I dunno about ya'll, but I once went a stretch, felt like a month or so, where I felt like I found more rebar and rods by looking than I found with a locator. And I am certain I have dug up enough junk to have put Fred Sanford into a new pickup truck and a 3 bedroom house.
Rocks and random junk sound different from vertically set pipes and rods.
Nate The Surveyor, post: 391358, member: 291 wrote: I set the magnet on the tops, of these "Low signature monuments", for a second. Now, these low signature mons give nice loud signal.
N
I love that! Now I need to start packing around a magnet too!
Dave Karoly, post: 391445, member: 94 wrote: Rocks and random junk sound different from vertically set pipes and rods.
Yeah a rock or random junk give you that drifting signal while a vertically set iron gives a nice centralized zing!
If the pin is not at the corner then go ahead and cushion it. That would not be unpardonable, it would not even be a sin.
Kevin Samuel, post: 391467, member: 96 wrote: Yeah a rock or random junk give you that drifting signal while a vertically set iron gives a nice centralized zing
Maybe ya'll are where you don't have trash mixed in with the corners, but if I didn't search out everything, I woulda been just as guilty of holding the rebar at the Tpost as the other guys, and wouldn't of found the railroad rail 
At least three of us should go back to bed.
Two things determine the magnetic signal of an isolated vertical iron. One is the soft-iron effect whereby it sucks in the earth's magnetic field, and you can detect the field warpage with the magnetic locator. The other is the semi-permanent field a harder iron may obtain and retain, by taking on the field it was in at the time it cooled or was hit very hard, thus rearranging the crystal domains in the iron, or from application of a strong magnet.
If those two field components happen to be opposite and approximately equal, then you have very little to detect.
Careful listening to the pattern of changes in the tone of a Schoenstedt will let you find a weak signal if it is from the only object nearby. Junk can easily mask it.
When searching for a weak signal keep the tone in the medium frequency range where it is easiest to hear a change, not at the tick-tick end of the scale.