites the challenge is not depth, it is target separation. Combining the above with a very slow sweep has yielded me great results.

[Bell-Two]

In my experience the affected targets in the situation you cite would be small, such as half dimes, Canadian five cent pieces, three-cent pieces, etc. Generally, when working very trashy sites I reduce the sensitivity and set Recovery Deep to Off. When working such sites the challenge is not depth, it is target separation. Combining the above with a very slow sweep has yielded me great results.


In your scenario Angel would you also turn Fast off or On?

[angellionel]

In your scenario Angel would you also turn Fast off or On?


Definitely Off. The setting is intended to allow the machine to recover quickly from target to target, but in my case I found the resulting tone distortion much too obtrusive when working the highly trashy sites I frequented. To compensate, I made sure to slow down my sweep to a crawl, and this worked well, allowing me to pick up the nuanced silver tones from among the aluminum screw caps and other similar trash littering the area I worked.

Experiment with it On and Off at your sites though. Perhaps you can tolerate the tone distortion while still picking up the good targets from among the trash.