A good ground balace makes a difference

I have read and heard the importance of a good ground balance but didn't realize that it actually does make that much of a difference until today. I went to a woodchip playground this morning with my DeepTech Gold, I have detected this playground many times over the years. I made an effort to set my ground balance as good as I could and checked it often. I got the usual coins & jewelry type things that a person usually finds at such a place but I noticed this time that my targets hit better, were deeper, and it was almost like you could feel the targets swinging over them. So I am now a firm believer that a good ground balance makes more of a difference than I thought.

Various tracking and auto-balance schemes have been implemented for decades. Some are pretty good. The only one you can be absolutely sure is correct at any given time is the old - bob the coil and listen to the ground reaction. Once you know how to do that - you’re golden.

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold

I totally agree that for best results is by doing a manual GB,only trouble is and i can only speak from a UK perspective,that you only GB on that one specific piece of ground,you could walk a few yards and in theory require it to be done again,but who actually does it every few yards ?? of course most folks dont,but in theory it should be especially on a site with a great amount of human activity,if you are running a detector without a screen you dont have the luxury of some detectors that show what the ground conditions are like,so in essence you could be seen as running blind after the initial manual GB.

This is when sometimes it can be wise too use a tracking GB or even a happy medium fixed GB on some sites,for the most part when using my Deus i use tracking almost all the time,is it the best method well i would say 'no' but saying that no GB system is perfect,as the ground can and does throw up a vast amount of various scenarios.What works for me of course may not work for others,the ground condition as we are all aware change across the planet in some cases by a massive margin,we are lucky here in the UK that our ground is pretty mild and not as wild as say in Aussie land or some other locations.

J&D - you are right, if you are using a non threshold based detector in discriminate. If even then however if you start picking up all sorts of ground noise, you are probably too positive - if everything seems to be way quieter than it ought to be, you’r probably too negative.

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold

There are two schools of thought on ground balance/tracking. They are both erroneous.

The first is that auto tracking is a good thing and ought to be -at least- the default setting. Problems with this include the difficulties J&D correctly cited as well as a tendency to “track into” a good target and lose the signal with successive sweeps.

The second school is that the first school is wrong. These folks, knowing on the one hand the faults of most auto tracking systems, are also aware of the difficulties many mere mortals have with obtaining and maintaining a good ground balance. The result has been a number of “ground grab” systems. There, the detector tracks the ground changes, but makes no adjustment until the user commands it to “grab” whereupon the current reading is the new setting - which is retained until the user does another “grab” and replaces the old setting with the current result of the tracking system.

They are both wrong because they are being merged. Increasingly detectors offer a combination of track, grab, and old school manual (or sumwhat automated) setting. The latter feature also often features the ability to manuall offset from the “”tracked” or “grabbed” setting.

Gosh, time for another Martini.

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold

Interesting discussion.... especially since beach hunting can leave you scratching your head about what to use and WHERE to do it. You have different moisture/salt levels..... yet you dont want to GB out small gold. So is an active GB ..... better than a locked one?

Dew

Ground balancing is half the battle. I think it is one of the main reasons why the Nox is doing so well. A great example of this happened to me yesterday.

I hit an area i hit many times with other machines. This area has the toughest ground in the state simply because there is a 5 inch layer of ash covering a football field size area covered with two inches of top soil. I got two barely readable halfway decent hits. Both turned out to be wheat pennies with ash fused to them.

If you ever stuck your pinpointer into ash, you know it will sound off everywhere because it is basically highly condensed mineralized gravel.

In order to see past this ash layer, you need to neutralize it with ground balancing(I just used auto as time was short).

If you are talking about burned coal waste with a high content of iron minerals, ground balancing will allow you to eliminate the ground signal but it will likely not allow you to “see past” it. Both singlefreaker and multifreaker VLF IB detectors suffer target return loss as iron mineralization increases. It’s not just depth loss for items in or under the ash layer - even items on top of it have the strength of their target return reduced. This is the main reason why PI detectors which aren’t affected this way are used for nugget hunting in highly mineralized ground.

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold

My experience is that while the ground cancel feature itself is a science, the ACT of ground cancelling is an Art unto itself.

lytle78 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> If you are talking about burned coal waste with a
> high content of iron minerals, ground balancing wi
> ll allow you to eliminate the ground signal but it
> will likely not allow you to “see past” it. Both s
> inglefreaker and multifreaker VLF IB detectors suf
> fer target return loss as iron mineralization incr
> eases. It’s not just depth loss for items in or un
> der the ash layer - even items on top of it have t
> he strength of their target return reduced. This i
> s the main reason why PI detectors which aren’t af
> fected this way are used for nugget hunting in hig
> hly mineralized ground.

Have to disagree. I was finding items beneath the ash layer(thus saw through it). In other words, some of the targets were in the soft dirt beneath the ashes some large, other penny sized(wheat pennies). At least that's what I experienced and perceived yesterday. Since I am not an engineer, I can only assume what the mechanism of action was that allowed me to detect those targets was indeed the ground balancing, perhaps combined with multifreq.

Without a detector that will give you an indication of the type of mineralization such as a Fisher F 75 there’s no way to tell how much iron mineralization is in that ash - if it’s not much, then seeing through it should be no problem. If is a lot, you might detect objects beneath it – depending how strong the ferric mineralization is - but you will still have lost depth compared to the same target in ground which was not iron mineralized.

My Knox 600 lost significant depth at a beach with black sand which was ferrous mineralization. It still worked. I still found targets but I lost a lot of depth

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/26/2018 01:17PM by lytle78.

I recently took a vacation and took the Kruzer to the beach. I watched the GB window and saw how it could change, sometimes pretty drastically!

In the non-wet sand, 3-tone and ground tracking enabled had me digging 12"-14" deep quarters with solid tones. Fun times!