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Try these settings on your X-Terra 50/70
For gold prospecting
Gold Prospecting—Not
much metal rubbish
Cleaning up patches. Crumbing, picking up the crumbs.
These are areas that
have been previously detected successfully with the deeper seeking SD/GP
metal detectors. We are looking for the smaller nuggets missed.
Prospecting mode
Tracking on
Iron Mask on
Sensitivity : as high as ground conditions allow
Tones: 22
Coils: 5x10 18.7kHz elliptical coil
Checking quartz specimens
for the presence of
gold (high grading)
This involves manually passing quartz pieces across the coil for a
positive metal response.
Prospecting mode
Iron Mask off
All metals mode
Sensitivity: 30
Coils: 10” H, 5x10 DD 18.7kHz
Detecting old campsites
areas full of iron
debris
Disc mode
Pattern1 (AM if the area is only mildly rubbishy)
Tracking on
Tones 4
Coils: 5x10 18.7kHz elliptical coil or standard M coil
While the X-Terra
detectors are very advanced discriminating detectors, they are not
foolproof. You the user must decipher the audio and visual information
presented by the speaker and the visual display.
Beginners should
listen to clean single tone target sounds ignoring the low ferrous tone
hits. Larger ferrous objects should be removed to uncover possible good
masked objects hiding amongst the ferrous rubbish. If you hear two toned
objects it should be investigated. Just in case there is a piece of gold
next to a rusted piece of tin.
Remember that heavily
infested areas where there are a multitude of targets of various
conductivities will present a challenge to the detector and your ears.
Nice round and ring
shaped ferrous objects can give a false signal (high tone)
Thin sheet like iron
objects like match boxes and crown seals can also give off a high tone.
It is not that the detector is lying it is a case of oxide layers on the
metal surface that are very conductive. The original object was perhaps
tin plated. In the rusting process all we can see is the rust and not
the original plating agent below the surface that is giving off the high
tone.
For advanced users try
using 99 tones. This will result in more precise target information
giving us more sounds to tell us that we are dealing with a difficult
shape or with 2 conductive targets together.
Response on gold nuggets
Don’t expect gold to
be highly conductive, it is not. Natural gold nuggets can vary greatly
in composition and shape. For this reason it can give a response from
low-mid tone to a high tone with corresponding changing numbers.
In highly infested
areas try using the smaller 5x10 elliptical coil for improved target
separation. I urge you to experiment. Never be afraid of reducing the
sensitivity and lifting your coil to gain more stable operation and less
jumping numbers. It is up to you to learn your detectors language. The
day will come when they will yell out “gold, gold” or “nail, nail” . In
the meantime, if everything fails, as my grandfather used to say:
“If in doubt, dig it out”
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