Ground Balance

Hey Everybody. Welcome! To Episode 53 of the metal detecting show podcast. My Name is Ciaran and I have been Metal Detecting for nearly 30 Years. This week I want to discuss with you my first monster giveaway and I get deep into Ground Balance with of course updates from My world of Detecting. So Lets Get on with the Show.

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Hey everyone before we start I want to thank you for listening to the podcast and I hope you enjoy the show this week  but before we begin I want to give you the following information.

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Content:

Hi All I hope your awash with gold and if not gold then at least some silver. Firstly My adventures in detecting resulted in me finding a new spot to hunt within my 5K zone, Another Harbour beach spot where all the finds are generally toast but I have to say I only got about 90 minutes in as Ireland were playing England in the rugby and I wanted to make sure to see that but also Finds started to come up giving me the warm fuzzies of a great site and it was then I thought this spot is so good I don’t want to keep hunting I want to savour it and enjoy it over a couple of hunts. Has that every happened to you that a spot is so good that you thought I need to slow down here so I can drag it out as long as possible just so you can enjoy it more, needless to say ill be back there this weekend tide and weather permitting.

So onto the topic a lot of you have been waiting for and that ground balance…….

Hahah only joking I am of course talking about the shows first giveaway.

So the intention was to do a give away for only my subscribers but I don’t know who you are.

Podcasting is not like youtube where you know who your subscribers are and all you have to do is tell them to subscribe and pop a comment in the comments section to entry the draw and don’t forget to smash the like button.

Unfortunately with podcasting I only know the people who interact with the show and no one else. I don’t even know how many subscribers I have, all I can tell is I get just over 1000 listeners each week and from my best guess I have about 660 subscribers because of this ambiguity and the fact the price is quiet large prize at approx 600 dollar I felt it was best and probably the most fairest to employ a third party service to manage the draw and that service is KingSumo.

So how it’ll work is you will click the link in the show notes below which will bring you to a webform where you can enter the draw by entering your email and that’s it your entered,

However Kingsumo has another cool feature that if you complete certain tasks you get more entries for example. If you subscribe to the podcast on itunes or Spotify you will get 5 more entries to the Draw and don’t worry if you have already subscribed once you click the link it’ll detect that you already have subscribed and you will get your 5 entries. Also by using Kingsumo I can guarantee that I comply to all social media terms and conditions which you can read on the webform if you so wish. So the draw will run from Now on release of this episode till the 23rd of April at 3PM UTC +0 so that’s 4 weeks for you to get your entries in with Kingsumo announcing the winner at 3PM UTC +0 the following day the 24th of  April. 

So what prize are you entering for, well as you may or may not know a great prize happened to come into my possession recently and that’s an Minelab Equinox 600 valued at approx. 600 dollars.

So I am putting up this brand new Never Used Equinox 600 still in box up for grabs. Ill also include a New Copy of the Equinox Series by Andy Sabisch or otherwise known as the equinox Bible and I’m not finished ill add in some merch from the podcast as well so a great prize which I will ship anywhere in the world and  the draw is open to anybody in the world.

So the winner gets a great prize but for clarity what do I get will I get to see how many subscribers I actually have, I am assuming every one of you will enter. I get to promote the podcast across all social media and YouTube which can only help the podcast reach more people and get better as a result.  It this Experiment is a success ill make it a regular feature of the podcast as it might be better to spend money on prize’s for draws rather than facebook ad’s

So click on the link below it’s just there go one do it.

Best of luck everyone

On onto todays topic and that’s Ground Balance.

The oft forgotten red haired child of detector features ground balance but you cant talk about Ground balance without first discussing Mineralization so to put it simply Mineralization or mineralized soil is soil that can have a negative effect on the performance of your detector.

It can cause your detector’s depth to shorten, Cause Target ID to be off and cause target masking of small finds under the coil.

Some people refer to mineralized ground or hot ground as having a large iron content with  Iron oxide particles giving this ground a reddish color just look at the  gold fields of Australia for an example of this.

In fact Mineralized Soil or ground is dirt that has a large percentage of magnetic Susceptible particles or salts such as ferites and hematite’s present.

These magnetic Susceptible particles cause your detector to react in a similar fashion as it would with a normal find would under the coil. The more magnetic susceptible particles the greater the EMF Fog created in the receiver coil.

So to be clear mineralized soil acts just like a normal find on your detector in that it creates a signal in the receive coil which the detector has to process and handle. think of it like driving your car in the fog with your full headlights on. the field of view, resolution and distance you can see ahead is drastically handicapped but what do you do in a fog you switch on your low beams and go a little slower and this is essentially what Ground balance does.

It alters the detector to best see in the fog of Mineralized or hot Ground.

So how does it do this? Well! I think the easiest way to describe how it works is that, it is a separate discrimination program that runs alongside the normal operating program discriminating out the noise from the Mineralized ground.

To get even more complicated consider that your detector operates across several frequencies and these signals are pumped in the ground. what is received is one signal at any one time and when there is no metal under the coil your essentially receiving a signal from the ground and this signal is affected depending on how much magnetic suseptable particles are in the ground.

the received signal is shifted in proportion to how much magnetic suseptable particles are in the dirt the received signal is said to be out of phase or shifted out of phase.

The closer to 180 degrees out of phase the received signal is the more magnetic susceptible particles are in the ground.

Brief Tech Time out on what phase means. From the The CWNA definition of Phase v106. Phase is not a property of just one signal but instead involves the relationship between two or more signals that share the same frequency. The phase involves the relationship between the position of the amplitude crests and troughs of two waveforms.

Phase can be measured in distance, time, or degrees. If the peaks of two signals with the same frequency are in exact alignment at the same time, they are said to be in phase. Conversely, if the peaks of two signals with the same frequency are not in exact alignment at the same time, they are said to be out of phase."

So in our example the magnetic susceptible particles cause the received signal to be out of phase with the transmitted signal and the separate discrimination program is tuned either automatically manually or is pre-programmed in the factory to filter out the phase shifted signal.  Most beginner detectors come pre programmed or fix tuned for Ground balance while most intermediate to advanced detectors allow you manually or automatically ground balance. If you are using manual ground balance make sure to check it periodically but be carefully over use of manual GB can have the same effect as the thing your trying to remove  mineralised soil in itself giving the same results like your target id being off your depth shortened.  I prefer to use auto GB and pump my detector everytime is start a hunt even though I probably don’t need to as most of my hunting grounds are low Mineralization but I do it anyways and especially if I move hunting areas.

Do you need to use Ground balance or are you like me and only use it just in cases.

Wrap Up 

That’s it for this week’s I hope you liked this episode of the metal detecting show podcast.

Check out our website www.themetaldetectingshow.com for this episode show notes.

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If you like this content and would like more please don’t hesitate to tell your friends and don’t forget to hit that subscribe button.

Once again, I hope you have enjoyed this episode and we will chat to you all again next week. 

Get out there eyes down and Happy Hunting.