EMI this week anyone?

Hi Folks, Indy Pinpointer here.

This week, I've been having issues with my DFX acting squirrely.  For the first time, I've had to back down my PAG to 1 and I've had to decrease my DC/AC sensitivity down to levels that only provide me about 3-4 inches of ground penetration.  What is so baffling is these are areas I've searched before with perfect stability.  I've cleaned my coil cover, done a hard reboot (remove battery when machine is booted up) and at times backing down the adjustments above.

Now, one might say I don't know my machine well enough . . . and that may be true on some respects, but that doesn't explain why my buddy, who is using a Minelab E-Trac was having the same issues . . . even while our machines were at least 20 yards apart.  Rebalancing, turning the machines on and off, checking cable connections, nothing seemed to eliminate the issue, so I've concluded it has to be environmental.

Lastly, yesterday I was at a site at least 7 miles from the site we were at today.  I had the same issues there and this was a site that again, has allowed the machine to stay perfectly stable before.

So what do y'all think?  EMI?  Solar flares?  I'm baffled!

Thanks all!

IP

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Thanks for taking a stab at it BJ!  I'll have to look into the items you suggested.

I'm afraid though, that the change to a previously stable site and the fact that my friend was also having issues, points to something external to us both.  I looked around the area I was having issues at yesterday and could find no reasonable external source for EMI.  The park is 145 acres and changing sites in the park didn't seem to help much.  Add to that the fact that I was unstable at a site 7 miles away the day before, and it would seem we are getting more EMI in the Indianapolis area.

One thought I did have was maybe the cell towers turned on additional frequencies recently.  That would explain the coverage of an area 7 miles wide.  I've looked into solar flares and the activity that has occurred in the last week seemed too low to be of any concern.  I certainly hope it isn't that my coil is going bad.  Would a bad coil cause the freakish behavior even at lower power settings (low PAG, low AC and DC sensitivity)?  The machine seems to stabilize when it is set very low.

Thanks again for suggesting other possibilities.

IP

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Oh man Homefire - you are talkin' supernatural stuff! 

It couldn't be that though.  I have a pact with the aliens that as long as I take all the corbomite off of their hands, they'll let me detect without interfering.  (Let's see who among us is enough of a SciFi geek to get the reference - you know, give us a response).

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Hey Homefire:

I don't have a spectrum analyzer - My work is one of a IT software quality expert, which doesn't call for measuring ambient EMI (darn).  What happens is I boot up, load my program, air balance, ground balance and then I get signals anywhere from iron hits to 95 VDI (DFX this is a hot rock).  I've made sure ground balance isn't done over metal and I've looked at the sites I've been hunting and no cellular tower is within sight.  It just goes crazy after balancing.  Hopefully tomorrow, (I'm getting back out then)  I"ll find it was temporary.

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