McDave said:
You'll never find gold unless you dig those tabs .. way to go !!
First, WOW! That's a lot of tabs for sure!
Here's a thread you guys might want to read where we scanned in over 100 random gold rings, found via water hunting with an Excal digging all signals (sick sounding or not) above iron over a number of years, so the test pool isn't biased in any way by say only digging certain conductivity zones or good sounding targets. What we found was that almost fully half of all rings read in the foil range. Many believe most gold rings are in the nickle or tab zones, where in fact those two combined still don't equal the amount found in the foil range. This scanning process and graphing was done on a machine with very super high resolution, in particular in the foil, nickle, and tab range, all the way up to copper penny. So the distinction of actual zones is very quantified, as for instace the "nickle zone" is very distinct in resolution as compared to the foil zone below it and the tab zone above it.
While nobody really knows for sure, the law of averages along with a good random test pool of gold rings found at numerous high scale and lower "class" swimming locations makes these numbers probably as good as it gets in trying to nail things down. I have had a few others who conducted similar tests tell me their numbers for the most part match the percentages we had derived ourselves.
There is no doubt that digging it all is the best way to insure you don't miss a gold ring, but when land hunting often doing that is not a realistic option. For that reason, a strategy that might have some merit is to concentrate on zones of conductivity that a site isn't loaded with in terms of junk. Too many tabs present that would take a life time to dig? Then avoid that and dig the foil and nickle zones. Too many bits of foil and can shards but not as much in way of tabs to be found? Then avoid the foil range and dig the tab and perhaps nickle range of targets. Also, while gold rings from zinc penny up are not as numerous, you might be suprised by the numbers that we found more ranged in that zone then the supposed "nickle" zone often touted for years as the best to dig when hunting gold rings. I believe that belief might have spawned from machines with lower resolution to distinctly see nickles and not also foil and tabs in the included zone they considered nickles to range in. The width of the nickle zone can be wider on machines with less resolution, so as to include a good part of the upper foil range as well as a good chunk of the lower tab range. Then of course a good chunk of rings would in fact fall into that zone on some machines.
Other "selective" criteria might be further applied to lesson your trash to treasure ratio when hunting for rings. You could for instance further be selective on targets by judging both the sound and the VDI response. On some machines, trash often has distinctive audio traits not found with most gold rings. Rings tend to sound round, smooth, warm, soft, and so on...While many forms of trash will sound harsh, tinny, bangy, hollow, or sick (sick sounding in particular if they are oddly shaped, unlike a ring being round). On a machine with high resolution in the foil and mid range, you can also judge the probably shape of the target by how stable the VDI is. A ring, being round, usually will lock onto say one or two VDI #s at the most no matter which way you sweep over it from different angles. By working your way around a target you can often tell it's oddly shaped trash by how much it changes in VDI from various angles. On my machine a ring will usually lock into one or maybe two VDI #s, while odd shaped trash will often change by 3 or more digits depending on which angle I sweep over it.
Of course these are all only general rules of thumb and there are many exceptions, there are ways you can stack the odds more in your favor when land hunting to lesson the recovery of obvious trash and increase your odds of digging targets that have the potential to be a ring. And, of course when water or beach hunting using a long handled scoop recovery is so easy that most people would never dream of not digging each and every target.
Anyway, here's that thread with the statistical data and other strategies for ring hunting on land that might give you ideas on what zones rings in a certain site are likely to fall in, as well as ideas to improve your ring recovery while avoiding at least some common trash. There are also links to threads that give you ideas as to best potential spots to hunt for rings on land.
http://www.findmall.com/read.php?21,1720979,1720979#msg-1720979
this tells me I need to dig more tabs. When I go out looking for low conductivity items I use my tracker IV. That machine gets me more nickels than any other.