Discrimination Query… Gents (and ladies), Ive been enjoying this hobby for the last 2 years, however certainly don’t consider myself an expert, I believe there is always new things to learn, I realise different people use different techniques and what works on one detector won’t always work on another, so interested in getting comments and suggestions to my query.
Last weekend I was out hunting a friends paddock with my AT Gold, I found a nice 1933 silver and a few bronze coins along with a old Victorian broach, all was going well until I came across a heavily iron infested area. Signal and iron audio confirmed it was iron, it read around 34 at around 6 inches, I dug it out, got another target, same reading and same depth, dug it out, so I was left with 2 heavily rusted 4 inch nails, I pumped up my discrimination to 40 as the nails were reading between 34 and 36. A while later I hit a good strong signal reading 54, iron audio was on but didn’t alert. It was registering at 8 inches, solid clear signal, dug it up, depth was correct at 8 inches but to my disappointment it was another rust 4" nail, then I hit another 56 reading at 6" with iron audio not registering, but to my frustration it was yet another 4" nail. I had 1 bar battery power left, could it be this that was causing it all?
Garrett AT Gold user here, I don’t pay too much attention to the depth and I’m surprised that you are finding it accurate.
Discrimination mode is quite good on these machines and they do not lose much depth on gold over all metal mode, if any, this I have tested.
The numbers displayed are quite unpredictable, dig every target, the orientation of those iron nails has a huge telling on what the numbers on will show on that display, sometimes iron nails sitting bolt upright as opposed to those lying on their sides will push the numbers up to the bronze range, I have also had scratchy readings of solid 15’s, which should be iron, turn out to be gold, too small and too far to give it’s correct number, dig every target, especially if it’s a scratchy reading and giving you the impression that its small or far.
I have not noticed any reduction in power, or any misreading in my unit at low battery levels, I know others claim they lose a lot of depth when the batteries drop below half but personally I do not believe it, not from my experience. My machine has proven to be a solid little VLF Detector, it’s just not as powerful as a Goldbug or even on the same planet as the Minelab I have replaced it with.
Cheers for that Darren, much appreciated. I have just upgraded my coil to a NEL Tornado so will see how that performs, huge depth advantage compared to std coil. I have also been informed the at gold (I’m sure all garretts with be the same) will run full steam ahead even with low battery
Keep intouch, I’m really quite interested to know how the NEL coil performs on this machine!!!
I have a 4.5" super sniper, and the standard 5x8" DD, found the DD coil runs a lot quieter in all metal than the concentric super sniper which is a huge advantage, the little 4.5 coil is very noisy and prone to falsing at high sensitivity in all metal mode.