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F75 LTD2 Field Report
Posted by Cal_cobra
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F75 LTD2 Field Report January 09, 2015 06:17PM |
Now that I've got about 50 hours of use on my DST upgraded Camo F75 LTD, so I wanted to share some of my thoughts on it.
First it's important to keep in mind that every environment is different, what may work well in the inert soils of Florida, may not work well in the highly mineralized soils of California.
I've had my F75 LTD since 2009 and have put thousands of hours on it, it's been, for the most part, a pretty good machine, although not without it's faults. I've always felt that it was not particularly good with dime sized and smaller silver once it gets past 6" of depth (and that's in BP mode with sensitivity as high as possible, and single digit discrimination). It's always been amazing on deep low conductors, such as gold and lead, even tiny droplets of lead, which is not something that I'm particularly interested in finding, but I know some of the civil war site hunters are after these types of low conductors.
I sent my F75 to FT in mid November and they were able to get it back to me with the DST upgrades, and a new coil by the first week of December.
My first trip out with it was at an 1870's abandoned rail road depot station. The station is no longer present, but their are modern tracks running next to it that are still in use, and there's various types of utilities burried along the tracks. This spot turned out to be unhuntable for me, with my F75 spewing TID numbers out like a stock ticker during a major rally. It really didn't matter what setting I used on the F75, it was simply an unhuntable site, which, much to my dismay was exactly what I thought the DST upgrade was supposed to address. My buddy was hunting with his Explorer2 and had no issues at this site. I found that going forward, it actually ran fine at other sites, so there was something at this RR depot that was like kryptonite for the F75.
I rehunted an old site that I'd hit before with high voltage power lines above it, and previously my F75 was pretty chattery, but it was still usable. With the DST upgrade, it ran very quite here.
I hunted an old 1840's hilltop adobe site that a friend and I did a bunch of research to locate, and we had previously found a 1776 Spanish silver reale, 1825 bust half, barber dime, and a 1849 $5 gold coin. On a subsequent trip the site was pounded with an Explorer2, Etrac, and Blisstool and no coins or relics were found. This trip, I gridded the site and found a blackpowder muzzle loader, couple of musket balls, and my first ever bust half, a 1836 bust half dollar at a good 8" + deep! My hunting partner also found a mid 1800's Mexican reale.
At another early California site, I found a trigger guard off of an old Spanish musket, lamp parts, musket balls, and a shoe buckle that was gold gilted with designs like the ones they find back east at those old colonial cellar holes. My buddy called me over when he got into a three ringer bullet drop spot, he almost had them all cleaned it out, but I managed snagged one
I hunted a few times using the FA mode, and didn't really find it to my liking. Has kind of a delayed/artificial sound to it. BP mode works great. I haven't tried all metal mode as I've never really hunted with it. The various 2 tone modes work great. This was all using the 9.0 program, the 9.1 program has too much audio delay for me.
My hunting was with both the stock 11" DD coil as well as the NEL Sharpshooter coil. Both performed excellently, although I found something interesting with the NEL coil. It had a propensity to produce good sounding high tones on large iron relics, whereas the factory 11" DD did not.
For me, the bottom line is that I do see some appreciable differences with the DST mode, and while it may not 100% correct some of the F75 shortcomings/challenges, I appreciate the fact that Fisher finally listended to the field and made an attempt to make it a better machine. I hope going forward we'll continue to see improvements, but hopefully they don't take five years to get them to us the next time
Happy hunting,
Brian
First it's important to keep in mind that every environment is different, what may work well in the inert soils of Florida, may not work well in the highly mineralized soils of California.
I've had my F75 LTD since 2009 and have put thousands of hours on it, it's been, for the most part, a pretty good machine, although not without it's faults. I've always felt that it was not particularly good with dime sized and smaller silver once it gets past 6" of depth (and that's in BP mode with sensitivity as high as possible, and single digit discrimination). It's always been amazing on deep low conductors, such as gold and lead, even tiny droplets of lead, which is not something that I'm particularly interested in finding, but I know some of the civil war site hunters are after these types of low conductors.
I sent my F75 to FT in mid November and they were able to get it back to me with the DST upgrades, and a new coil by the first week of December.
My first trip out with it was at an 1870's abandoned rail road depot station. The station is no longer present, but their are modern tracks running next to it that are still in use, and there's various types of utilities burried along the tracks. This spot turned out to be unhuntable for me, with my F75 spewing TID numbers out like a stock ticker during a major rally. It really didn't matter what setting I used on the F75, it was simply an unhuntable site, which, much to my dismay was exactly what I thought the DST upgrade was supposed to address. My buddy was hunting with his Explorer2 and had no issues at this site. I found that going forward, it actually ran fine at other sites, so there was something at this RR depot that was like kryptonite for the F75.
I rehunted an old site that I'd hit before with high voltage power lines above it, and previously my F75 was pretty chattery, but it was still usable. With the DST upgrade, it ran very quite here.
I hunted an old 1840's hilltop adobe site that a friend and I did a bunch of research to locate, and we had previously found a 1776 Spanish silver reale, 1825 bust half, barber dime, and a 1849 $5 gold coin. On a subsequent trip the site was pounded with an Explorer2, Etrac, and Blisstool and no coins or relics were found. This trip, I gridded the site and found a blackpowder muzzle loader, couple of musket balls, and my first ever bust half, a 1836 bust half dollar at a good 8" + deep! My hunting partner also found a mid 1800's Mexican reale.
At another early California site, I found a trigger guard off of an old Spanish musket, lamp parts, musket balls, and a shoe buckle that was gold gilted with designs like the ones they find back east at those old colonial cellar holes. My buddy called me over when he got into a three ringer bullet drop spot, he almost had them all cleaned it out, but I managed snagged one
I hunted a few times using the FA mode, and didn't really find it to my liking. Has kind of a delayed/artificial sound to it. BP mode works great. I haven't tried all metal mode as I've never really hunted with it. The various 2 tone modes work great. This was all using the 9.0 program, the 9.1 program has too much audio delay for me.
My hunting was with both the stock 11" DD coil as well as the NEL Sharpshooter coil. Both performed excellently, although I found something interesting with the NEL coil. It had a propensity to produce good sounding high tones on large iron relics, whereas the factory 11" DD did not.
For me, the bottom line is that I do see some appreciable differences with the DST mode, and while it may not 100% correct some of the F75 shortcomings/challenges, I appreciate the fact that Fisher finally listended to the field and made an attempt to make it a better machine. I hope going forward we'll continue to see improvements, but hopefully they don't take five years to get them to us the next time
Happy hunting,
Brian