SDC - Lead free setting.

[Teemore]

"Last Monday I stopped at an old spot on the way home and found a nice quartz speccie with 0.7g of the good stuff. It was dark so I had to walk away knowing there was more there.
This Monday I went back in the freezing rain and got approximately 1.5g from 5 bits. Again it got dark so I went back today to the patch. Beautiful sunshine and no EMI. I pulled another 5 bits from the patch. Then I changed settings to chase the smaller stuff and snagged another 3 and plenty of lead that my earlier settings missed. I'm guessing at least another gram for the day. I guess I'll be going back Saturday for the rest. Running the SDC2300, stock coil, Steelphase Pro headphones with no booster, a plan and elbow grease."

That little story was taken from the SDC FB group, what caught my attention was the highlighted comment ...... before calling a BS factor of 99.9 I thought I'd better check with the PA SDC experts.

Has anyone EVER been able to tune their SDC to find 'smaller' gold (or JUST large gold for that matter).
By the comments it would appear that his 'big' gold setting has the ability to mask out lead shot ...... anyone know what that magic setting would be ?????

Cheers T.

 

[mbasko]

The SDC is inherently tuned for smaller gold with MPF.
The only thing he would be doing is using a lower sensitivity (1-2) & possibly lower threshold (less than 3 or 4) so he's not hearing the fainter signals.
His "small gold settings" would likely be higher sensitivity (4-5) with a high threshold (over 5). This helps with faint signals but can also lead to more ground noise & erratic operation.

In nearly all cases I always found the happy medium to be a Sensitivity of 3 or 4 depending on ground & Threshold from 3 to 5 was sufficient.
I found gold that didn't register on 0.00 incremental scales to gram plus bits using that set up & some reasonably deep. I wouldn't want to be finding anything smaller.
Never found ground that I could run Sensitivity of 5 for very long.

 

[user 7222]

So this guy thinks he found the discriminate setting on the SDC?
That should be your answer right there.

 

[Teemore]

The SDC is inherently tuned for smaller gold with MPF.
The only thing he would be doing is using a lower sensitivity (1-2) & possibly lower threshold (less than 3 or 4) so he's not hearing the fainter signals.
His "small gold settings" would likely be higher sensitivity (4-5) with a high threshold (over 5). This helps with faint signals but can also lead to more ground noise & erratic operation.

Understand everything you say, have no problem maintaining a 95% success rate when using the SDC ...........

BUT have you ever been able to find a setting that will find gold (large or small for SDC) AND NOT PICK UP LEAD SHOT?

Personally think the bloke has been raiding his weed patch (or in reality detected a spot with lead shot whereas the previous area had non).

Cheers T.

 

[mbasko]

The SDC is inherently tuned for smaller gold with MPF.
The only thing he would be doing is using a lower sensitivity (1-2) & possibly lower threshold (less than 3 or 4) so he's not hearing the fainter signals.
His "small gold settings" would likely be higher sensitivity (4-5) with a high threshold (over 5). This helps with faint signals but can also lead to more ground noise & erratic operation.

Understand everything you say, have no problem maintaining a 95% success rate when using the SDC ...........

BUT have you ever been able to find a setting that will find gold (large or small for SDC) AND NOT PICK UP LEAD SHOT?

Personally think the bloke has been raiding his weed patch (or in reality detected a spot with lead shot whereas the previous area had non).

Cheers T.

Sorry probably wasn't clear enough.
He said "Then I changed settings to chase the smaller stuff and snagged another 3 and plenty of lead that my earlier settings missed."
I assumed from this, as he had changed settings to chase smaller stuff, that it was also small (or smaller) lead he was finding.

The only way I can see he could do this is as above, by having low Sensitivity & Threshold then changing it to higher settings for small stuff (or faint signals).

He also doesn't say he never found any lead or junk with the first setting/s. Just plenty of lead he'd assumed he'd missed with his prior setting/s (or he just didn't hear them). :Y:

 

[StoneTheCrows]

If anyone found a setting that the SDC tuned out lead with hmmmm

that would be worth probably more then the gold he found.

 

[Goldtarget]

Not to be cheeky but maybe pm him to explain.

But reading between the lines Im guessing he used the threshold and sensitivity settings change to target one then the other size.

Without the SP01 its maybe fairly limited to what you can achieve chasing big target signals with sens cranked to five and fiddling with the threshold, but for chasing whispers of tiny gold you can dull the sensitivity off to sheild out the ground noise and emi pretty effectively as the SP01 can bring those repeatable quiet tones right through where its almost unmistakable as a target (credit to the creators).

I still think gold thats chunky puts up a much better response in hot and mild ground than everything else except a blanking bit of flat tin, but maybe its just me.

 

[Teemore]

OK, he finally responded with what he did to achieve those results........

"The week before I had bad EMI so I had the threshold on 2 but still set on 5 as I don't have a booster for my headphones yet. I ran that for the last two days because I forgot to check first. I missed a lot of small targets but got the bigger bits, including two half grammers. The fine reefy bit didn't make much of a signal which was odd but I didn't catch on until an hour before dark. Doh! When I cranked it up to full and retraced my steps the small ones and speccies appeared. I still dug a heap of tin and big lead shot on low threshold so it didn't filter it all out. Happy coincidence? Give it a go and let us know."

We live and learn,
Cheers T.

 

[Guest]

G'day

As is the case with most detectors, there will always be a trade off when dumbing down your machines settings, you may get big targets only or may get smaller targets only but in reality you are going to be missing out on something one way or another, some of the best nuggets I have found have been the ones that due to the iffy signal response could have been easily walked away from and not investigated, in my opinion the only reasons to dumb a detector down a little is to make it able to run in some soil or high emi conditions, it does not make sense to do this for any other reason because gold comes in all shapes and sizes and can be at many varying depths in the same area.

I would be running the detector in the highest possible settings that the "conditions allow" and let it do its job, also you have to remember that there are also many variable factors in gold detecting, and setting of the detector is only one of them, other things that will come in to play are things like, ground conditions, moisture content, heat, cold, emi, and even your level of hearing, concentration span, mindset, to name a few, so what will work for one person will not always work for another.

cheers

stayyerAU