Hi again Aaron,
I think I just stumbled across a couple of your posts here regarding your comments to me earlier about the Ace models. I also noticed that your much more expensive Sovereign appears to have craped out after the first week and required a trip back to the repair center. I also know from experience that an Ace 250 coupled with a 4.5 Sniper coil in heavy trash would teach you a few things about "target masking". But I suppose the term "el cheapo" is relative. Still, don't make the mistake of confusing "cheap" with "inexpensive", or one bad Sovereign experience with the term "crap".
Your comments to Rick(ND) seem to indicate that you prehaps do not fully understand the conductivity scale or how it relates to metallic targets of different make-up, so I thought I would try to enlighten you on the basics, for your own hunting benefit of course, and not in trying to be a smart @$$ or know-it-all.
First of all, you have a full range of metallic targets that can fall into a 180 degree range of "phase shift", and it is the relative phase shift that is used to help determine the constituent make up and conductance level of a particular target. In other words, it is not just the relative conductivity value of the metal, but also the cross-sectional mass or "conductance" that determines where along the effective phase shift scale any target will fall.
So, if we had two separate gold rings made up of identical material, but one was much larger than the other (mens vs. womens), the mens ring will always tend to read at a higher VDI level or segment than the smaller womens ring, even though the material is exactly the same in each. This is why most smaller women's rings read down into the foil to nickel range while larger mens rings read up into the tab or screwcap range. To simply state that you "have to dig tabs to find gold rings" is not an accurate statement. You DO have to dig pulltabs to find the rings that may register in the same range as the tabs, but you can still notch out higher level tabs and detect smaller level rings. That is the beauty of having a good notching system on any detector that is designed and equipped with such. The Ace 250 is also proof that you don't have to pay upwards of $1000 or more to gain that capability in a well functioning machine. And fact is, a good 50-60 percent or more of lost rings will read well outside (below) the pull-tab range simply because there are multitudes more womens gold rings produced than mens gold rings in the first place. I think you simply misread the sentence that "to find ALL gold rings, you have to dig pull-tabs". That might be true of a progressive discrimination detector, but certainly not true of a segment or VDI notching type machine that can be used to notch out individual levels of conductivity above AND/OR below certain levels of desired targets. With a notching machine, I can dig just foil signals (small gold ring/foil range), just nickels, just tabs, just coins, or any other "level" of conductivity which will ALWAYS include some trash signals, regardless of how you hunt. The best you can do is narrow your odds in lowering certain levels of junk targets, and a good notching detector design is the best way to accomplish that as opposed to progressive discrimination designs.
Also, you might want to go back and read ALL of the related posts concerning those ring finds with the Ace 150/250. It is plainly indicated that not all of them were "gold" as you mistakenly assumed. We "unscrupulous types" who simply enjoy our hobby without carrying a chip on our shoulders (for whatever reason) usually base our comments and opinions on facts and reality rather than spouting off based on our misunderstanding of the matter at hand.
Ralph