TTF: How To Set It Up and Use it Properly
Have you ever ran across an old house, section in a park or an area in the field where you just completely lose threshold due to a massive amount of iron around? Your E-trac just completely nulls over all the iron. No matter how much you slow your swing speed down too, you just can't seem to get the threshold back and pull any targets out of this area. Here is an idea to try! Put your e-trac in 2 tone and use ferrous sounds with a mostly open screen. I use the relic screen, as it only has a small section blacked out on the bottom right corner.
The E-trac has different audio options ferrous sounds and conductive sounds. You all know when you use conductive sounds and you click on quickmask iron screams high pitched just like silver, so running an open screen in an area like described above just won't work. There is no way to tell from iron and good targets,....But if you choose ferrous sounds the iron will produce a low grunt and it makes it very easy to distinguish from ferrous and non ferrous items. Using two tone at an old site can be very productive. Normally this type of site will have very little clad, aluminum, pull tabs etc, so every high tone you get will be worth investigating.
In order to use this method of hunting with the e-trac you must be patient, as it will require you to go extremely slow for two reasons:
#1 going slow allows you to hear that coin or desirable relic sitting directly under or beside a nail, you will get a very audible easy to hear higher pitch tone for the good item and a low tone for the iron by it.
#2 if you go to fast with your swing it will cause you to get false signals from the iron. Slowly down will allow your machine to see ALL the targets in the ground, good and bad.
Like I mentioned above you will need to use a mostly open screen. I chose the relic screen for simplicity, you can use a 100% open screen if you want, try different options and see what works for you. There is less filters for the machine therefore the e-trac has a much faster response time allowing you to hear that coin when before the iron beside it masked it out and you simply got a null and walked right by it. In conductive mode sometimes there is just too much trash/iron for the coin to come thru.
Using ferrous sounds with the stock coin program would be worthless because you need to allow the iron to be heard in order to hear the good target along side it. You need as little as discrimination as possible.
Pinpointing in this type of environment is another tough thing to do, and using the machines pinpoint is not a real choice. When you use the e-trac's pinpoint it is in all metal and it will try to pinpoint the strongest signal which might be the close iron. Here is how you overcome that battle. You get a high tone and you do your best to isolate it from the trash by wiggling the coil over the high tone as you slowly walk a circle around the target until you achieve the best signal you can produce. You might only be able to wiggle the coil an inch back and forth over the good item. Then while your wiggling the coil and still hearing the high tone, slowly pull the coil back until the high tone goes away. STOP, the good target will then be exactly at the center front of the coil. Cut your plug and retrieve your item.
Why use two tone and not multi tone? It may be a personal choice but by using only two tones it is SIMPLE......iron is low grunt, and everything ABOVE iron is a higher easy to distinguish tone. If you use multi tone, it will be murder on your brain trying decipher the musical song you will be hearing. When in this type of iron rich site the numbers will be bouncing all over and with multi tone it will be like a machine gun of tones going off, making it extremely difficult for you to really pick out good from bad. Keep it simple, iron low tone, everything else high tone. Go extremely slow and let the machine do it's job.
I even experimented with 4 tones and this still was too much ear candy for my liking. I suggest you stick to two tones for the best performance and chance of pulling goodies out of all the iron. Also by using two tones you are allowing the e-trac processor to work as quickly as possible giving you even more chance to score the goodies.
Don't expect the numbers on the screen to be solid 12-45 for a silver dime or 12-36 for an indian penny, with the close iron it may very well mess with your numbers, pay more attention to the conductive number. Listen for a clear high tone, try to work your coil around it till you get a nice clear tone, without a broken, scratchy sound. The first indian I found using this method gave me a 07-35, it had iron all around it. If I had waited for a 12-36 it would have not happened and I would have kept walking.
Using this method you WILL detect targets other machines have walked right over many times because their machine either nulled over the iron and did not see the good item or their machine “blended” the iron and good target giving them a trash signal and they kept walking. But I'd guess mostly they got a null and heard nothing at all, they were totally clueless a good item was under their coil. Using this method will “blow all other machines out of the water”
You might be saying would I still get these targets if I were using conductive sounds with a stock or modified coin program? Most likely NO. I have been experimenting with this each time I go out. I locate a good target in 2 tone ferrous then switch over to my saved coin mode with conductive sounds, what do I get?..........NULL.........no coin signal. I have tried this many times. This method will find items at your sites that you have missed before because of iron I promise you.
I first tried this at a one room school house, the owner told me it was pounded to death, and doubted I would find anything. Withing two minutes at this site I was ready to pull my hair out, complete null every direction I went no matter how slow I swung my coil, I simply could not achieve a threshold. Was not likely I was going to find a thing just like the owner said. So I flipped it into two tone ferrous for the first time, and away I went swinging slow as a turtle. I only had an hour so did not expect much. I pulled 2 harmonica reeds, a few shotgun shells and a beautiful 1905 indian. Not a ton of finds you might say, but in conductive mode this site was dead, nothing was going to be found. There was so much iron it was like they threw handfuls of nails all across the yard! The indian penny had 4 nails surrounding it, but I managed to pull it out using this highly effective method.
Second time I used this, I went to an old school I have detected hard for 2 seasons now, not a large yard at all, and I have dug everything here, pulltabs, can slaw, all clad etc...there were no signals left but iron. I thought this would be the perfect test site for 2 tone ferrous. I was able to squeek out an early date wheat, 2 war nickels and 2 older Jefferson nickels using this method in a 2 hour hunt and only covered about 20% of the yard. I am sure there is more waiting there. 2 tone ferrous seems to work miracles on nickels.
Ok now you've read all this and want to try it out, here is how to set it up. First thing you want to do is hit your menu button go to USER MODES, scroll down to SAVE, choose a slot, they are called “My Mode 1-4” press the right navigation button. This will save all your current settings so you do not lose what you have for settings now.
The E-trac has different audio options ferrous sounds and conductive sounds. You all know when you use conductive sounds and you click on quickmask iron screams high pitched just like silver, so running an open screen in an area like described above just won't work. There is no way to tell from iron and good targets,....But if you choose ferrous sounds the iron will produce a low grunt and it makes it very easy to distinguish from ferrous and non ferrous items. Using two tone at an old site can be very productive. Normally this type of site will have very little clad, aluminum, pull tabs etc, so every high tone you get will be worth investigating.
In order to use this method of hunting with the e-trac you must be patient, as it will require you to go extremely slow for two reasons:
#1 going slow allows you to hear that coin or desirable relic sitting directly under or beside a nail, you will get a very audible easy to hear higher pitch tone for the good item and a low tone for the iron by it.
#2 if you go to fast with your swing it will cause you to get false signals from the iron. Slowly down will allow your machine to see ALL the targets in the ground, good and bad.
Like I mentioned above you will need to use a mostly open screen. I chose the relic screen for simplicity, you can use a 100% open screen if you want, try different options and see what works for you. There is less filters for the machine therefore the e-trac has a much faster response time allowing you to hear that coin when before the iron beside it masked it out and you simply got a null and walked right by it. In conductive mode sometimes there is just too much trash/iron for the coin to come thru.
Using ferrous sounds with the stock coin program would be worthless because you need to allow the iron to be heard in order to hear the good target along side it. You need as little as discrimination as possible.
Pinpointing in this type of environment is another tough thing to do, and using the machines pinpoint is not a real choice. When you use the e-trac's pinpoint it is in all metal and it will try to pinpoint the strongest signal which might be the close iron. Here is how you overcome that battle. You get a high tone and you do your best to isolate it from the trash by wiggling the coil over the high tone as you slowly walk a circle around the target until you achieve the best signal you can produce. You might only be able to wiggle the coil an inch back and forth over the good item. Then while your wiggling the coil and still hearing the high tone, slowly pull the coil back until the high tone goes away. STOP, the good target will then be exactly at the center front of the coil. Cut your plug and retrieve your item.
Why use two tone and not multi tone? It may be a personal choice but by using only two tones it is SIMPLE......iron is low grunt, and everything ABOVE iron is a higher easy to distinguish tone. If you use multi tone, it will be murder on your brain trying decipher the musical song you will be hearing. When in this type of iron rich site the numbers will be bouncing all over and with multi tone it will be like a machine gun of tones going off, making it extremely difficult for you to really pick out good from bad. Keep it simple, iron low tone, everything else high tone. Go extremely slow and let the machine do it's job.
I even experimented with 4 tones and this still was too much ear candy for my liking. I suggest you stick to two tones for the best performance and chance of pulling goodies out of all the iron. Also by using two tones you are allowing the e-trac processor to work as quickly as possible giving you even more chance to score the goodies.
Don't expect the numbers on the screen to be solid 12-45 for a silver dime or 12-36 for an indian penny, with the close iron it may very well mess with your numbers, pay more attention to the conductive number. Listen for a clear high tone, try to work your coil around it till you get a nice clear tone, without a broken, scratchy sound. The first indian I found using this method gave me a 07-35, it had iron all around it. If I had waited for a 12-36 it would have not happened and I would have kept walking.
Using this method you WILL detect targets other machines have walked right over many times because their machine either nulled over the iron and did not see the good item or their machine “blended” the iron and good target giving them a trash signal and they kept walking. But I'd guess mostly they got a null and heard nothing at all, they were totally clueless a good item was under their coil. Using this method will “blow all other machines out of the water”
You might be saying would I still get these targets if I were using conductive sounds with a stock or modified coin program? Most likely NO. I have been experimenting with this each time I go out. I locate a good target in 2 tone ferrous then switch over to my saved coin mode with conductive sounds, what do I get?..........NULL.........no coin signal. I have tried this many times. This method will find items at your sites that you have missed before because of iron I promise you.
I first tried this at a one room school house, the owner told me it was pounded to death, and doubted I would find anything. Withing two minutes at this site I was ready to pull my hair out, complete null every direction I went no matter how slow I swung my coil, I simply could not achieve a threshold. Was not likely I was going to find a thing just like the owner said. So I flipped it into two tone ferrous for the first time, and away I went swinging slow as a turtle. I only had an hour so did not expect much. I pulled 2 harmonica reeds, a few shotgun shells and a beautiful 1905 indian. Not a ton of finds you might say, but in conductive mode this site was dead, nothing was going to be found. There was so much iron it was like they threw handfuls of nails all across the yard! The indian penny had 4 nails surrounding it, but I managed to pull it out using this highly effective method.
Second time I used this, I went to an old school I have detected hard for 2 seasons now, not a large yard at all, and I have dug everything here, pulltabs, can slaw, all clad etc...there were no signals left but iron. I thought this would be the perfect test site for 2 tone ferrous. I was able to squeek out an early date wheat, 2 war nickels and 2 older Jefferson nickels using this method in a 2 hour hunt and only covered about 20% of the yard. I am sure there is more waiting there. 2 tone ferrous seems to work miracles on nickels.
Ok now you've read all this and want to try it out, here is how to set it up. First thing you want to do is hit your menu button go to USER MODES, scroll down to SAVE, choose a slot, they are called “My Mode 1-4” press the right navigation button. This will save all your current settings so you do not lose what you have for settings now.
Step 2, press menu button, go to user modes and scroll down to select, scroll to MINELAB MODES and select RELICS, then hit the detect button. A dialogue box will appear asking you to confirm this load, click navigation button to the right to confirm, this mode is now loaded and this will be an almost open screen, only very bottom right corner is blacked out
Ok hit the menu button again and scroll across to the AUDIO, scroll down to no. of tones and select 2 tones. Then make sure sounds is set on ferrous (by default when you select relic it selects ferrous mode, just verify this). Ok your set that is it!
Now to save this ferrous set up repeat the above instructions, go to user modes, go to save, select a different slot from where you saved your other settings and click navigation button to the right to save this set up. Now whenever you want to switch back and forth from your normal settings to the two tone ferrous all you have to do is hit menu> user modes> select> choose what mode you want> hit navigation button to the right, then A dialogue box will appear asking you to confirm this load, click navigation button to the right to confirm, this mode is now loaded. Thats it!
I hope this article has been helpful, easy to understand, and helps you pull goodies out of your previously hunted out spots and areas that produce a complete null on your etrac. If you have any questions feel free to contact me on
www.facebook.com/terry.barnhart.12
I hope this article has been helpful, easy to understand, and helps you pull goodies out of your previously hunted out spots and areas that produce a complete null on your etrac. If you have any questions feel free to contact me on
www.facebook.com/terry.barnhart.12
