Understanding my AT Pro

[hotmill]

Spent a few hours on the beach tonight as I noticed a few nice cuts have appeared on it after some rough seas. I'm still having a job getting to grips with machine to be honest. Had it set up on standard mode and coins, auto balance, iron audio off, 1 notch off the discrimination.
Nearly all the targets coming up were indicating at 20-25 cm, when i was digging down to that depth and finding nothing it was still indicating more to dig, I was getting to the water level and not finding anything. Surely the stuff cant be that deep can it? I was getting fed up digging that deep and not finding anything. I thought it was a beach detector, help please, what am i doing wrong?

[Tombs]

i had the same problem unfortunately i dont know the answer

[biro]

I had this on my ace 250. Someone said that if the hole is big enough and you push the detector in the hole. it will still ding as the object may be in the side of the hole. It maybe, just mean that the pinpointing is slightly out by a few inches.
Biro.............

[pinkypixie]

Yes, I had that same problem with the 250, learning by trial and error i've found that it usually isn't deeper but in the side walls somewhere. As I haven't a pinpointer, I just dig wide enough to get coil in and turn it so it's facing the wall and find it that way, as Biro said.

Hope that helps

[oliver]

Sound like you are missing the target a touch and it is to one side i get this with my PI on small iron just have to get used to it or dig a bigger wider hole.

[peanut]

I find this occasionally on my Euroace. Although you carefully pinpoint the target it still seems to be one the edge of the hole. Adjacent ferrous can maybe throw the pinpointer off target if you are using discrim.
The other possibility is that the target is very tiny and you are burying it in the spoil from the hole. The Euroace regularly picks up targets much smaller than a .177 airgun pellet and its not easy to find one of them in wet sand

[hotmill]

Thanks for the replies.

As an experiment on the beach yesterday when I had this problem I turned the sensitivity right down so it was only picking up targets down to 15cm and I was finding stuff so I am kind of confident that it is giving me a correct indication that something is actually there.
One thing I did notice was that most of the time I had dug down through the sand and had hit a lower level of pebbles and gravel and it was still indicating, I would get the pro pointer out and by this time the hole was starting to fill up with water, I would put the pro pointer in the water and would get a good indication, I would scrape by hand and still nothing!!!!
If I could be really confident that there was a target at the bottom of this massive crater I would dig away all day, it's just the holes are so deep you kingd of start thinking 'this can't be right'

[biro]

I had the same in a field, Just kept digging deeper and deeper. I do not use a pinpointer, only the detector one, but could not find anything. It could well be that it is picking up very small bits and you cannot see them and they just keep getting deeper. In the end if I had dug a 16 inches deep and still had a signal, I just left it, as it happened to about 20% of the indications I was getting. I knew that there had been clay pidgeon shooting where I was, so it could have been buckshot showing but to small to see with the naked eye.
Biro.....................

[Tombs]

i think what a lot of you guys/girls are experiencing is falseing i dont know why this happens but i have been told that it can be because ground balance is out or the sensitivity is to high . when i used my at pro in the sea it did that all the time! im sure that someone knows how to get round it but i couldn't work it out.
falseing happens on land to and it happens with all detectors that i have used apart from my etrac and ctx, im lucky enough to have a small farm so when i get signals that i cant find i am able to leave the holes open and investigate them using diferant detectors and what i found was that it was mostly user error or a false signal and there wasn't anything in the hole or it was large iron next to the hole giving the false signal.
im sure that some of the more experienced guys on hear could explain this better.

[hotmill]

Cheers for the replies. I went down to the beach last night and used the Pro-coins mode and knocked back the senitivity, as a result I was only getting targets down to 15cm, I was digging them and on the whole I was actually finding items. It may be that I am actually getting indications of a target but as they are so deep or very small I am missing them. I noticed last night that with it in pro mode that the volume of the indication was a better indicator to go on than the generic 'ding' in standard mode, it just may take a bit of time for me to get used to using it in pro mode and trusting what it is telling me about target depth.
I had similar confidence problems with my Ace 250 but as somebody on here told me that the one thing you can trust with a Garrett is that if it is telling you there is a target down there, there will be a target down there somewhere! I have to admit that I found that advice to be spot on and somewhere in the bottom/side of a dug hole or a pile of dirt there was always a target, even if it was a ring pull or a tiny flake of iron!

[clint]

Hello Hotmill,
there is a good review by the Ferret regarding the AT on the beach in the Garrett section.Basically,if I remember correctly.Ferret recommends manual ground balance when moving from dry to wet sand and back again and pro mode.The report says he could run in wet sand/mud with just two clicks off top sens.
At the moment I use the Euroace and it sounds like falsing which the Euro is very prone to when you reach wet sand.Ferret will be along soon to put us right on this!

regards

Clint

[monkeyman999]

I also had this issue on ace 250 so I kept digging and after goin down a long way it was a 6 kilo diving weight lol

[biro]

I think I have learnt a lesson here, although I do not have an at pro, i have the 250. It has occured to me that the field that I was detecting in was strewn with a lot of ferrous,so I discriminated that out a couple of notches. But the pin pointer does not discriminate, So the nice ding ding you get now dissapears as you are now picking up a ferrous object nearby. When I go back on this field I will just use the detector by waving the cross method and not use the 250 pinpointer. as that is not a discriminator and will pick up all the ferrous nearby, which in my field is every 2 feet.
REgards Biro..............

[Johnx1]

Yes I have same detector and 9 times out of 10 the object was in the side. However I have also had odd occasion where the coin/object would sink further into the waterlogged level as I dug down. Getting ever further away lol