I found a location with multiple ball fields and a nice tot lot that looked very promising. Got set up with my F2, turned it on and it went crazy and would not calm down no matter what I did with sensitivity. I then looked up and realized what was the cause. There is a massive cell tower in the middle of everything and I knew that it was a no go with the equipment I have.
My question is, are there any machines that have the ability to ignore or tune out the EMI? I can't imagine that this location has been detected much at all and it will likely be a long wait till we have a cell outage that would allow me to access the site.
Some are way better than others, but all seem to be affected in one way or another.
Using the F2 on top of a mountain in direct line-of-site of every kind of tower for miles around made my F2 go into that machine gun mode in all sense settings all the time, while my last trip to the same area my F70 seemed to handle all that EMI much better even though it is a much more powerful and I believe an even more sensitive machine and also prone to a lot of chatter.
Areas where I get much jumping with the F2 or my F70 my Tesoros seem to be extremely quiet, and others see the same effect with different brands.
Minelabs seem to be less affected in this area, just as an example.
At one neighborhood site surrounded by homes, and this is the only time this has ever happened, my Compadre went nuts in a small area with a tot lot I was hunting and would not shut up unless I turned the disc up pretty high, while my F2 was much more stable and seemed to have no problems in that same area every time I hunted it which I have done several times.
This was actually a rare and unusual experience and the opposite happens most of the time when using these two different units at the same sites on different hunts.
Luckily, those extremely difficult areas like the one you describe aren't the norm...although we do come across them from time to time.
By the way, I have used my F2 in such a problem plagued EMI site a few times in the past, one was right next to a tower exactly like your example.
The one area I really wanted to cover, a small flat area where picnickers could possibly have played frisbees or thrown balls around and lost jewelry and also the entire area around a picnic pavilion which was also loaded with a bunch of trash, was directly in the area of the worst of this interference and I had that machine gun effect and severe jumping in the numbers that wouldn't stop on any sense setting.
I was still able to pull many coins out of this area through all of this because even with all those tones and severe jumping like my F70 the F2 does seem to stop, if even for just a brief instant, and give you a solid signal and tone when swinging over good targets even in the middle of all that mess, but only because I have a huge amount of experience with my F2 was I able to recognize these good targets by using short, quick swipes when I saw a quick good number and heard a good tone as I came across them.
The good targets would tone repeatedly in exactly the same place from any angle and the good numbers would show up on the screen on every pass but they were super quick.
Even though there was a super ton of jumping in the tones and the numbers also going on around them I was still somehow able to recognize those good signals.
This is actually not easy to do and back when I was new with the F2 I would have never been able to recognize and pick out these good signals at all I am sure.
It all would have been a wall of noise and unintelligible jumping and tones to me.
I was using the sniper coil at the time which might or might not have helped find the good targets but I really don't know for sure.
Even though I could have stayed and probably found even more good targets than I did that kind of hunting is very mentally fatiguing for me and not a whole bunch of fun so soon enough I moved away from this band of severe interference and moved onto other areas of this park that did not have so much of this jumping problem and were much more enjoyable places to hunt.
One day I will return to this exact site with other detectors and see if using them would be easier and more productive without tiring me out so much.
I don't like what I'm reading here. I live probably within a half mile of an FM broadcast tower, three cell towers, a water tower with public safety repeaters, and a high tension power line. On top of that, I have a wireless router in the house, plus cordless phones! I really want an ATP, but was thinking on getting the EuroTek Pro for now, until I can afford the ATP. But, now with all this about the susceptibility of the TEP to RFI, I'm wondering if I would be wasting my money--I plan to start learning here at home (several acres). Do you guys think that I should wait until I can get the ATP, or chance the RFI with the TEP?
