Experiments with nails and coins

[Anonymous]

I was doing a little living room detecting. Can somebody else try this and see if they get the same results? I've been hunting alot of old trashy home sights and not finding as much as hoped-constant iron signals. Decided to play with air test coin/nail combos to see how the explorer reacts. When I hold a rusty square nail and coin together it looks like the explorer only sees the coin if the nail is close to parallel to the heel-toe hot zone of the coil. If the nail is only a few degrees (15-20, am sure it also depends on nail length) from parallel it only sees the nail. This also holds true if you seperate the coin and nail by a couple of inches. Seems any time there is a nail situated perpendicular to the hot zone under the coil the explorer will miss any coins in that area.
I've been re working some productive areas at a 90 degree angle from the first sweep; if what I'm seeing here is accurate it may neccessary to work an area in 15 degree increments. It also means never pass up signals that only sound good in one directions.
Also played a bit with nail above/below coin and looks like iron above coin by much will cause coin to be missed even if nail is aligned with coil.
I'm guessing that there are still plenty of coins being missed in trashy areas. Will try same experiments with pulltabs bottlecaps sometime.
This ring any bells for anybody?
Chris

 

[Anonymous]

I did quite a bit of testing with a stick and two pieces of playdough, nail closest to the coil and coin further away. Nails directly above the coin will be the worst with respect to properly IDing the coin. If they are offset by just a bit, which is what the coil will typically encounter in the field, you will see much better results. Especially when the coin is closest to the approaching coil.
Other neat thing I noticed was that a nickel signal traced an arc from the nickel region to the upper left corner of the screen, which may explain why some people (including me!) seem to have problems getting the knack of finding nickels with the Explorer.