The best time to detect - EMI

According to a doco I saw on TV the other day the strenght of the earths magnetic field changes depending on the position of the sun. Can anybody tell me what affect if any does this have on our detctors? If so is there an optimum time of day or time of year to detect to reduce these effects

G'day - it's not so much the position of the sun; more the current activity of the sun. We have just gone past the solar minima and are just starting another solar cycle, in which the sun peaks in activity every 11 years. So SETA is going to have a real work out 5 yrs from now.

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CME's) don't just kill satellites and overload the Canadian power grid networks, they cause all sorts of whoops and chirps to detectors too.

You can keep an eye on the current solar 'weather' on www.spaceweather.com - best times to detect are when the sun is quiet from an activity point of view, or (sounds obvious) - at night.

cheers - trashdigger

Hi Swaggy53, i can't answer your question but EM is bad in the daytime and starts creating audible noise that can be difficult to filter/tune out by 11am. But it varies.

Regardless of what negative solar and other interference is about the night time after 9pm is the best time to detect. It is often so much better it can make a real difference. Some places that have moderate noise/interference during the day become absolutely silent at night. I have had fences that pump out intereference for many metres in the daytime that fall quiet at night allowing you to detect within a couple metres of them. It is possible to hear signals really well late at night. If you have an old patch where there is often interference, try detecting it late at night... you may be surprised at the faint signals you will pick up on.

A few of us have invested in good headlamps and often detect until 2am. We set up camp in the middle of a good detecting spot and detect far out in the day (resting in the middle of the day) and detect long into the night close to camp. (i don't recommend detecting on your lonesome late at night- too many boogeyman around)

Cheers Tributer

Gday

I have always found the best time of the day to be from dawn to about ten oclock, the grounds quiet and cold and if there is no wind then its even better, and because you are rested and cool, you are also at your peak as well as you are more focussed on the job, and the detector has less work to do as there is less outside interference to deal with.

Later in the day as the temperature and the wind gets up everything starts to change, EMI starts from lots of other sources, making your detectors electronics work a lot harder to filter it all out, so that must come at a cost, and that would probably be a loss in depth and sensitivity.

I dont detect at night, mainly because by the end of the day I have done enough and I am ready for a drink and some food, but secondly there are many ways to get hurt at night, from falls to walking into protruding limbs from trees, if you were on a salt lake or something that would be ok, one area I went in to someone had used a dozer and pushed away some mounds of dirt from around the old shafts, so the shafts were exposed and could not be seen until you were right on them, at night you would have no chance of seeing them.

cheers

stayyerAU