Ground balance.... What the?

[Goldtarget]

Here's one for the shooters. Wound my gb back from 75 in fast grab to 35 and went over my backyard. Pinged $1 coin at 9 inches. 8) ... solid tone and I've hunted this ground a few dozen times. Soil was wet from half inch of rain, gravels on top for 5 inch and loamy Brown soil below. Also got a small brass sink plug. Did I get lucky or can anyone explain this. I've never fiddled before with gb except to balance as usual and puts 1, 2 or 3 extra. The reason i was playing with it isjust this morning watched a video of a relic Hunter winding gb back to get better depth. Surprised me. I'll be out testing this for a couple of hours to see what happens. .......

 

[Goldtarget]

Well the results are in. .. Picked up $11 and 1951 florin. Had a double $2 coin hole and the florin was reached at 9 inches, so deep and not a solid ID and in due course I nicked it on retrieval didn't suspect it so deep. ... What a shame didn't have one of these two (1951/1952) with the different print. Thems the breaks might have to get a better deep digger.

 

[Guest]

Goldtarget I was once taught that the ground balance is like a a ground mineralisation discriminator.

The results your getting now though will vary depending on the ground and make sure you do your tests because you
can mask targets out especially in more mineralised soil if your running in the positive.

What you have discovered does work but each machine is different.

Sometimes a slight change is all that's needed.

There are guys who use an XP Deus running it in manual for the very same reason which can become a balancing act.

The other thing is if in auto ground tracking and your looking for very small gold you simply don't know if your ground tracking is tracking
out the target and for this reason it is not an issue with a manual ground balance detector like a gold bug 2.

There is a big gap in your tracking which the machine has a reading of 75 and you have changed it to 35. Are you using a DD?

One great area to use this little trick is in tot lots and watch the deep $2 coins pop out

In my opinion there are 2 important factors in a detector and its not bells and whistles.

You have discovered one of them. The other is unmasking good targets among iron and not many machines can do this.
Once you have both then new ground is automatically opened up because good targets close to iron that was masked
out and discriminated out by previous machines are detectable by faster and more capable machines.

 

[Guest]

Which Machine were you using?

 

[Guest]

I forgot to mention a couple of important things.

Some manufacturers have made provisions for it in some metal detectors that are being sold. This
was one of the reasons I purchased the v3i.

With the whites v3i and XP Deus you can adjust the offset of the ground balance by adding a
digit (minus or positive). So basically if the detector is ground balancing at 90 and your offset is -2
it will auto adjust this to 88

Looking for deep silver coins and running the 4khz setting on the Deus or the 2.5khz on the v3i along
with an offset like this will help find those deep silver coins.

Not sure about other manufacturers and someone else might be able to chime in here.

Goldtarget take a look at the article below.

Check out the section under manual mode or Ground balancing 8th paragraph down.

http://www.metaldetectingworld.com/xp_deus_manual_ground_balance.shtml

Each machine is different. Do your own research and your tests before performing an offset
in your ground balancing.

I hope this helps.

 

[Goldtarget]

To answer your questions, and put you in the frame wolf I was using the Fisher f75, 10x5 coil. Most of the ground I run over will be highly mineralised usually gb 65 to 85. Sub 60 this machine is an animal. So used manual gb and probably took it beyond the point of balance. Fast grab would be mid 70s. Depending on emi I usually run it in pretty high sensitivity on 0 to 99 scale in town mid 70s is great but wind it out despite the chatter when hunting out. The rail station and backyard I experimented in today I've covered both many times. These were targets previously hidden to me. By his I mean non existent or so low id and unrepeatable they are ignored. That florin was an eye opener. I guess I could put these finds down to better ground conditions and a few small adjustments but what ever occurred today between the signal and is interpretation but the end result was ids high enough to be repeatable to pinpoint and dig. What I forgot to do was play with the gb to see where they disappeared or couldn't be a useful signal. I'll be experimenting from here on out.

 

[Goldpick]

Sounds like something interesting to experiment with, I currently just do ground grab, and off I go, as I am still in the process of learning on the G2. I do a quick rebalance every now and again if the ground starts to cause a bit of falsing, considering I am running pretty high sensitivity.

Makes you wonder about some of those dubious non-repeatable targets, or the ones that fall back into part low tones due to the depth.

I might have to pick a small known area, and try running the G2 GB a bit on the hot side, considering it is a common thing to do when nugget hunting t squeeze out a bit more depth.

The problem with auto ground tracking is not the tracking itself, but knowing when to take it out of tracking mode, or lock the ground balance once a good target is encountered to allow pinpointing. You get some guys who repeatadly pass the coil over the target in tracking mode, then wonder where the heck it has disappeared to, putting it down to a false signal. Fortunately a lot of the better detectors now lock or turn off the tracking as soon as you use pinpointing mode.

 

[Goldtarget]

Mate I've never dug so many holes at my old man's as I did today testing this. He has the unique offering of heavy mineralization down to very little due to various incarnations over decades of the place being in the family. The trouble with most testing vs hunting is not disturbed earth Imo, it's just very hard to remove the bias when you"know" a target is in the ground and at what depth which you have no control over when hunting "finds". I think this will take a while to figure out but there's definitely a distinct set of correlations between gb, depth and sensitivity levels. I'm still getting my head around this but I can adjust the gb to get significantly deeper with a much clearer id than just by using grab and adjustments by only a few points with the added bonus of less sensitivity. Seems counter intuitive but the testing seems to point in that direction which is amazing to me.

Typically the id scale will round down in a lower value descent. The machine however will pick up ferrous targets deeper and up until today it had me believing these deep targets with an Id were iron. Shallower targets are easy to ignore but my thinking now is to mark these deep targets as I did before using threshold drop out and adjust the machine to try and get a clearer picture. The detector sharpened it's response to both ferrous and non ferrous known values
I'm yet to place the smaller coil on and repeat but I've just gotten alot more excited about what may be possible going forward. The proof will be in the digging I guess.

 

[Guest]

You could make a test bed on site somewhere on a side
of a small hill without disturbing the ground.

 

[Paulmarr]

Perhaps the rain/wet ground increased the conductivity to allow the detector to punch further in? I notice my detector in wet sand seems to penetrate further than in dry sand...