Best discrimination setting

There several area in my gold field that are full of iron trash, particularly nails at varying depths from 1" to 18". What is the best settings to discriminate the nails from nuggets? I can discriminate the shallow trash but not the deeper ones.

local digger

G'day ld, with a PI machine the discrimination function IMHO is a waste of time and I have another machine for that purpose. Even the guys using good discrimination machines will tell you to dig everything.
If you must perservere and use this function make sure you are using a DD coil of course and a very small coil at that. Bare in mind too the deeper the target the less effecient again the dicrimination function becomes.

LD

Never use it trust only your eye's and digg digg digg.

Pete in WA

Gday


The general concensis as far as the descrimination feature on pi detectors is dont bother with it and leave it switched off as it is unreliable on anything that is not close to or on the surface as you already know, they simply dont descriminate to full depth.

Very often you will get a buried trash target and the descrimination will start to work after you have partially dug down to it, but also a ferrous target signals can also mask out the fainter signal of a gold nugget that is close by, simply by drowning it out, by I have found this on many occassions, on my last trip I detected a 5 grammer that was not very deeply buried under a layer of leaf litter, after digging it out and when I swung the coil back over the same spot I discovered that there was a piece of scrap metal on one side of where the nugget was laying, and a piece of wire on the other side, I had luckily swung the coil right in between the two trash targets and right over the nugget, had I been closer to either of the rubbish targets I may not have heard it at all or possibly have dismissed it as being more trash and walked away.

If you are wanting to detect these areas and you know there is good gold to be had then maybe getting a good quality vlf detector may be the go as they have much better descrimination than the pi detectors, apart from that all you can do is dig everything, quite a few gold nugget signals are obviously gold to the trained ear and as soon as you hear it you know you have a nugget, but there would be equally as many gold targets that I have dug that I could have easily dismissed as being trash too and could have walked away from them.

After awhile of digging trash targets its easy to get tired of it and simply move on, this is what a very high percentage of operators do, and its due to this that there is still the chance of good nuggets being there so perserverence is the key, if it does your head in after awhile just wander away and do some other ground for awhile then go back to it, the trick to working these types of areas is to mark out a small area at a time and work it slowly, removing rubbish and putting it to one side, often a small coil is good for this as you dont get as many confusing multiple signals in each swing, after you have cleaned up a bit then fit a bigger coil and do the same thing, any deeper and more subtle signals should be easier to hear without all the confusion.

cheers

stayyerAU

Hey StayyerAU,
Your post would have to be one of the best descrimination explanations read.
Cheers
Peter

G'day Local digger.

Just taking this one step further.If Ive been uncertain at times on pieces of gold that Ive dug up,placed in hand and visually examined it in the past,and still had doubts as to whether or not it was gold,(due to the type of signal it gave and surface coating covering the gold) what hope have ones ears got of being accurate in deciphering good gold targets from trash at depth?.Like StayyerAU says,rake all surface areas of trash that you intend detecting on,hammer it with every coil in your possession and dig everything out.

Cheers kon61.