Anybody had a solid nickel hit, which turned out to be a gold ring?

[dewcon4414]

Here you go Steve..... i did a little gold testing today on just 9 rings. No. 1 is the smallest ring and 10 being the largest in both weight and size all these rings are 14K. Ive also indicated any ring that was white gold. I wont show all the channels but take a look and tell me what you think. Critter.... looks like those guys are right in that a freq shift makes a difference. Im just not certain what kind of shift 1 and 2 does on the Sov since the Sov has set channels of 1.5 kHz increaments. Also..... the big thing for me was on ring 1. Its a .6 g 14K childs ring. I started out by drawing a pencil line on the rod of my SE where in channel 1 it came into range and used those lines coming off the ears on the coil as a consistant height. What i found was from channel 1 to 11 that small ring LOST 1 inch in depth. I could read the ring at 3 1/2 inches on channel 1, but on channel 11 it was down to 2 1/2 inches. Oddly the larger heavier ring read constant at 7 inches and didnt change. So heres some info....

Channel 1 Channel 6 Channel 11
1. 13-01 14-01 15-01
2. 12-01 12-01 13-01
3. 11-01 11-01 12-01
4. 13-01 14-01 17-01
5. 10-06 (w/g) 10-05 11-04
6. 08-16 08-12 09-10
7. 09-09 (w/g) 09-07 10-06
8. 09-09 09-08 10-06
9. 09-08 09-07 10-06

It appears to me that if you are looking for small gold and want to set you channel manually you would be best to set it closer to channel 1. If you want more consistant readings near the nickel range..... set it at 11. Looks like channel 4 is where numbers begin changing on the larger rings.

Dew

 

[sgoss66]

Wow, dew...some really interesting results. Numerical ID-wise, your results match mine exactly. My nickels were hitting 10-05 at channel 11, and as high as 10-07 at channel 1 and 2. Middle channels are 10-06. Very, very interesting, as the larger gold rings show the same pattern -- the lowher the noise channel, the higher the CO number on the larger rings tends to be.

Also highly interesting is your depth discovery, dew. Losing an inch of depth on a small gold ring going from channel 1 to channel 11 is fascinating. That's substantial!

I'm going to have to do some more thinking; clearly, there's some tendencies here -- that may be able to be put to good use. I know that if you are using the digital screen, just knowing that your CO number changes is good info to have. I would like to test some can slaw, pull tabs, square tabs, etc that read down in the "nickel range." Since we now KNOW that gold ring CO numbers change, and since we now KNOW that nickel CO numbers change, based on noise channel settings, it would be interesting to see if the CO numbers of the less-dense "trash" targets change similarly. I assume they do -- but if they DON'T, it might be possible that just by changing noise cancel channel, you may be able to set up your machine in a way that allows a tad bit better differentiation between the "trash" and the "good stuff." Some further testing is in order...

Steve

 

[Critterhunter]

A friend found over 100 gold rings over the years water hunting with an Xcal digging all signals above iron, junky sounding or not, so this test pool of rings isn't biased by digging only good sounding targets or certain conductivity zones. I've seen test pools of rings graphed percentage wise in the past, but since they were largely the result of selective digging the data is biased. This one isn't, and that's why we compiled a chart of these rings.

We also compiled a chart of randomly found round and square tabs, and then ran the numbers to compare for instance notching out tabs. Even using the notch raised just high enough to kill a 165 tab VDI # (on a GT) and blocking out 84% of all know tabs, the vast majority of gold rings would still be recovered from the site. While you wouldn't want to do this beach hunting, in a park loaded with millions of tabs avoiding the tab range will greatly alter the trash to treasure ratio for you and still recover most of the rings.

Further "selective digging" criteria would also have to be used to cut down on the trash. For instance, most of the rings would lock onto one or two VDI #s no matter which way they were swept, where as trash, especially oddly shaped trash, will vairy (at least on the GT) by 3 digits or more. Further restrictive criteria could be applied by the sound of the target. Only a handful of rings would bounce by 3 digits or more, and that same small amout of rings would also have a rather sick or warbly sound to it, while most of the rings have a round, smooth, soft, "quality" sound to them.

Now, you may not find this very interesting being that this is the Explorer forum, but read further. Below you'll find a graph where the percentage of rings fall on the conducitivity scale in terms of the foil, nickle, tab, and other ranges. As you can see, there are more rings in the foil range than even the nickle and tab ranges combined. Digging the nickle zone is a rather poor strategy when ring hunting. However, it is useful even to me when I only plan on coin hunting but will take a chance on a nickle number, as that could be an old nickle, maybe a ring, or at least I should have the satisfaction of standing up with a clad nickle.

Although, you have to adjust this generic listing of the conductivity/ring percentage scale to various machines. For instance, with lower resolution on some machines than the Sovereign what others consider the "nickle" zone or "tab zone" might be a much wider net of targets, and so for instance the nickle zone on one machine might well drop down into well into the foil range. On the Sovereign foil starts at about 60 or so on the VDI, and the target range up of low to mid conductors ranges all the way up to about 178 where copper pennies start. Nickles are usually about 144 to 146, but old degraded ones can read as low as about 136 or 138 on the VDI. For that reason the following chart has the official nickle range from 139 on up to 148 (though it's rare for a nickle to read higher than 146, or as low as 136, or at least I never had dug one that read that high or low). Tabs start at 148 and go up to 169, so these zoned off conductivity zones are pretty clear cut using high resolution, with enough fine detail to crunch the numbers in pretty good clearity in terms of conductivity zones.

The original thread is here. It's rather lengthy but through out it various graphs are used to display the data in various ways. Later, towards the end of the thread, bar graphs are used to more visualy represent where the rings fall on the conductivity scale. It's much more telling to view the data that way.

http://www.findmall.com/read.php?21,1096415,1101102#msg-1101102

We also scanned these rings onto an Etrac and created a few graphs for that. That information can be found in the Etrac forum in this thread...

http://www.findmall.com/read.php?63,1377441,1377441#msg-1377441

 

[Critterhunter]

I apologize if this is rather redundant is some respects, as I am just re-posting another message without editing out information that was already covered in the above message...

While the original thread's intent was to chart VDI numbers on rings and tabs for the Sovereign and the Etrac, I feel you'll find this data useful to the Explorer as well. Further into it, on page 2 the graph for the tabs can be seen and where they fall percentage wise. It's unexpectedly a bell curve.

Anyway, the first page or two of this thread shows actual Sovereign VDI numbers. On page 3 of the thread you can see that I broke that VDI range down into more understandable (generic) numbers in terms of where the foil range, the nickle range, the tab range, the coin range, and so on falls on the Sovereign...And thus what percentage of rings read "in the foil range", and what percentage reads "in the nickle range", and so on for application to other brands and models of metal detectors. Shockingly, for example, 47.1% of all gold rings fall in the foil range. Even more shocking, only 9.1% fall in the nickle range. And for further jaw dropping statistics, only 31.4% fall into the round and square tab range. Many people would have suspected that most gold rings fell in the tab range or perhaps the nickle range. So, even if you combine both the nickle and the tab range, that still is not as high of a percentage of rings as there are in the foil range. That alone should blow a few people's minds.

Obviously, keying in on the "nickle zone" is a rather poor choice in terms of percentages, but it's still fun to do when only coin hunting and so perhaps you might pop an old nickle or a ring, if not at least a modern nickle. But, keep in mind that these "zones" depend largely on how high the resolution is on your detectors. All coins above copper penny are compressed into the 180 VDI #, but foil starts at about 60 and ranges up to a copper penny at about 178 or so. But, as I think I already said, it all depends on the resolution of your machine. if your nickle zone is much lower and higher than where nickles really read, then you will of course find more rings in the nickle zone. But, even if that's the case, you'll find that the vast majority of rings are still probably going to be in the foil range below it.

Zinc pennies read around 173 or 176 on the 180 meter. From 170, so just a hair below zinc penny, all the way up to 180, there are only 12.4% of gold rings that read that high. I bet many would be shocked that as low as that is, it still is a higher percentage of rings than what read in the nickle zone. More details at this link. The third page has this data on it in a chart, but the prior pages as well as ones after page 3 also have various charts displaying that data in various ways. Later in that thread I started showing various target ranges via bar graphs, which gives a very visual representation of these numbers on the spectrum of the conductivity scale.

Foil on my machine has a good bit lower tone than the nickle range of numbers, so it's rather easy to note and avoid or dig if you want. What I've found is that odd shaped blobs of foil (thus being most foil found at a site) will give a rather sick warbly sound to it. Not only because the foil is oddly shaped, but also because the foil has surface "hills and valleys" or fine ripples running through it. Thus, gold rings that read well down into the foil range *usually* have a nice smooth, warm, round, "quality" sound to them, while most foil won't. The rings will tend to lock onto one or two VDI #s no matter which way you sweep, while the foil, especially odd shaped for and other odd shaped junk as well, will tend to roam by 3 digits or more depending on which way you sweep. Rings, like coins, being round, should most lock onto one or at the most two VDI #s no matter which way you sweep. Out of over 100 gold rings we tested there was only a handful that sounded sick or warbly and also would roam by 3 digits or more in VDI. These were rings with fine webbing or many holes in them. Even a super thin gold ring won't do this warbly/sick/roaming thing. It's due to the nature of the ring structure that'll make them sound like odd shaped trash.

 

[sgoss66]

This is outstanding stuff, critterhunter...thanks much for posting. I'm contacting you by PM via another forum, shortly...

Steve

 

[Critterhunter]

More than welcome. I'll get to your PM today if I can. I made the mistake of posting a few threads in a few forums with the above messages (slightly edited for forum content). Mainly, here, the Sovereign forum, and the main detecting forum. I should have posted this condensed data from the super long original "Splitting Hairs" thread and just posted in one place and then provided links to it, so that all the conversation or debate on the pros and cons could take place in one spot. For that reason, to this thread and another thread, I am linking them both to one place in an attempt to not try to keep more than one ball in the air at the same time. Never should have done that. On that note, here's a condensed data thread to further conversation, as well as further potential merit to concentrating on the foil zone first and foremost when conditions permit, but of course adjusting to other zones when conditions (trash) change the variables. Hopefully any further discussion, pros/cons, or debate can be held in that one place...

http://www.findmall.com/read.php?21,1720979

 

[dippodigger]

Very informative post. Thanks