Small Gold Items

[SurfPro]

I've read here, and other forums that the Sov GT's and the Excals don't hit on small gold (women's rings) as well as the PI's. Based on your experience, would you agree?

 

[dfxone]

Surfpro, I hunt in the dry and wet sand on the beaches here in So. Ca. with the Sov. GT, and it picks up everything, even small ladies and girls gold rings. I do not know about in the water for the GT and the Excal. I pick up ladies hairpins at 7 and 8 inches. I very seldom will find a gold or silver necklace unless it has a cross or medallion on it. The GT is the best detector for me in the way I hunt on the beaches. GH, Don

 

[Maxwedge]

Hi,

I've gotten quite a few small womens gold rings with my GT and they were on dry dirt. One ring was broken. I have no complaints on the finds of it. It's a great detector. I dug one quarter in wet river gravel that was 18 inches. My only complaint is I don't get to the beach or fresh water beaches yet. HH-Mark

 

[goodmore]

The deeper they are the less chance the Excal or Sovereign will detect them. That isn't really news. The truth is most women's small gold rings fall into the foil range. Depending on gold purity and size. But most are in the foil range. Foil and small gold are just hard to detect in wet sand because of the salt and conductivity. The Sovereign and Excal were set up to run stable in this environment. To do that they are running in a form of salt mode all the time. In the detecting world there is always give and take. The cost of running stable is the inability to hit the small stuff deep. We are talking averages. The average ring pulled out of the wet sand is usually a man's band. Yet there is a ratio of 8 to 1 of women's rings on the beach. I'm not busting on the Excal or the Sovereign. In fact I love my Sovereign. No other VLF detectors can do it better. But the fact remains gold sinks at an incredible rate on the beach and is usually out of range of the average detector. PI detectors go deeper. Some go extremely deep. But we all know the trade off is junk digging. Being there for the fresh drops help. Being there when there is a cut is very helpful. No detectors do it all. It is always a give and take situation. Hopefully we can pull some gold after mother nature takes some sand. Because she is going to give it back.

 

[Critterhunter]

The thinnest and smallest of gold rings are not going to be a problem for the Sovereign/Excal to detect. When you talk about gold chains though they have a harder time with that. On the other hand, something like a Tesoro will detect chains better, but it won't get rings as deep as the Sovereign/Excal. For gold ring hunting there isn't a better machine on the market than the Excal/Sov. They'll hit them hard thanks to the multifrequencies and the way they handle the ground matrix. Not only that, but the awesome audio ability of them makes it easier to "tell" gold rings from trash with a trained ear.

The trade off of using something like a Tesoro that hits well on chains and tiny gold earings and such is you'll also be digging a ton of tiny bits of foil and other junk that the Minelabs would otherwise ignore. That's not to say that I'm not impressed with how tiny objects can be and how deep they are with my GT. I've dug earing backings and other little bits of junk that were easily 6 to 9" deep.

 

[old lobo]

Critterhunter is right. I've never had a machine like this that likes rings of any type and size the way this GT does. In my first two weeks with it I found two sterling silver rings, one tungsten steel ring, one man's 18k white and yellow gold wedding band, one ladies 14k white gold ring with 3 diamonds, and one ladies platinum 950 ring with one diamond, and the GT hit hard on all of them. I don't have a meter on my machine, but as I was leaving after finding the platinum ring, I saw a man with a Garrett GTI 2500 doing the area around the fire pits, and I asked him if he would scan the ring so I could see what it read as. He did, and it read +4 which is the very small foil range just above iron, and as I said, my GT hit on it solid.

 

[Rob in (Ca)]

Use a small coil ........ Clives new book on shoreline hunting...... really push's the 8'' slimeline coil .....


here's a link

http://www.findmall.com/read.php?21,1515731


Good luck

 

[bootyhoundpa]

n/t

 

[bootyhoundpa]

ive found excal and gt to be very good on rings.....they love round objects......i have had some trouble on a fresh water beach picking up small gold pendent earings and some small oddly shaped gold.... i know this cause i reworked the same area on the same day with a different machine just to see if i was missing anything,,,,,the excal didnt miss much quanity wise but like i said it did miss some tiny gold ......some machines seem to hit slightly better on some objects than others....no one machine seems to get everything.....

 

[Critterhunter]

You're right in that the GT/Excal love round objects. We've scanned in over 100 rings on my GT (dig up the splitting hairs on rings thread for the numbers) and even the thinnest of rings hit hard and fine on it. The only rings that gave a trashy signal were ones with many tiny holes in them like spider webbing or rings that were broke. This isn't the best machine for earings or chains but 99% of us are after rings and in that case there is no better machine on the market.

Another thing to try is to stick several rings in small containers seperately and then stick some tabs, foil, or other trash in others. Sweep over them and see if you can develop an ear for what gold rings sound like. They'll sound warm, smooth, round, where as a lot of trash will sound harsh, tinny, bangy, or jagged.

Which brings up another topic. A while back I was planning on scanning all these rings in again and recording the audio for them to put out on a CD. Anybody interested in something like that? You could hit shuffle and get a random mix of rings and tabs and other trash. Then you try to guess which is which before it anounces the ID of the target. A friend has well over 100 rings he found digging all signals while water hunting with an Excal so it's not a biased test pool by only digging certain zones. If you look in the splitting hairs thread you'll see that many do hit in the foil range and there isn't a larger portion of rings in the tab or nickle zone like people always try to say.

 

[Critterhunter]

Also, I think the 12x10 is more sensitive to smaller targets than the stock 10" coil but I haven't done any testing to prove that one way or another.

 

[locusman]

This is an interesting thread. I have both a Sovereign and a White's PI Pro, so I think I can chime in here. Both machines can hold their own on gold. I'm from South Florida, and I would say 90% or more of beach hunters here use the Excel (Sov) - with the other 10% either a PI pro or Aquasound (locally produced TR water machine). The excal users seem to do awfully well on small golds and chains too. I have used my PI and have found really, really deep golds, some of them have been very small or thin but most aren't. The sov can't get as much depth as the PI but I have found small gold items many times with it nonetheless. The Sov/Excal offers such good discriminating abilities that the PI's don't have and can still get small gold. It's a toss-up I guess. I would give the edge in raw depth to the PI, since I can go over areas where excal users have been and still get very deep targets, but obviously at a price - I get all the iron junk on the beach. I'm keeping the world "safe from bottlecaps" as I say. PI users have to be willing to dig a lot more crap to get the goods, that's for sure. Most hunters just aren't willing to do that, unfortunately.

Gold Chains, again, I would have to give the edge to the Excal. I have been hunting with the PI Pro for about 8 years now, and I can count my gold chain finds on one hand. And Excal users I know seem to get chains quite regularly. My other gold finds are in the hundreds through the years, just not many gold chains period. Maybe it's luck or I'm a lousy hunter, but either way, I have to give the Excal some credit, it can find gold pretty darn well.


Thanks,

Mark

 

[Bling]

iv found Gold earing studs the size of a BB 8" ....small Gold rings @ 12"...and MANY very thin Gold wedding rings with diamonds . if there was a better detector out there id buy it!