I have been using an arrangement on my Baron Goldtrax that I think is even more versatile and effective. I think it allows me to identify some round tabs and leave them in the ground without missing out on any rings. I wish some of you Baron guys would try out these settings, if you haven't already, and let me know what you think. I especially like these settings with the 5.5 coil.

With these settings, I will be hunting in all metal mode and checking with discriminate mode. Set the discriminate mode in iron reject. You will understand why I do this as we go along. Iron Reject is a fixed setting that George Payne refers to as just rejecting salt water but remember that it is also rejecting some small foil and small gold items. Dont worry, we aint gonna miss any of them itty bitty thangs because we are gonna spot them first in all metal mode. Now throw a ringtab on the ground. I use one with the beaver tail sticking straight out but if most ringtabs you find have the tail folded, you might wont to use one of those. Next, adjust your high/low tone break point to do the hi/lo warble over the ringtab. So now when you hear the lo/hi warble, you know you are hearing a ringtab. Try speeding up and slowing down you coil speed sweeping over the tab and see if you dont notice the tab trying to go a little more hi tone with a faster sweep and a little more lo tone with a slower sweep. Your chances of finding jewelry or a ring that will sound like that is just about zilch. A ring in that conductance range will give a much better sound with a faster coil sweep whereas the ringtab, being irregular shaped, will tend to go scratchy.

So you start hunting in all metal mode. The Goldtrax will indicate iron with that gawdawful staccato sound plus the little red LED light flashes on the control panel. Since I belt mount, I just go by the audio sound to eliminate iron. A really good thing happens here. Almost all bottle caps have enough iron to cause a stacatto sound, we are eliminating them Even in wet conditions, where bottle caps sometimes fool us with higher conductivity readings, the Goldtrax will still identify them in all metal mode by the audio sound. Be careful of weak iron stacatto sounds as that could be gold or a small jewlry item. If you hear any sound thats not iron, switch to Discrimination mode.

If you have switched to disc and dont hear nothing, that is a good thing:-) That means what you heard in all metal is being discriminated out in disc. which places it in the conductance range between iron and saltwater. I have a couple of small rings and a gold chain that falls in that range but more often than not, you will find foil there. I did find a 22 caliber bullet at four inches in this range also.

If you switch to Disc. and hear the lo/hi warble you know you are over a ring tab. If you get a good solid low tone you know it is something in the conductance range below a ringtab and above saltwater. Nickels hit very solid here and so do some low conductance jewlry items and of course, more foil.

If you switch to Disc and get a very solid hi tone, you are in the conductance range from ringtab up thru coins with some jewelry items also.

So there you have it. The Goldtrax is very accurate in indicating iron by audio sound once you become familiar with the variations in the Stacatto audio. It can identify them pesky bottle caps for us. It can exactly identify that very small range between iron and saltwater. It can identify some ringtabs so we dont have to dig them but still get rings in that conductance range. It gives a low tone for nickels and other low conductive items. It gives a high tone so we can dig coins and square tabs and such in the high range, including indian heads and wheaties that some push button and switcherator machines discriminate out.

I dig Square tabs without too many cuss words after I found out that a quarter with some low conductance item like a nickel or gob of foil laying within a couple of inches of it reads like a Square tab.

With the settings I am using, I still dig ring tabs with tail folded or those that are mutilated and warped out of shape cause they still give either a good low or high tone. I used the ringtab with the extended tail as the point to set my tone break point because I believe I can better differintuate between them and a ring.

Different detectors use some different ways of discriminating or alerting us as to what conductance range our targets are in. Ive always appreciated the versatility of this old Goldtrax. I could just as easily leave it in discrimination mode in the iron accept range with the tone break point set on nails and dig every high tone but the settings I have described are fun to play around with and allows me to eliminate iron better as well as bottle caps and some ring tabs. Makes me feel plumb technified:-) The Goldtrax has seperate sensitivity controls for all metel and discrimination modes and in my good dirt with both modes pumped up as high as they will go and that little 5.5 coil, I can get some serious depth, like about 8 inches if Im hunting careful. Does everything but dig its own hole. Im thinking of adding the deep hunter module to it and use it for blowing post holes:-)

The discrimination knob on the Cointrax Baron changes the break point for the audio tones.  I set it to the 9 o,clock position on my Baron with iron audio on, that gives low tones for iron and small foil, split high/low tones on medium foil and nickels and high tones on everything else.  As most gold rings fall in the foil/nickel range,  having the audio giving the split tone is a constant alert that the target could be gold.  Also, the preset sensitivity on the Cointrax is too high for many areas.  I use the turn on mode, or Demo, most of the time and the sensitivety is preset to 3.  I've found the Cointrax to run more stable by reducing the sensitivity to 5, and even 9 in some conditions.  Very little depth is lost until the setting is at 7 or below.

For those who use the base Baron, ProHunter Baron and possibly the GoldTrax module. If you turn the iron audio off by pushing the disc knob the discrimination range changes. Most medium and small foil will be rejected at 0 discrimination as well as iron. That's good. What is not good is that a large number of smaller gold rings and all gold chains except large ones will also be rejected. I checked 20 small rings and 3 different size chains with my Baron converted back to the Base unit and with iron audio off it rejected 9 of the rings and all 3 chains, even with the 5.5" coil. One of the chains is a 14 kt medium size chain. With iron audio on and disc set to reject nails it hit on all the rings and chains, even with the chains stretched out.

Jbird posted these tips on Carl's old forum.  The two tones of the Barons help a lot.  If you use JB's "Dig em Cowboy" setting of small iron like nails on low tone and everything else high tone, good targets will mostly be clean hi tones with varying strength of signal.  Deeper the target, weaker the signal.  I know the barons give a strong signal even on deeper targets but they will fade in strength noticably below about 5 to 6 inches.  Lots of my deeper finds were just a tiny hi tone "duh".  If I have any sensitivity adjustment left, I can tune that up to a good solid signal at very respectable depths by raising sensitivity.  Of course very small targets at shallow depths can sound like some coin targets at deeper depths.  Breaks of the game.  If you get a hi tone with just a hint of low tone, that may be a low conductive target or one located very close to iron.  A clear hi tone is a target further up the conductivity scale.  The baron is good about giving 4 way signals on targets that are not masked by very close trash but you can't always ignore two way or even one way signals.  Listen to the two tones and if you are getting a high tone chirp mixed in with low tones, you could have a coin or good target in there.  This varies some by site, depending on what the predominate trash targets are and where you set your tone control.

More tips from Jbird.  The CoinTrax and GoldTrax modules for the Treasure Baron are highly adjustable.  The PRESETS work fine under most ground conditions but for fine tuning to more difficult conditions, the adjustments are very helpful.  My experience has been only with the Goldtrax version but it seems to be almost exactly the same adjustments as on the coin-trax  as near as I can figure without having a cointrax to play with.  Im going to ramble on here and hope some of this may be helpful to ya'll. Contiued on Page 2............