Minelab Manticore & Seperation

For those of us that have been detecting for many years it has become noticeably evident that with the ever increasing amount of people turning to detecting there is a definite decline in the amount of targets that are out there. It is clear to me that the days of finding those untouched virgin sites are very few and far between. This inspired me to write this blog and to try and find some positive outcomes to the situation. There is a positive side but with that comes a negative side. The negative is that it is a damn well harder to get a big haul of coins and relics without having to travel further and put in a lot more effort with the end often being that of mediocre hunts. But never fear for every negative there is a positive. The positive is that it causes you to think outside the square and try new things. I find myself searching areas that I have never considered before which does create some good sessions but I will have to say that my favorite and most challenging positive is going over old ground using fresh ideas with the latest technology. This brings me to the separation that you can get from the Minelab Manticore while using the stabiliser setting. I have a few techniques I use that will help you to find coins & relics in trashy and supposedly hunted out areas. This is exciting for a number of reasons, firstly it pushes you to excel to a higher level of detecting ability because you will start to find targets that you thought were not possible and this will increase your confidence. Increasing your confidence gives you the edge over other people that are too lazy to learn and want it easy and because they lack confidence they wont hunt these areas and therefore yep you guessed it that area is now your new favourite spot. Secondly when your confidence grows you actually start to think differently about what your detector is capable of and you will try new things. Experimenting becomes fun when you are confident and excited and this is what clearly gives you the edge. I do consistently have pretty good hauls these days even though there are more people enjoying the hobby because I always push myself to learn in these hard areas.

Make sure you always have a base standard of settings that works for you and then experiment with them because if what you try new fails you can always come back to your tried and trusted settings. Sometimes when I am out trying new things it can really test your patience and do your head in. At this point I will go to my favourite trusted settings and go to a trusted easy spot just to clear my head before finishing for the day. Leaves you in a positive frame of mind for your next hunt.

Below is link to a blog of mine that has what I use as my go to settings.

MINELAB MANTICORE STABILISER SETTINGS

This is a video showing a couple of methods I use one is when you wiggle the coil back and forth just enough to see the target ID change from red to black and this can be a dead giveaway of a good target next to iron. Also notice how I move around a target to get myself into a position where I believe the detector is picking up both targets. This is what I call the visualising method and is in my opinion invaluable when you can master it. What I tr to do is paint a picture in my mind of what is in the ground and when you have done this many times you will start to be able to tell the difference between multiple targets as easy as a single individual target. Remember everything you detect has a distinct signature according to its composition. I can tell quite easily these days what the actual signature of a good coin and lets say a pull tab that are virtually right on top of each other sounds and reacts. Like I said even this combination will have its own signature due to the two different compositions and how they react together. Ah the excitement of challenging yourself to think outside of the box. There is absolutely nothing better than finding a good coin or relic that others have clearly missed simply because you have put in the effort and challenged yourself to think differently.

Anyone can be lazy and cherry pick but if you want to rise above then only you can do that for yourself. So do yourself a flavor and Step Off The Karmic Hamster Wheel. Thought for the day stop doing the same thing over and over like a Hamster spinning it that damn wheel and going nowhere. Challenge yourself.

PINPOINT LOCKED ON – NOW DIG

My fail proof way to pinpoint a target so that you are right on the mark, saving time and minimal disruption to the site. Less time locating and digging means more targets while detecting and in turn more finds for the day. My LOCKED ON TARGET METHOD involves the opposite to standard pinpointing and when you get used to it you will always use it for the final pinpoint. It is ok to use both methods together so that you have a fairly good idea of where the target is and this is where the LOCKED ON TARGET METHOD comes into play. The idea is to get as close over the top of the target or where you think it is and hold the coil only about an inch or 2.5cm above the target and then engage the pinpoint. At this point the pinpoint mode will only lock on to the selected target that is directly under the coil where the lug connects the shaft to the coil. It is almost like missile lock on a fighter plane before you fire or in our case dig. Then when you move the coil closer to the target that you have locked onto it will make a sound where it is in the ground but be aware that if there is another target close by this will also respond to the pinpoint function, although you will clearly tell the difference between them. You will have to practice a lot but when you get good at it you can actually tell where the deeper target or better target is in relation to others that may be present, by watching the pinpoint locator on the screen at the same time. There will be a video attached that shows how this works, but like I said, you will not master it straight away, however, when you do I guarantee you will use it all the time.

The next video shows how you can actually use this method to separate multiple targets when pinpointing. Hope you master this method and happy hunting.

MINELAB MANTICORE STABILISER SETTINGS

Thanks for your patience on waiting for the settings for the Minelab Manticore while using it with the new stabiliser function. I hope that you can get plenty of use out of them and would fully appreciate feedback on any tweaking that anyone does to improve these settings, but so far they are working a treat for me. I have included a video so that you can hear what I listen for while I am detecting, good luck and hope you find heaps.

SETTINGS

Detect Screen – I actually run my sensitivity at the maximum and although it’s chatty and noisy you will still hear the targets amongst the noise. I always run my detectors as hot as I can but if you can’t handle the constant chatter then simply turn it down to where you are comfortable. (although I do suggest putting your big boy pants on and at least trying to get used to the chatter – YOU WILL FIND MORE lol)

Frequency – I always run in Multi IQ because you have a broader range so all the frequencies are working together when over targets and therefore I believe it enhances the targets response. Hence more information allows you to quickly identify the target and make a decision to dig or not to dig because that my friends is the question.

Target Tone Regions – My choice is 5-Tone because it gives me more stability within each region and therefore it gives me a better idea of the target by its signature. When I talk signatures I am relating to the fact that each coin has its own signature or sound according to its composition but this can obviously be distorted due to coin orientation in the ground. The more you find the more evident this will become to you and eventually become like second nature. In saying this though when choosing your Target Tones it all comes down to individual choice for everyone.

5-Tone Region Settings – My 5-Tone settings are to cater for Australian coins, so again this area of settings will completely depend on your country and what you are hunting for. For any Australian detectorists reading this you will notice that the region 4 is set quite tight as to cater for our $1 & $2 coins because they can be a bit erratic when they are shallow or on the surface.

Search Mode – I simply run All-Terrain General because it works best in our parks in Australia due to the high levels of trash and coin compositions. Again this will come down to preference according to where you are detecting. There is a great balance between target separation and trash rejection that I believe makes it better.

Audio Theme – Enhanced seems to offer the best of both worlds if you are in high EMI areas as I often am given I detect in and around the city a lot. This allows me to crank the sensitivity right up to maximum and still be able to hear any repeatable signals that are at depth. I have found coins as deep as 11 inches or 28 cm and regularly pull coins from 8 inches or 21 cm without much trouble.

Enhanced Settings – Settings within the enhanced mode are something that I believe enhances deeper targets but I have had this discussion with a few technicians and they say that it probably has no effect at all but hey each to their own. My threshold runs so I can just hear it and I set the pitch as high as it will go. I understand that this will drive some people nuts and if that is the case then just turn it down so you can’t hear it or don’t run it at all. As I said it is a controversial one. I also run in medium because I like to hear the signal strength so that I can determine if it is a deeper target.

Ferrous Limits – This depends entirely on the individual but I run the standard preset.

Ferrous Tones – I have always set this as low as it goes because you want as much contrast between ferrous and non ferrous signals. This will make your good signals really stand out and if you do get a target that sounds ok where it’s falsing on iron, a quick full metal scan will cause the iron to give off a deep grunt. I also like to crank the ferrous volume right up high as well.

Ferrous Tones Stabiliser – This brings us to the latest addition to the functionality of the Manticore. I believe strongly this is an absolute game changer. I have this on all the time and adjust according to where I’m detecting. I find 1 works best for me but I am sure that some of the sites in the UK and Europe will benefit with going up slightly higher. This will come down to your preference but I for one will probably always have this on, even if it’s on the lowest setting.

Recovery Speed – Love running mine at 7 – 8 due to the heavy trash sites that I detect in but if you are in lower trash areas you are better off in a lower setting because you will probably get a bit more depth.

The video below shows what I listen for when I’m detecting to give you a bit of an idea of what the targets sound like. Make sure you take notice of the signals because they are often broken up and not a good solid signal but you will get used to that quickly. Happy hunting all and as I always say, ‘you are only one swing away from a great find’.

Stay tuned, I am going to do a video on how I pinpoint because I use a fail safe way to be right on the target every time. I call it the LOCKED ON TARGET METHOD.

Thought for the day – The sky is always blue! even if there are clouds in the way.

Manticore Rising Sun

Well the new stabiliser setting is working a treat in trashy areas that have rusty iron targets littered everywhere. I have tried to detect this area before and found it way too trashy to work successfully and always found myself moving on pretty quickly. I found this time as I worked around a bit slower, the Manticore was able to separate the targets and also make a clear distinction between a good target and an iron falsing. You can clearly here the difference between these targets and by referring to the on screen information it is really easy to see the difference as well. I had another good hunt for about 2 hours even though it was cold and wet. I have attached a video of the rising sun badge live dig. Keep an eye on the TID numbers as you will see how erratic they can be but the actual audio doesn’t jump around as much as you would think. I am putting together some more videos and settings that I use that will show exactly what to listen for.

These are a couple of the Threepence cleaned up to show the only two variations of the Australian coin that were minted. The find of the day was definitely the rising sun badge and it’s always great when they turn up. Happy hunting all and the settings should be up tomorrow after I edit the video that will be attached.

This is the dirty looking brooch in the bottom of the days finds, came up pretty good.

Minelab Manticore Upgrade

Hi all well its my last few hunts have been awesome and although we don’t have the luxury of thousands of years of history and the possibility of finding a Viking hoard or the such in Australia it is still great to get out and dig up our young but interesting history. There was a few tweaks to the software upgrade since my last post and the finds have been coming thick and fast. I have been alternating between the bottomless pit and one of my favorite places in the heart of Adelaide city.

As you can see there where quite a few older pennies and half pennies, 1 & 2 cent pieces, a 1914 silver shilling and one half silver coins plus a few spendable modern coins. The best couple of finds were a couple of old medals one being a 1900 South Australian Boer/Transvaal War Peace Medal. This cross shaped bronze medal was struck to commemorate the end of the Boer War 1899-1902. For anyone interested this is a great link that explains the conflict and what transpired during this period. https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/atwar/boer

The second medallion was quite interesting and I was informed that it was possibly from The Knights Templar – The Knights Templar was a large organization of devout Christians who carried out important missions during the medieval era. Excerpt from Wikipedia -The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon (Latin – Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici), also known as the Order of Solomon’s Temple, the Knights Templar, or simply the Templars, was a military order of the Catholic faith, and one of the wealthiest and most popular military orders in Western Christianity. They were founded circa 1119, headquartered on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and existed for nearly two centuries during the Middle Ages.

As you can see from the finds these have come from heavily detected areas in the city of Adelaide and I believe this is due to the separation abilities and the stabilizing software upgrade of the Minelab Manticore. I did mention that I would share the settings that I am running and that will be over the next week starting in a couple of days time and then ongoing for about a week. I do have a few theories on some settings that I feel will be even more beneficial but I will know the outcome in a week or two. I am also putting together some videos on the settings and will be doing some live hunts and digs so you can here the target responses. All the best and happy hunting until next time.

Minelab Manticore Magic

Well its been awhile, three years to be more precise since my last post. Since the release of the Minelab Manticore I have been able to go over some of my old sites that have been hammered over the years. Probably one of my favourite spots to detect is a place I call the bottomless pit that has produced literally thousands of coins over the years. I had kind of stopped detecting here as the targets were getting very few and far between. To describe the ground at the Pit it is probably the most reactive Adelaide plains soil that I have come across as it makes the pin-pointer go off continuously while looking for a target. To my surprise and or shock it started producing again and not just a few targets but there have been many and I will explain why below. If you type Bottomless Pit into the search you will get about 20 posts that relate to this incredible spot.

As I do have the privilege of field testing for Minelab I get the opportunity to try new things which is the case here. There has been a lot of talk surrounding issues with the Manticore and iron falsing so I have been working with Minelab on a software update, so far with what I believe to be a great outcome. Whenever there is something new happening with field testing I do always end up at the pit because it has been so heavily detected and a great place to test as it has it all, reactive soil, EMI, rusty iron, old nails and pretty much anything else that will test the best of detectorists. When I started it was evident that there was something different with the upgrade because I started to find targets that had been clearly missed by other detectors. I have run the Etrac, CTX 3030, Vanquish and Equinox over this area many times over the years. There have also been other people I know that have also been over this ground as well. One thing I noticed was that a lot of the bigger targets were either previously masked by trash or something close by that would have interfered, this brought me to the conclusion that these were found because of the separation capabilities of Minelab’s Manticore.

The greatest difference was that I was getting a lot of targets that were clearly on their own with minimal interference from other targets just the reactive soil and the EMI being the main issue. If you look at the pictures above take note of the amount of smaller targets. To explain the coins the majority of small ones are actually Australian one cent pieces. This was interesting to me because they are quite small weighing only 2.60 gm, diameter 17.65 mm and 97% copper with zinc and tin in them. The silver coins in the picture often have a broken iffy signal on any detector so also can pose as a bit of a challenge. The majority of these targets were from between 20 – 25 cm or 8 – 10 inches with the occasional one slightly deeper.

Australian One Cent

I have been back to some of my other spots and have had similar results and will be posting some more blogs later. Keep posted as I will release the settings that I think work best in an up and coming blog hopefully with some videos included. My conclusion to the changes is that if you take time to experiment with your settings you will be pleasantly rewarded with some great finds. Until next time happy hunting and remember you are just one swing away from a great find.

Thought for the day: Success is not a to-do list but primarily a way of BEING.

Normanton QLD Old Cobb & Co Site

Hi all, had to start with this pic because there is a lot of great things in life but one of my favorite is spending time with my lovely wife never mind detecting together because  that just takes the cake. While we were travelling around Australia last year we came across a great camping spot just out of Normanton QLD at Leichhardt Lagoon. Not only was this an amazing place to stay but there was an old Cobb & Co stop right across the road and need I say for a detectorist this is like waving a red rag at a bull. I was chomping at the bit all night and dreaming of amazing finds even though I had been told by the locals that they had detected the area but as you know not everyone finds it all.

We had certainly found the spot alright with a heap of really old glass scattered all over the ground. There were some really interesting old bits of glass but unfortunately there were no whole bottles to be had.

We were quite happy when we started digging up some great early finds. We could certainly tell by the lack of easy targets though (especially old coins) that the area had been detected but we were able to concentrated on an area that was probably the rubbish dump. The other thing in our favor was having the Minelab Equinox 800’s because this site had only had older technology detectors over it. Sometimes these spots can produce some amazing finds as was the case here. The best find was one of our first and it was a bar coaster from around 1900 advertising John Robertson & Son Dundee Fine Old Scotch Whisky.

John Robertson was a Scotch Whisky merchant and distiller from Moray-shire Dundee and was established in 1827 but later in 1896 became a limited company. Below is an excerpt from Alfred Barnard’s  “The Whisky Distilleries Of The United Kingdom”

“Founded in 1896 by John Robertson & Son, the Dundee whisky blenders who, along with Watson’s, lost warehouses and stock in the great 1906 fire. Coleburn began production in 1898 for Robertson’s who would eventually sell the distillery to the Clynelish Distillery Co. in 1916. Production had ceased just 3 years prior to the sale. Production ran in starts and stops as ownership changed among the companies that would eventually merge under the vast Diageo umbrella. The distillery was closed in 1985 and was later dismantled. The main building is now a hotel while the warehouses have been contracted out to age the stocks of Duncan Taylor. ”

I just love digging up these old historical pieces and can only but wonder what stories they could tell of the early history in these regions. We kept at it for a few hours digging up many different bits and pieces with the next best find being an old black powder flask. These are a great find because nine out of ten are really ornate with great hunt scenes embossed into them. This one is probably the best one that I have found having a hare and a couple of what look like pheasants on it.

Most of the other finds were very typical for this type of site and its era. We just love these old sites because we always come away learning something new from our early history and what they drank etc. Happy hunting all and stay safe.

Trashy Areas At Old Sites

Hi all hope all is well during  these hard times and you are all staying safe. Not long and we will be back out there at it without restrictions swinging the wand and enjoying the finds. In saying that I was able to go to an old site that I have been to before and decided that I was going to go slow over a very trashy area that I had done and see what I may have missed. It started out as most hunts with the usual trashy targets and bits of old galvanized roof that had broken up over the years. My first decent target was a really nice women’s buckle probably from the late 1800’s by the look of it. This certainly got me a bit more enthused as I thought that I was going to have a bit of an average day.

Although it wasn’t an outstanding session I still scored some good finds including a couple of South Australian dog registration tags. One of these was in fair condition but the other one has definitely seen better days. They are great to find and I still love digging them up even though I have found heaps over the years.

The rest of the day was pretty good with a mixed bag that included a half penny that was worn too smooth to tell what it was, an interesting button with an anchor on it, a french made 12 gauge end off of a shotgun case and a few other bits and pieces. Goes to show the old low and slow method is quite effective around trashy areas. I just want to say that one of the biggest mistakes in detecting is presuming that every site has been detected clean. With a bit of perseverance and patience you could still find something that’s been missed.

Happy hunting and stay safe.

 

Social Distancing Over Old Ground

I suppose one of the great things about this hobby besides what you unearth, Is that is is very much a lone thing to do and actually creates natural social distancing. I made a call to the police department to check if I was able to go out into our parks in South Australia and they informed me that if I am on my own there is absolutely no problem. Armed with the facts I ventured out to one of my old areas that I have only run the Minelab CTX 3030 and the Etrac over with good success to see if the Equinox 800 would sniff out any more targets that may have been missed or were undetected. This area as you can see is quite trashy in spots but I wanted to dig more of the larger targets this time because there has been a really nice cricket buckle found at this location. I had a great day  because I was able to get out and about and did manage some nice finds as well.

My first coin was actually my best for the day and was one of the rarer Australian sixpences in a 1917-M in exceptional condition. The 1917-M Sixpence was the second year in the series to be produced at the Melbourne Mint hence the M. Total mintage for the year was 1,632,000 which was quite typical but despite this it is quite scarce in most grades and finding one in this condition was awesome. Collectors do seek these when they are in good condition like this one.

It turned out to be one of those memorable hunts as the coins kept coming over a couple of hours. I think that most of the coins were actually masked by trash and missed by previous detectors but 3 of the pennies and the Florin were just overlooked being closer to the road where I hadn’t detected much.

Threepence’s due to their smallish size are often hard to detect if there is a bit of trash around but I am convinced that I found them due to the technology in the Minelab Equinox 800. I will be going over a lot of my old spots from years ago to see what I can find and will keep the posts coming. Until next time keep safe and remember to social distance the very lives you help to save is worth it. Happy hunting.

Barrow Creek WWII Camp

The following morning before heading further North I had a couple of hours to spare so I fired up the Equinox and continued on from where I left of the day before. There were still a few targets around and thankfully hardly any flies yet.  I managed a couple more finds including an awesome propeller pin that is more than likely from an Australian Air Force Leading Airman of the 1939 – 45 period and an Australia shoulder pin. I did get a few more cool finds before we headed off but if anyone is up that way there are still some good targets to be found.

Happy hunting all.