Even after ground balancing your gold detector some soils in difficult ground conditions produce an unground balanced noise when moving your gold detector across the floor. This is because of all the different interferences from chemicals and minerals underneath the ground. Different terms to describe these different noises are because of difficult ground conditions, they can be hot, variable or saturable. However, you can reduce the difficult ground conditions to better hear the fainter gold nuggets signals by choosing the most suitable gold detector control settings on your metal detector.

In difficult ground conditions, the first thing to try is both ground balancing and swinging the coil at least about 3 centimetres above the ground, and when doing so check whether this clearly reduces the ground noise or not. 

Variable ground means the ground balance requires a different ground balance adjustment to your metal detector from one patch of soil to another it is usually relatively close around the patch of soil. The other meaning is variable hot ground has alternating patches of low and high concentrations of soil signal interference that produces noise. In either case, when the metal detector coil is moved across the ground, the ground balance required for optimal adjustment changes often. In this type of ground, use the Difficult Gold modes and every time you ground balance and after ground balancing, use either Auto or Manual Ground Balance depending on which seems to work best for you. It may pay to swing the coil at least a few centimetres above the more noisy patches.

Some soils can saturate, this is called saturable ground which means that whilst it is possible to get near zero signal when the coil is raised and lowered down to several centimetres above the ground surface, lowering the coil below a certain height produces an un-ground-balanced signal. Do not ground balance moving the coil up and down only use this up-and-down coil movement with your metal detector to check what type of noisy soil you happen to be detecting. In saturable or severe soils, the height below which an un-ground-balanced signal occurs is dependent on the soil’s findings and your metal detectors settings. In such soils, this saturation noise ‘threshold height’ is usually, but not always, less than about 3 cm above the soil surface for the Difficult setting, and usually a bit less than this for the Severe setting, but maybe as high as 15 cm for the General setting.

If your metal detector happens to be noisy when the coil is being held still, and therefore this noise is not caused by a signal from the soil, this noise is probably caused by Electromagnetic interference. Use either Manual or Auto Noise Cancel to minimize this noise.

For any of the above difficult ground conditions, there is the option of making further adjustments to the metal detector controls. The Sensitivity control can be adjusted lower than the default setting of 9 and the Audio Smoothing control can be changed from Low too High to assist reduce noisy soil ground signals to a better level.

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