Swing Speed In General 'What's The Rush'

What's The Rush?

I wrote a previous blog about swing speed when using a Nexus machine but I wanted to share my thoughts about swing speed in general. I don't understand this obsession with swinging your detector like a madman. Now I understand that machines are faster now than they've ever been but does that really warrant a stupidly fast swing speed. I don't think it does and I'll explain why, let's leave analog detectors out of the equation for the moment. 

All the high end digital machines have an option to raise and lower the recovery speed, slower speeds smear the targets as opposed to high speeds that shorten and tighten the target response up. When you're running a machine on a high recovery speed you don't actually have to swing any faster because the high recovery is actually doing that for you, it's speeding up the target response. This was something that I learnt pretty quickly on both the Equinox and my Legend, you can swing slow because the machine is doing all the work in how it conveys the target signals to you. 

Despite how fast modern machines might be I genuinely believe that if you're swinging really fast then you are missing targets. You can look at it anyway you want to but I believe that to be a fact, I'm trying to figure out the psychology behind the 'fast' swing speed. I've never been on rallies or group digs but I can only assume that one reason for the need to swing fast is to find the good targets before anyone else. Remember that we live in a sphere of instant gratification, the quicker and more you find, you can upload it onto your social media and instantly get told how amazing you are.

"Someone Might Find A Hammy Before Me"

The second reason I see for "caffeine arm syndrome" is the mind virus of the modern age which is a short attention span. Maybe people get bored quickly and want that dopamine hit of the detector going "BEEP", if they don't get that feeling quickly they might end up selling their machine on eBay because it's clearly not finding stuff for them so they purchase the next "polished turd" that will, no doubt, find treasure in the ground that isn't actually there. 

Through both experience and common sense, if you go slow, focus and be meticulous in your approach then you will find more targets in the ground. I mentioned in my blog about the Tesoro Compadre, you want to be working with your machine and not against it. Working with your detector is working out a way to operate it so it runs to the best of its abilities. I'll finish the blog using my Golden Mask detectors as the example, these machines are crazy fast and if I swing too fast my brain literally can't process what I'm hearing. When I slow down, all of a sudden I realise just how many targets I've been walking over, on the river there are so many signals and with a stupidly fast swing speed I'm missing good targets.