Recovery and Response

This week we continue our series on metal detector features where we pick a feature and break it down to how it works and how it should be used this week it is the turn of recovery and response, We chat about what it is how it works and where to use it. 

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Transcript

0:08

Everybody. Welcome to episode 147 of the Metal Detecting Show podcast. My name is Kiran and I have been metal detecting for the last 30 years. This week we continue our series on features, talking about recovery. So let's get on with the show, everybody. The sun is shining. I see newspapers full of stories and pictures of beaches full to the brim are, as we say, full to the gobbles with people sunbathing and topping up their color. So if you are a beach detectorist like me, it's time to get out there and hit those beaches every evening. Because the sunbathing population is possibly bursting at the seams right now, especially if you're in Ireland and the UK. So make sure to get out there. A gal out there myself this week I got the opportunity to detect on a private beach of the country. I didn't have much hope for it because essentially it is a private beach and as you know, you need a high population of people for fines. So I didn't find much. However, I did have the opportunity to practice a few techniques, such as grading and refining my pinpointing and find recovery technique. And speaking of recovery, that's what we're talking about this week. Not find recovery, but recovery as a feature of the detector. And this will be the second part of our series where I pick each feature of a detector and break it down as best they can for you guys to try and understand a little bit better. I'm by no means an expert, and this is my version of what I believe is happening. So there is that warning that I must put out there at all times. So last time we talked about ground balance and mineralization, and in that discussion we talked about target masking or even ground masking, where the mineralization in the ground masked out the target. Well, on normal ground, you can also have masking that occurs target masking, and that occurs when you have two finds close together and one finds signal masks out, the other find completely. That's essentially called target masking. And to combat that, your metal detector has a feature. It may be something that can be manually adjusted or it may be something that's automatically in there are just set in house at a certain level, and that's called recovery. Now, I did do an episode previously on Recovery. It was episode 116 Rant response and recovery. However, that was more around the wars and the tribulations of people presenting air testing as facts on YouTube and how it's very easy to represent a great recovery speed by using air testing online. So recovery is often paired with response, and we're no different today. You can't talk about recovery without talking about response. What the talk about response and recovery, we do actually have to talk about target masking. And like I said, target masking is when one target masks out, the signal from another target, the level of target masking is correlated to the distance the two finds are from each other. So the closer the fines are, the more likely it will be that your detector will target mask out the second signal. This is normally more prevalent when a target is discriminate out. So an iron target that may have a good target right beside to your discrimination may null out the ion target as I should. If you have your detector set up like that. But in doing so, it also masks out the adjacent target, which may be good due to that discrimination target masking just as an effect ion type signals. You can also happen with several targets that you want to actually find within your range. So for example, you may have copper adjacent to a silver coin and that copper signal may null out that silver coin. And if you're only looking for silver to only dig in silver, you may disregard a copper. Now, this is really out there. I think everybody, if they had a good copper signal, would they get I'm just using this as an example to say that it's not just iron signals that mask out. Other finds that can happen with different metals that occur on different parts of the conductivity scale. So how good a target is and how high it is on the conductivity scale has no impact to which target will be masked. The only factor that impacts whether something will be masked is its distance to that other target. And the second target will always be masked depending on your swing direction. So if you're reading from left to right and you're swinging from left to right, your first target will always mask out. The second target. If you're moving your cloud from right to left, you can actually target Moscow the first find. So if you're doing several swings over, you may find that your flip flopping target masking out each other. That's what will give you a signal that jumps around, say, for example. So the distance between the target is the most important factor. Ah, to be more precise about it, the time taken to travel that distance between those two targets is the most important factor. That's why you get the advice to swing a little bit slower if you're experiencing some target masking because that increases the time between those targets on a swing. However, swinging slowly results in less ground being covered, and that's where recovery comes in. Recovery is the time taken for your detector to detect the target processes, identify it, present a audio tone or a VDI signal on your screen, and then return to a base level where there is no target being detected under the detector. Response is a subset of recovery. So like I said, there is a portion of the signal where you detect to find the process to find, and then you respond to the user with whatever the detector identifies to find that. So response is a slow process of recovery. This is a very important thing to remember when you're talking about response and recovery. Realistically, it should be stated as recovery and response. Most modern detectors come with a facility to adjust your recovery speed. However, if you have an older version of a detector, you may have recovery set at a factory preset. And the only way you can really address target masking is by adjusting your swing speed. Like I said previously, the best way to do this is to get out your old test bed, hide your finds close together and adjust your swing speed. You can pick up every one of those finds with ease, but also make note of how fast your swing has to go to create target masking. This only is relevant if you have a detector where you can't adjust recovery, but if you do have a modern detector, you can adjust your recovery speed up and down to best suit the environment you're hunting in. But remember, respawn is a subset of recovery. I'm not sure how long the recovery time is on a processing level. So when you were actually adjusting your recovery speed, I don't believe you're actually adjusting your recovery speed, but you really only adjust the response time. And and here's why. I believe, as you said, your recovery speeds at five on your detector are seven dependent on your detector and that recovery speed equals one second. That's one second for your detector to process the signal, it gets recoil, identify what it believes it is. Present that to you on the video and create a response in a tone. So one second to do all that. So you can't really adjust the processing steps without overclocking the processor on your detector. And this is why I believe the way manufacturers get around the fact that they can't overclock the processor is to adjust the response time to give an overall lower recovery time. So let me go through the example again. So say for the previous example I mentioned where the total recovery time is one second. So say the first phase of a recovery period is always a half a second and a second phase. The response phase at a certain set and say five is another half a second. So your total recovery in response is one second. You can't do just half a second processing piece of recovery, but you can adjust the response. You open your recovery speed and the first initial part is still point five of a second, but your response gets adjusted down to say 0.3 of a second. So that gives you the impression that your recovery is 1.8 now as opposed to one whole second. Again, if you adjust your recovery up a little bit higher, the first phase, the processing phase is still half a second, but your second phase, the response phase is shortened again, 2.2 of a second. So your total recovery time is 0.7 of a second. Now, this is just an example of concocted in my head on how I believe it is best to explain how it works. And this rings true because as you adjust your recovery speed up, your response tone shortens. This allows your detector to get back into that base level phase a lot quicker by shortening your response time, giving the impression that your overall recovery is faster. I hope it makes sense, and I hope it is clear that adjusting your recovery up in particular shortens your response time and you can keep going up higher and higher till your response is nearly an unintelligible chant. And that for me is just too short because I believe that you as a user should be using that audio tone back from your detector as part of your own signal processing. And if that tone is too short, you're not going to be able to identify the pitch. Plus, you're not even going to be able to identify the strength of that tone. It's up to you where your recovery speed is set, and that's based on your ability to process the response from your detector. Ultimately, it's about setting yourself up with as much information as possible in the dig, not a conversation that goes on in your head the whole time. Where will you use or should you consider adjusting your recovery speed Recovery is one of those features people love to dig around with and adjust on the fly into Hunt, believing that it's going to help them in recovering more finds. However, for me, it's only worth adjusting recovery based on the level of trash on the site. And in fact, that's what most trash programs do is adjust up your recovery speeds. So for me, if I'm on a beach and I find that I'm getting at least one or two targets under my clothes during a swing, I will tend to adjust my recovery speed. And only then manufacturers like to use recovery speed as an indicator or a KPI that they're detector is more powerful than the competitions. And for me, I would never use recovery as a barometer on the quality of a metal detector because a detectors quality and ability to detect can be down to so many other factors and realistic every time you go, detecting your swing is not going to be consistent. The distance between two targets is not going to be consistent. And having a recovery speed that's adjustable is a good feature to have. However, you can also just the rate you swing to allow for target masking recovery as a feature is great if you have it on your detector to allow you to navigate trashy sites better. But don't be sold on the marketing blurb To say a faster recovery rate is actually better than another detector with a slower recovery rate because ultimately it's the human that's the major variable in the recovery equation. For example, you set it up high, you're naturally going to swing faster or swing the faster your recovery is higher. You're just negating the benefit of adjusting up your recovery speeds. So for the full effect of recovery, make sure your swing is consistent and only adjust it. When you find that you have two or more targets on your swing at any one time. And that's it for this week. Guys, I hope you like this episode of Metal. Take the Joe podcast. They can subscribe, leave the podcast, the positive review on any podcast directly of their choice. We have Patreon. You can buy me a coffee. We are uploading each week, the podcast now on video format on YouTube, going to see all the jumps where you have to edit out all the mistakes. Go look at that. It's highly entertaining. Well, you guys listen. That's it for this week. I'll be back again next week. And most importantly, get out there. Good luck. Don't be digging around with your recovery speed and happy hunting. Why?