My wife is having me hang some heavy curtains on a textured wall. Of course, the first thing I did was to get out my stud finder - specifically, my Zircon HD55. I felt I was getting strange results when the finder went over the bumps of the texture, so I tried to look for smooth parts of the texture. When I did so, I got results that seemed less erratic, but still not right. As I searched for a solution, I found a description of the kinds of behavior I'm seeing in this post:
[the] studs seemed to be upto [sic] a foot wide and at irregular spacings [sic]
I didn't always get studs a foot wide - some seemed to show up as the normal "2-side" of a 2x4. However, even in these cases, the approximately two-inch widths found by the stud finder often did not line up. My question is whether this could be due to the stud finder (as was assumed by the OP in the linked DIY-SE post and as many people assumed in other stud-finder-related questions), or if it's likely due to the texture on the wall. I've thought that I might just put some cardboard between the texture and the stud-finder, but if it sounds like the problem is due to the stud finder, I don't want to go to the trouble and awkwardness of doing that.