I see several people now have just purchased the mighty F2 and are already staring to find and post some great first hunts.
I just replied to another post but there is some good info here that kind of sums up my experience with this unit so far, so I am going to repost it here and add a little more info as I think of it.
Digger27
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One, I live in Alabama and the F2 seems to fit the territory around here just fine.
My Bounty Hunter was almost useless in this soil, but the F2 handles it really well.
I have dug clear signal dimes at 8" and I think it will go deeper than that with very little falsing.
I will actually probably be doing some searching in Florida as well. So how does the F2 hold up in sandy areas, especially wet sandy areas?
I used it on a little beach on a freshwater lake in Michigan last summer and it was fine.
The water edge at the beach at Oak Mountain State Park gives it fits, but I think there is some kind of metal under the sand all along the edge of the entire beach and up into the dry sand a little bit.
Saltwater will give most VLF detectors some problems and this one is probably not going to be an exception.
Turn down the sense and it probably will work well enough to find some not too deep targets.
How does it hold up against water in general? Not gonna be swimming, but how about against rain and maybe small puddles?
Coil, shaft, coil wire and connection to the coil is fine for water.
Get the electronics in the control box wet and you are gonna end up with a nice doorstop.
I wrap a gallon plastic zip bag around mine and staple or tape it shut on the bottom on soggy days and you can still use the buttons on the control panel and see the display pretty good.
Last question, I noticed in the demonstration that you can choose to eliminate certain metals in the options (such as steel etc) which is important because a lot of the areas I will be looking will be trash infested. My question is, and this is kind of a dumb one, silver and gold were not options of things to eliminate from the options. I know I would never want to do that, but it made me wonder what does gold and silver read as if they are not on the screen?
You can't knock out silver or larger coins or copper pennies, (dime signal),on this no matter how much notching you do.
Repeatable solid signals are all very digable and usually good targets
All objects can get bouncy if you are at or near the depth limit.
Iffy bouncy signals are sometimes good, but usually means one of three things...
Something deep and coin or ring size near the depth limit, or you are on the outside edge of a very large and deeper object like a can, or you found a stay-tab or something else with holes, or some weird shaped small foil.(see stay-tabs below).
I have gotten high tone bouncy signals a foot or more away from the large can type of trash,even large iron, especially in moist ground, but as I have learned the language of this fine unit I can usually tell now if it is a legitimate target.
Dug enough huge foxhole size holes at the beginning to figure this out.
The same thing will happen if you swing near big tot-lot metal posts with almost any sensitivity setting and the large coil.
That's what the smaller sniper coil is for.
Every silver ring I have and all other silver items no matter what shape up to a ring size always and consistently comes up in the low 70's as a dime with very good depth, unless it is larger like a quarter and then it will be in the 80-82 range and will always say quarter.
Half dollar and dollar coins will be from 85 to the 90's, and I expect that big silver bracelet I am destined to find will show up there, too
More than one object in a hole next to each other will be different.
I had a kinda solid signal once but it did bounce from 82 to the 90's and it was 2 quarters laying 1/2 way on top of each other.
Nickels will usually be between 29 and 33 and solid and show nickel.
34 and up and pull tab on the display will usually be a pull tab...but not every time, some will be nickels.
Full beaver tails or the beaver tails themselves are usually solid and above 33 but they can also be bouncy and up into the 50's, especially partial pieces of these.
Stay tabs, (hate these!), are always bouncy unless they are right on the surface and could range from the 20's to the 40's.
As a matter of fact, the thinner the object, especially if it has holes and is not solid, like stay-tabs, charms, and chains, the bouncier the signal no matter what it is made of.
Nails are usually in the 20's and mostly solid.
Gold...well, that's another story.
I have 2, small, 10k rings, a little bigger but still thin 14k ring and an old gold filling as test objects.
I don't know about larger items, but on these 4 I do not get great depth on any of them in air tests.
4-5 inches max...sometimes 6 but intermittent on 75% start up power, a little more on 100% power, (sensitivity).
Smaller gold objects usually come in as foil in air test right next to the coil, a little larger object will come in as nickel.
However when you start to move the object away from the coil just an inch or two, the signal will get bouncy from foil to nickel.
I suspect some gold objects, depending on gold content, shape, depth, size, position in the soil and other factors, can and will come up anywhere from nickel on down...and that includes iron!
I dug a zillion targets last year that were bouncy and iffy foil to nickel signals with my F2, and cut out at foil or just below nickel with my Vaquero.
They were always foil or pull tabs or parts of pull tabs...always...except 3 times.
Those 3 signals were small gold rings.
After the first one, I vowed to always dig any signal on any machine that I ever will use that said foil or above when not in all metal and I am hunting in disc, and I was rewarded with 2 more gold rings.
Unless I am just coin shooting, which this is excellent at doing, or relic hunting, every time I go out with this I usually just turn the sense to max, knock out iron and dig everything else...and I mean everything.
I also use a Propointer, so between the great pinpointing capabilities of the F2 and the Propointer, it takes very little time to recover most targets no matter how deep.
This is a volume business people...the more you dig the more really good stuff you will find.
Once in awhile you might dig a foil or pull tab signal and get surprised with something golden and shiny instead.
It happened to me, and that is the kind of surprise we live for in this hobby.
I found lots of great stuff from the get-go with this wonderful detector, and even more and better treasure as I continue to learn it's quirks and language.
HH
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