Alrighty, I've been hunting with a the wrong pattern

[DirtFisher]

Well, I thought I would be fine hunting for coins and jewelry by merging the stock E-Trac Coin and Jewelry patterns together but tonight I found out that this is not the best way to go! My son had his coin collection out and I wanted to see what a silver half and silver dollar sounded like and to my surprise my merged pattern discriminated both of these coins out! Wow! I've been hunting for weeks with this pattern thinking I had it all covered.

So, being a newbie still, I need to ask for some advice. Are there any tested patterns out there that will pick up coins and valuable jewelry? There must be.

What surprises me is that the E-Trac manual says that the Coin pattern was tested on coins from all over the world but it discriminates out the US silver half and silver dollar!

Thanks in advance for the help!

[DirtFisher]

I merged Andy's Coin program with the E-Trac Jewelry program. Looks like this will do the trick but I'm all ears if someone wants to share any input. Andy's programs gets pretty ferrous but I suspect it pays off on deep coins. it will be fun trying it out. It's going to be more noisy than I'm used to.

[earthmansurfer]

Ok, newbie as well but I'll let you know what I do. I basically use The Beep Goes On's minimal discrimination pattern. (Rejects FE 1 from CO 1-39 and CO 49-50. Rejects FE 28 ) But where I hunt it is often too noisy, at least when I was newer with the E-Trac. So really, the best recommendation for you, is to just back that off until you can deal with it. In my 1% highly iron mineralized soil, that is around 19. But, I as I get more and more used to the E-Trac, I do run TBGO's minimal disc pattern, it is just noisier. I think it would work fine for jewelery as the gold is going to hit from the middle to the left side and that is all opened up.

Something to consider, when I am hunting for deeper coins (in my soil that is 8-9) they all bounce on the Fe line, down to 24 quite often. I wouldn't say they stay there, but they bounce to there. So, your choice is to hunt with the Fe opened up down there or just to switch to an open quick mask when you start to get a hit. The only downside doing that is sometimes an open quick mask seems to not be as good as the discrimination screen. This might be due to iron getting priority on coin co-located targets - so you can lose a coin theoreticall - I think. I'm still learning so maybe someone that knows more regarding this (if indeed true) can chime in.

Hope that was helpful,
Albert

[DirtFisher]

Thanks Albert. I tried out the above mentioned pattern tonight (Andy's merged with E-Trac Jewelry) in the dark where I found 5 gold targets. I was really amazed right off the bat because I immediately started getting US quarter hits, 12-47! I've been to this place about 10 times now and did get a few quarters with the original pattern I was using but not nearly as many as tonight. This tells me you really must allow a lot of wiggle room for a desired target. And it makes further sense to have an even more open screen like you are using. I do plan to hunt for deep silver coins so I'll open up my screen even more.

No gold tonight.

Reese

[earthmansurfer]

Hey Reese, I think you are right about allowing wiggle room. I made a video on signal chop due to too much discrimination (e.g. stock coin program). If I was hunting a really trashy spot, then I would use a semi tight coin pattern and just cherry pick and avoid the headache. Bill_S on Finds has one, you should load it as a pattern just for those terribly trashy spots.

But yeah, as we learn the machine better we can start to open it up. Really, learning on a T2 for a while makes falsing on the E-Trac no big deal as that was the normal operating mode on the T2! LOL

Sometimes when I am not in the mood for noise I'll close things up a bit and I don't seem to lose those deep bounces as when I see an iffy hit I just go into quick mask.

Good luck, winter is here, no more hunting,
Albert

[DirtFisher]

Hey Albert. Sorry to hear you have to quit hunting for the season. Around here it's water hunting time. No one is swimming, so I can hit the swimming spots with my Excalibur II. I bought a dive kayak this week to make it easier to go from beach to beach and to get into the spots on lakes with no easy access.

Reese