New guy looking for some help.

Hello, and welcome to the hobby I think you will have fun doing it. I dont know what kind of features your detector has But most people will tell you the simpler the better when you're first starting out. What I would do if I were you is set up a test garden with coins of different sizes quarter, dime, nickel, penny, maybe even two of each and bury them at different depths between 2 and 6 inches, and about 6 inches to a foot apart and just experiment. You can also bury some pull tabs from soda cans,(or beer cans if you prefer), and nails or whatever other junk you can find lying around the reason you do this is so you can hear the different tones your detector makes with different metals. Also use headphones so you can hear tones bettter. Hope this helps!
                                  Foiled Again

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Compass went out of business a few years ago and left no legacy web site for users.

One thing you can do is post a picture of the controls here and perhaps someone can advise you on the functions. With detectors of that vintage, the controls are often similar to other brands. In other words, sensitivity is the same on just about all brands. Ground balance is the same on most brands. So, if you post a picture, you'll be sure to get some hints and help.

Welcome aboard! Enjoy!

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Hi Stilllooking

This is what I would do if I were you. Firstly turn the discrimination knob to min then set volume to mid point now place the search head about 1in from the ground and turn the ground balance knob to the left then to the right till it just stops to give an audio signal now place a coin or ring on the ground pas the search coil over it you should get an audio signal if all that works place a pull tab on the ground place the search coil over it and turn the discrimination knob till it cuts the audio out now pas it over the coin what should happen is that when you pass over the coin you gat an audio signal and when you pass over the pull tab you get no signal there is one thing that you must remember the more you have the discriminator turned up the more you will discriminate and you WILL miss on good finds personally I do not use any other discriminator other than my ears they can tell me what is in the ground  and how big it is. There are probably other settings but as I do not know what they are I can?t tell you what to do with them.

Regards Xavier 


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Xavier

First of all, the way you have your unit mounted means you have to keep the speaker switch off. That's connected to a mercury tilt switch that turned off the speaker when you set the detector on the ground to dig. The auto/manual switch is for the ground balance and tuning. When in manual, the ground balance is adjusted by the ground balance knob at the top. Normally, that's a 10 turn pot meaning that it takes 10 rotations to go from the start to the end of the rotations.

The tuning is set like this. Set the machine to Manual. Lift your detector away from any metal and slowly turn the tuning until you just get a faint buzz or signal. Bring it near metal and you should hear it get louder. Make sure you don't go completely silent or it could need retuning. Do that as often as you must. In auto mode, the tuning and ground balance are set automatically.

Discriminate is set according to what you want to eliminate. In such an old machine, there was very little accuracy to this circuitry so my advice is to set it to minimum and dig every target until you learn your machine better. Set the sensitivity to maximum and only back it off when you need to because of instability or because your target is so big it swamps your receiver circuitry.

The button in the handle would have been for switching between VLF and TR. It's useful when pinpointing as well.

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