An advanced technique used by experienced hunters to fully customize their detectors

If you ever wondered if metal detectors allow for a little bit of tinkering to bring on your own improvements to them, there’s a brief and clear answer for that: Yes, but you have to be very knowledgeable with electronics and a lot of other science stuff.

Here at Detector Power, we believe in the sort of freedom detectors are able to make their users feel by prompting them to explore and open their minds and personalities to the possibility of discovering something exciting underground on an adventure.

Making your own coil is another way of exploring possibilities with a metal detector. Ideally, anyone who comes across with the notion of customizing their device enjoys the experience a lot because of all the things you have to learn about first.

Join us in this new read to learn about the ins and outs of building your own GEB coil for your metal detector.

Preliminary notions

One of the most important things there is to know about the functions of metal detectors, in general, is that what they do is more or less what bats do when they use echolocation. In order for them to better understand their surroundings and be able to navigate them avoiding peril, bats emit a distinctive sound wave that bounces off surfaces and solid materials. These returning sounds are the ones that tell them how to fly in a set space.

We’re obviously not comparing you guys with bats... but there’s a common principle here, let us explain. Metal detectors use electricity to create a magnetic signal that is emitted from one of the coils they come equipped with.

VLF metal detectors, on average, are equipped with at least two coils to send and receive signals. Magnetic signals vary in size and shape, and the whole notion of ground balancing revolves around the ferrous and non-ferrous bodies underground being able to send a signal back to us, when we hunt.

So, if you instead of a hunter were a bat, there wouldn’t be much that you could do if there were no walls around you, right? Ground balancing gives us the ability to control which signals from which materials we want to hear. So, again, to conclude with another bat example: Imagine echolocation for the specific things a bat wouldn’t want to crash upon. That is the foundational principle of ground exclusion balance.

So how do I build a GEB-capable coil?

First things first: You have to get the appropriate materials and be mindful of the kind of add-on that you’re going to craft for your detector. Is your detector single-coiled or multi-coiled? If it has more than one coil and none of them are GEB-capable, then you should think about replacing specifically the transmitter coil, which is the one that sends magnetic signals onto buried ferrous materials.

A metal detector coil is a sort of vessel: it contains electronic and magnetic materials that interact and do what they’re meant to do when you play around with the knobs. You’re gonna need electrical wires, an inductive body and a conductive body (these could just be minerals with electrical and magnetic properties) and an encasing whose shape matches or fits the metal detector you’re trying to modify.

We would go into the details of actually building the whole thing but the tinkering part is totally on the users’ side, so if you’re thinking about hacking your detector, we must disclose that this should be done at your own discretion and that playing with the integrity of a device voids its warranty.

So there you go! What have we learned from this article? We now can say for sure that ground exclusion balance is found in most metal detectors because their designs almost always include a transmitter and a receiver coil. These act together to send magnetic signals to minerals underground and that you can control how they do that, in order to obtain a response from the kind of material you’re actually interested in.

If you’re still interested in building a coil for your detector, make sure you’re using the right kind of materials and try asking for help if things get too hard for you.

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