Sunday, November 14, 2004

Chapter 3: When and How to Use AUDIO 1

Now that you have learned to adjust your sensitivity properly and set up your explorer for maximum depth you probably want what every other detectorist wants, MORE DEPTH.

If you have followed the preceding guides, youre already hearing more deep signals than before. Targets that are deep enough to hit the bottom of the depth gauge. Often times, these faint and deep signals can become intermittent making a digital ID and a digging decision difficult. NORMAL response expresses a signal with a short beep. The deeper a target the shorted and fainter the beep. In my mind, these deep signals come really high and sometime are just barely a "tinkle". Really deep target are also sometimes beyond the reach of the explorer’s pinpoint mode.

To ID and pinpoint better, switch the RESPONSE from NORMAL to AUDIO 1. To the uninitiated, AUDIO 1 can be confusing with co-located targets but the signal does change from one target to another. They are just "connected". There will be no gap in between. nor will there be a recovery to threshold. Again, THERE WILL BE NO RECOVERY TO THE THRESHOLD FOR CO-LOCATED TARGETS. With intermittent deepies, AUDIO 1 amplifies and extends the tone enough to confirm to the user the existence of the target and makes for better locking target ID. You'll also notice that an iron target pretending to be silver will not produce a good tone in AUDIO 1.

You can hunt with AUDIO 1 full time if you can hack it. For me, I find it easier to keep switching between NORMAL and AUDIO 1 as the ground, and my brain, allows and as I move from one corner of the site to another. In an imperfect world, a tweaker makes for a better hunter.

HOT TIP: when you are on one spot and struggling to develop a target signal from a deepie, you can ramp up the sensitivity a few clicks, or even MAX it, to lock in that deepie. As you wiggle the coil over the target, the detector's processor has to work (ground balancing etc..) quite a bit less as you are actually taking the same soil matrix sample over and over again. The ability to hunt deeper with this trick is limited as interference and target averaging take their toll. Be sure to set your sensitivity back to your previous setting as you move on.