high trash yard

hooper1

Senior Member
Joined
Oct 14, 2012
Messages
388
Location
Spokane Valley,Wa
hey guys ive recently got into metal detecting and i have the fisher f2 with the 4" and 8" coils what one should i be useing. When i say trash i mean you name it i have dug it up or will soon.I think my house was built on a trash dump.
 
Basically since it is a smaller coil it means you are more capable of separating targets. Say in one spot you have a silver coin surrounded by a handfull of roofing nails. Those nails are in an 8" circle around the coin, but your 4'" coil can pick up just the coin. Its really just to get a better read on smaller targets.
 
thanks for the replys back, ill do a little more detecting tomorrow if its not raining and ill see what i find. So far just a lot of junk and not much clad for a house built in 1950.
 
thanks for the replys back, ill do a little more detecting tomorrow if its not raining and ill see what i find. So far just a lot of junk and not much clad for a house built in 1950.

As it has been written, your 4 inch coil is your weapon of choice when you enter an area like the one you describe.

When I'm dirtfishing, I like to start out with the big coil, and look for the area with a high concentration of trash - those are the hotspots, which I take a mental note of. When I'm done mapping the area, then I switch to my secondary detector, which has a very small coil, and then I work the 'busy' areas very slow, trying to cover them from more than one area.

I never switch to the small coil, unless I have a few finds, which I can date back to the timeframe I'm looking at, unles the place has been detected before, in which case, I know that they have been to the less trashy areas, and that my best chance is to go strait to the trash, which most people try to avoid, just because they get borred or confused about what the detector try to tell them.

A lot of times, you will find, that your competition have walked right over the silver, without finding it, just because they did'nt want to take the time with their 4 inch coil, or 'cup cake' as other calls it.

try putting a fistfull of targets around a silver coin in your backyard, and see what the coil can do for you - you will be surprised, and should probably review your list of previusly producing spots!!!

Remember to review your discrimination patern and crank up the sensitivity, since the 4 inch coil will change the responses your detector sends to you - It's like getting a new detector.

GL and HH.

/Steffen
 
I would suggest starting with the small coil, if the yard is trashy. The large coil will pick up so many targets the it can leave you overwhelmed. Clean the yard well with the small coil - and understand this is no small feat. Once the trash is out of the way, use the large coil for its depth and go over the yard again. Without the trash masking deeper items, you should get some 50's finds. One of the hardest things to do, is to clear trash while looking for quality finds. But, if it was easy, those that came before would have cleaned it and taken thar was below.

GL & HH
 
hey guys ive recently got into metal detecting and i have the fisher f2 with the 4" and 8" coils what one should i be useing. When i say trash i mean you name it i have dug it up or will soon.I think my house was built on a trash dump.

As it has been written, your 4 inch coil is your weapon of choice when you enter an area like the one you describe.

It's like getting a new detector.

After using the F2 with the 8" coil for about 2 years I finally decided to try out the 4" coil most of this past summer and I can tell you now that I am kicking myself because even though I found all kinds of great things with that larger coil I am afraid to think what I missed by not using that sniper coil more often.

I have found that even though on the screen solid numbers and depth bars are primary dig-able targets, and jumpy numbers, (more than 2), and jumpy depth bars usually indicates trash, there is so much going on under that coil in especially trashy sites that you need to use the best weapons possible and ALL the information you see on the screen and hear in those tones to really get a good idea of what is truly happening and make informed choices on what targets to dig, or become a dig it all kind of hunter like me to be sure.

I have learned that on trash targets of irregular size like can slaw and foil, and other trash that have holes like tabs of all kinds, as you move your coils over these types of targets, (especially the bigger coils), you might be able to get a pretty solid number in the center of the coil, but as you move different parts of the coil over the target, and even move the whole coil off the target completely, you will usually get some very big jumps in the numbers on the screen, the depth bars, and you might even jump to a completely different classification.
For instance a sta-tab that for me that is usually a 34-35 can easily jump into the high 30's...the 40's, or down into the 20's, especially if it is not right on top, (shallow), or on its side laying in the ground.
Even though I usually dig most targets I come across, I still play the game with myself on every target and try to guess what it is before I dig.

I use this slight movement of the coil and jumpy numbers and depth bars info to figure out trash, and after digging up so much trash I can tell you I am right about 95% of the time.
Even so, I have been wrong and sometimes even good targets can jump and bad targets can be stable.
If you believe anything is 100% in this hobby we need to talk about a bridge I have for sale.

If you have a trash target all by itself this stuff will work pretty well, but imagine a site with trash galore and try to imagine the amount of false signals you will get with 2-3-4 or more targets under that coil at the same time.
Even if you have a good target in there somewhere it still might be very difficult to pick it out even if you move that coil very slow from all kinds of different directions.
When you go from the 8" coil to the 4" you are effectively cutting that scanning field in half and gaining some precision that would never be possible with larger coils and that will give you about a 50% better chance of picking out a good target in the vicinity of a lot of trash...and a side benefit is you also gain a good measure of sensitivity, too.

Since last December I have been hitting a large amount of parks with several detectors including my F2 and that 8" coil.
After mounting the sniper coil I revisited many of these parks I thought I had cleaned out pretty good but I was shocked to realize how wrong I had been.

Some examples on a few sites I re-visited...there are many more.
http://metaldetectingforum.com/showthread.php?t=120082

http://metaldetectingforum.com/showthread.php?t=122428

This site I visited in August and first hunted it with my new 10" and found a bunch.
Then I returned with the sniper coil and not only dug everything, but because of that smaller coil I could much more easily differentiate between all the signals I was getting, and zero in on each one separately.
Using the larger coil the amount of noise and jumping signals was almost overwhelming because of the trash, especially the large amount of foil and sta-tabs at this site.
My first time through with the sniper in an area I covered one hunt before with my larger coil I managed to single out this 37-39 more solid signal and I dug it...and found the first gold ring that I am actually proud to wear as a personal piece of jewelry.

http://metaldetectingforum.com/showthread.php?t=124694

4 days later I returned to this exact same area at this same site and continued to go slow and cover another part of the same small area I had scanned with that larger coil and luck was with me again because I found 2 gold rings that day, one at a 24 foil and one at a 35 with is a nickel signal on the F2 but for me has always been a sta-tab.
http://metaldetectingforum.com/showthread.php?t=125006

This park and this area has had not only been hunted by me and that larger coil but by others in the past, and we all missed those rings.
The fact that I was going slow, using that sniper coil and digging all solid signals, which were much more easily acquired with the sniper, is what enabled me to have the best week ever MD'ing in my short career.

I mentioned the fact that the smaller coil has a range of sensitivity that the larger coils do not, and here is the proof....
http://metaldetectingforum.com/showthread.php?t=127835

If I am in an older area looking for deeper coins the larger coils would be my choice, but I am a jewelry hunter and I hunt parks and I want to find not only rings but chains, too, and when it comes to the small thin ones the sniper can pick these up where they would be virtually invisible to the larger coils.

As was mentioned, if you put on the sniper coil you are changing the F2 from a very capable all around unit to a different and more precise hunter, and don't worry too much about the loss of depth because you can still get about 6" or more in good soil with that 4" and that is well within range of just about every great thing I have ever found.

It is still almost unbelievable to me what this little "hockey puck" of a coil can do, and what it actually costs either in a package or aftermarket.
Considering what it can find, I think it is one of the best values on the market as far as accessories go, and it happens to fit on one of the best values on the market when we are talking about extremely productive detectors at a bargain price.
 
Great post digger27 - I don't disagree on your observations, but I'm too tired after a long hunt to post a comment, so I'll return when I've got some rest.

/Steffen
 
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