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Date Posted: 13:29:05 03/28/03 Fri
Author: Steve Herschbach
Subject: Infinium Discrimination
In reply to: jim straight 's message, "Re: Garrett Infinium" on 02:26:55 03/28/03 Fri

Hi Jim,

I had to run the disc control as high as 5-6 in Hawaii while underwater on the volcanic rock bottom. And I found not only gold but platinum rings. And at good depths.

I have yet to do any serious testing of the disc control but it appears to me that it only is going to tune out very small low conductive targets unless set at near max settings. What is going on is that the Infinium is picking up the salt water. This means it is more sensitive to low conductive items, in this case salt water, than many other pulse units.

In other words many pulse units will not pick up salt water at all. This might seem to be a good thing, but what it is telling you is that the Infinium is set for a lower conductivity range. Increasing the disc control to eliminate salt readings simply gets you to where many other machines are set even at their most sensitive settings.

I prefer a machine that is "hot" and must be tuned down for certain situations to machines that are set at the factory for "safe" stable performance. Like my Gold Bug 2... you have to back off the sensitivity in hot soil. The disc control on the Infinium acts to increase or decrease its sensitivity to low conductive targets, and so in some ways can be thought of as much as a sensitivity control as it is a discrimination control.

What the disc control mostly does is adjust the pulse "delay", or the pause that occurs after a pulse but before the machine goes into the receive mode to "listen" for signals. These signals decay and disappear over time depending on the target, and so a short delay causes low conductive items to be detected. If the delay is short enough even salt water is detectable. As the delay is lengthened the lowest conductive items drop out. The most conductive items are not eliminated within the range of most controls. So from this we can surmise that at the "0" disc setting the Infinium has a very short delay period indeed, as it does pick up wetted salts.

The White's Surf PI Pro has a delay of about 15uS and does not get a salt signal. I've read that anything much shorter than this will cause salt signals, and so the Infinium appears to have a pulse delay of less than 15uS at the "0" disc setting. Increasing the disc setting lengthens the pulse delay until a point is reached where the salt signal is reduced or eliminated.

But the point here is that even at that "reduced" level of sensitivity you are simply getting into the normal area of sensitivity for most diving Pi detectors. And if you can put up with a bit of noise, riding the ragged edge, so to speak, then you can wring every bit of possible performance out of the Infinium.

Again, the VLF analogy. If my Gold Bug 2 is picking up the ground even if properly ground balanced the answer is to back the sensitivity down. You can't find gold if you are picking up the ground! And with the Infinium the disc control must be advanced to eliminate salt signals. You can't find gold if you are picking up salt water!

I know of one person who insisted this was "wrong" and decided his new Infinium therefore would not work for him. His view was that it should not have to be adjusted for salt effects and in his estimation advancing the disc control was going to cause the machine not to perform. He was so convinced of this he would not even try the unit to see it his suppositions were correct!

But even my GP Extreme has a "salt" setting which does the same thing. It reduces the sensitivity of the GP to low conductive salt signals. I'll do some bench testing with Infinium to try and determine the loss of depth/sensitivity to gold targets caused by advancing the disc control.

Steve Herschbach

Garrett Infinium

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