After using the Bliss for a few days I noticed somethings were not working as they should.
Never being one to blame the machine, I knew the issues were due to my inexperience with Dragomir. I reached out to a more knowledgeable Blisstool user and he gave me some pointers to properly do a manual ground balance.
I have to say, ground balancing the Bliss appears to be the biggest challenge for first time Blisstool users. I followed the manual’s advice to start on auto ground balance and was having a huge problem with false signals and with discrimination. Upon successfully doing a manual ground balance I noticed two things:
1) Auto-ground balance left my machine ‘hot’, way hotter than I would normally run it.
2) Manual ground balance was extremely easy, so long as you know that the pots, i.e. knobs, are rather sensitive.
The biggest problem with the manual ground balance was finding a spot in the park devoid of metal. I had to actually clean a two by two foot spot in order to balance Dragomir.
Having completed this task, the number of false signals dropped to near zero and I was able to discriminate fine.
So armed with Dragomir in its more stable state, I went where a road ran through an old park. The road was removed sometime in the 90’s and a person who was there at the time they removed the road, told me that they found large cents and Seated coins and so on and so forth. The beauty of this spot is that it is relatively devoid of modern trash besides being rather large area wise.
I began and hardly a signal was to be had, as I expected. Finally, I got a nice repeatable signal and I went for it. Digging there you can immediately tell there was a road in the past. There were chunks of asphalt and cement but around the 5-6 inch mark, I found the target. I could see that the chunk of asphalt and dirt I dug up was round. My heart was giddy with the anticipation of uncovering a precious Seated dime.
Give me a break! A clad dime. I can’t even tell the date because of the cement stuck to it. the reverse actually has asphalt stuck so you can’t even see it. ***UPDATE*** After soaking the dime in soft drink (cola), I can see the dime was minted in 1966.***
I put in the work. Dragomir put in the work. This was our reward. Leave it to me to find the only clad coin that was possibly dropped by a city worker at some street repair job in the past. Sigh!
On my way home, I stopped by another park and buried a dime 12 inches deep. I dug up the hole and I stuck a new shiny dime in the side of the hole at the bottom and covered it back up. I then began tinkering with the Bliss until I got a solid, repeatable signal. 12 inches. My Deus, beloved and respected as it is (it remains my go-to machine for hunting the parks)
cannot give me a solid repeatable signal on a dime 12 inches under the ground (with the 11 inch coil).
And that is the purpose of the Blisstool. The Deus will unmask a coin better than any machine out there and the Blisstool will sniff me out some of the deepest stuff. But I cannot control what was dropped in the past.
Thank you for stopping by.
The Dirt Is Good To Me 
And the question is…..how deep will you dig?
Oh boy Dick! I could write a book on the subject of how deep i am willing to go for a silver coin. Hey, there’s the subject of your next book, “Deep Holes in the Park and the Idiots who Dig Them”.
The answer of course is, it depends. There are only 5 or so parks where I would use the Bliss and dig 12-17 inch deep holes. Then on those parks, there are popular areas where I would not dig deeper than 7 inches or at all. Yes, there are folk out there who will tell me that they pay their taxes and thus we should dig where we want when we want but I think my usage of the parks is a little less conventional than say, the family having a pick-nick there (although I won’t trash the park, they will likely trash the park).
Deep digging is not something I advocate. I have OCD and must find every deep coin ever dropped. Also, I absolutely do not mind digging deep iron.
Last, the last 5 years have proven to me that there are coins past the 10 inch limit. Lots of them. Most old coins being recovered in the parks today are from either the 20’s or the 40′ s and 50’s which were boom times for our fair city. The coins dropped from 1860 to 1920 are below 10, 11, or even 12 inches. The 1864 2 cent coin I found downtown was 4 inches deep after they had removed a foot of dirt (probably more than a foot) from the top of it. So I am willing to dig 17 inches, if it does not represent a nuisance to the general public and if I am not downright tired, which oddly, seems to be happening more and more now that I am in my 50’s.
And that’s my short answer.