Scan Technique and the Sensitivity Habit

0:00half the signal. And this is why we do not teach zigzag scans. Zigzag scans are outdated in my opinion. We shouldn't be doing it anymore. What we should be teaching people to do is to find that cable or the pipe or whatever and trace it and follow it and notice signal change. Because if you're walking up here with your locator and your signal suddenly drops, what does that tell us? We've lost half our signal. Why have we lost it? There's a branch. I see this with a lot of the guys on site. they they'll be tracing a cable along, they suddenly lose half the signal

0:37um and they just turn it back up and carry on. There's no thought process there as to as to um why that has happened if that makes sense, guys. Yeah, Jake, exactly. I mean, we're just talking actually locating it with a cat. My job is to teach you to be able to get the best out of locators, but yeah, definitely try holes in that, of course. Any questions, guys, so far, feel free to chuck them in um in the box. If you've got anything you want to ask, anything you want to expand on, let's go back to the earth position. Okay, we talked about um you know,

1:18putting it near a lamp column, but you remember what we said with a with a cable with a lighting column because it's insulated, it's kind of got to run down it, hasn't it? It's got it's got to it's got to flow down it. So, but remember we said about pipes. pipes are not insulated. So, we need to consider a few things. If if this is our metal gas pipe, this is looking from above plan view or a metal water pipe. If we hook the Genny up and put the earth quite close here, what if what what we're effectively doing there is we're encouraging the signal to jump off. [Editor's note: 'because it's insulated' refers to the CABLE: the cable is insulated, so the signal must run down it to find an earth. The column itself is bare conductive metal; that is why a direct connection to it works at all. See 15:30 for the cable-versus-pipe explanation.]

1:48Remember, with a cable, it's more difficult because of the insulation, but the pipe we can lose a lot of signal here. So when you talk about moving the earth further away, if I put the earth further away, I basically trace further. So simple as that, guys. Um, radio detection sell the yellow extension reels, guys. And if you do a lot of pipe tracing, they're certainly worth getting because they can help you. Now, in radio detections instruction book, it'll tell you to put the earth at 90°. Um, which is what I've done here, but but I think we need to think about it more. I tend to not use it at 90, and