Redwaller
Full Member
Been debating about posting this since I don't feel like I've done enough testing of this yet to be very scientific or in depth about what I've found but... here we go anyway.
I was messing around the other day at a site I've posted about, the ground balance there is real nasty, it's a 94 or so on my AT Pro which is the highest I've ever seen anyway. but that's not really the point of this thread. I was thinking about the manual ground balance button on the AT Pro - you're supposed to bounce the coil up and down over a spot of ground where there isn't actually any metal and fiddle with the + and - buttons until the detector is silent. But I was thinking, what happens if you instead, swing it like normal, over actual signals? The answer was at least to me, rather interesting.
As it turns out, the detector still behaves like a metal detector, just with some interesting differences. Near as I can tell the recovery speed is vastly higher than normal, the detector is extremely sensitive, and the tones are inverted (the AT Pro manual sheds some light on the tone thing, apparently it's supposed to be telling you which button to hit to get the machine closer to neutral) but in practice this is actually pretty useful. The recovery speed is so high in ground balance mode the detector will make up to dozens of extremely quick tones with one swing over a target (I mean it's not supposed to be used for actual detecting, so whatever the reason is for this probably has something to do with the intended purpose of ground balancing) which can be useful I've found in at least the following ways:
Pinpointing: The real fast recovery speed is nice for this, and the other effect of fast recovery speed (reduced depth) makes it real clear where a signal is, you just have to keep in mind it won't sound like it does normally. It's really easy to find the loudest point in a signal while in manual ground balance mode, though it doesn't do very well with deep stuff. (probably because of the recovery speed)
Determining if there are multiple targets close together: Pretty self explanatory, the ground balance button is very good at giving separate loud spots when there's something like two coins close together, or a coin and a nail, etc.
Determining what a real messy signal is: This requires some practice but I've been able to use it fairly reliably to be able to tell if the high tone I'm getting in between a bunch of iron is actually a coin or just iron falsing like it tends to. In manual ground balance mode, nails usually sound like nice clean high tones, while most highly conductive stuff sounds like a loud, very dense series of clicks and a few times even iron tones. Things towards the middle of the id scale like pulltabs and IHPs will give different warbles of clicks and high tones which thusfar I've been entirely unable to reliably distinguish. Nickels sound like smooth high tones the same as nails. When the iffy high tone in normal detecting mode isn't represented by a consistent clicking in ground balance mode, and it's just the high tones nails make, generally I'll just end up digging only nails from that signal. If there's a small area of clicking in between the nail high tones, well those have been most of my recent good finds at the one pretty heavily searched site I've been posting about. It's really important to note that the ground balance mode really really likes shallow objects and will react exactly the same to a 1 inch deep wad of foil as it would a 5 inch or so deep quarter.
I haven't tested if any of the above works the same with the ground balance set differently to the 94 I've had to have it at recently, and there's very little to what I've just said beyond my direct observations and a lot of digging trash to see if I could find a pattern. I hope this is useful, I couldn't find any other similar discussions about this, so this is either something no one noticed before or it just doesn't work the way I've interpreted it to (or indeed at all). I'd appreciate any comments, even those telling me I'm crazy.
I was messing around the other day at a site I've posted about, the ground balance there is real nasty, it's a 94 or so on my AT Pro which is the highest I've ever seen anyway. but that's not really the point of this thread. I was thinking about the manual ground balance button on the AT Pro - you're supposed to bounce the coil up and down over a spot of ground where there isn't actually any metal and fiddle with the + and - buttons until the detector is silent. But I was thinking, what happens if you instead, swing it like normal, over actual signals? The answer was at least to me, rather interesting.
As it turns out, the detector still behaves like a metal detector, just with some interesting differences. Near as I can tell the recovery speed is vastly higher than normal, the detector is extremely sensitive, and the tones are inverted (the AT Pro manual sheds some light on the tone thing, apparently it's supposed to be telling you which button to hit to get the machine closer to neutral) but in practice this is actually pretty useful. The recovery speed is so high in ground balance mode the detector will make up to dozens of extremely quick tones with one swing over a target (I mean it's not supposed to be used for actual detecting, so whatever the reason is for this probably has something to do with the intended purpose of ground balancing) which can be useful I've found in at least the following ways:
Pinpointing: The real fast recovery speed is nice for this, and the other effect of fast recovery speed (reduced depth) makes it real clear where a signal is, you just have to keep in mind it won't sound like it does normally. It's really easy to find the loudest point in a signal while in manual ground balance mode, though it doesn't do very well with deep stuff. (probably because of the recovery speed)
Determining if there are multiple targets close together: Pretty self explanatory, the ground balance button is very good at giving separate loud spots when there's something like two coins close together, or a coin and a nail, etc.
Determining what a real messy signal is: This requires some practice but I've been able to use it fairly reliably to be able to tell if the high tone I'm getting in between a bunch of iron is actually a coin or just iron falsing like it tends to. In manual ground balance mode, nails usually sound like nice clean high tones, while most highly conductive stuff sounds like a loud, very dense series of clicks and a few times even iron tones. Things towards the middle of the id scale like pulltabs and IHPs will give different warbles of clicks and high tones which thusfar I've been entirely unable to reliably distinguish. Nickels sound like smooth high tones the same as nails. When the iffy high tone in normal detecting mode isn't represented by a consistent clicking in ground balance mode, and it's just the high tones nails make, generally I'll just end up digging only nails from that signal. If there's a small area of clicking in between the nail high tones, well those have been most of my recent good finds at the one pretty heavily searched site I've been posting about. It's really important to note that the ground balance mode really really likes shallow objects and will react exactly the same to a 1 inch deep wad of foil as it would a 5 inch or so deep quarter.
I haven't tested if any of the above works the same with the ground balance set differently to the 94 I've had to have it at recently, and there's very little to what I've just said beyond my direct observations and a lot of digging trash to see if I could find a pattern. I hope this is useful, I couldn't find any other similar discussions about this, so this is either something no one noticed before or it just doesn't work the way I've interpreted it to (or indeed at all). I'd appreciate any comments, even those telling me I'm crazy.
