Ground balancing is a setting that you can adjust on a gold detector, which increases the technology’s detection depth in mineralized ground. The ground will likely have a lot of other metals or elements, like salt, which will trigger or respond to the detector’s transmit field in the same way that gold would. You’ll likely get a lot of false readings, which can be frustrating because mineralization can hide small pieces of gold.
Most modern gold detectors will use an automatic ground balance, which means the detector will choose the best setting for you. This is a quick and convenient way to use your metal detector for finding gold, but it can also cause problems when you want to make manual adjustments for mineralization. Manual is a great option to have when you want to really learn how to maximize your chance of finding gold. Other detectors use a tracking ground balance, which means the gold detector will continuously scan and adjust the ground balance for you.
Ultimately, you will need a ground balance feature to ensure that you are picking up and reading the small pieces of gold that you are searching for and that discrimination doesn’t become a huge problem or waste your time with you digging up worthless items. The ground balance feature can really help gold hunters increase their chances of finding small pieces of gold and ultimately making gold hunting an exciting hobby.