Critterhunter
New member
Two friends (Fern & Jim) and I scanned in about 128 gold rings or so (refer to chart for exact number) using the M6 today. Jim just bought an M6 and I'm considering adding one to my line up. Many thanks to Fern for letting us use his test pool of rings, as well as helping us do the coins. Most of these same rings were used to compile a Sovereign GT ID chart a few months ago that I posted in the Sovereign forum. Maybe only 5 or 6 rings were excluded or added to either chart, so the test pool for both is pretty much the same.
These rings were found by an Excalibur water hunting over several years and at several locations, digging EVERY signal above iron, so this test pool of rings is NOT biased in any way. In other words, by people digging certain target ranges or only at one location where one type of ring (man's versus woman's) would be more common than at others. For example, you are more likely to find a small woman's gold ring at a kiddy playground, where as your more apt to find a large man's ring at a football field. These rings coming from several locations in the water digging everything above iron eleminate that kind of bias and are a true random sample.
This blows away the old slogan of "dig the nickle zone" on both machines. The reason why I feel that people always felt that way was on older machines the nickle zone was much wider and so you couldn't really seperate a lot of rings from where a machine said nickles fell. As people followed this old rule the number of rings dug in "the nickle zone" would be more than others due to people concentrating on that zone, and thus more people were finding rings that read like nickles and the bias was tilted even further.
Of course the old rule of "dig everything" still is the best approach at locations where the amount of trash is low, but there are locations where it would take you a life time to dig all the pulltabs out of that location. In these situations playing the odds is your best strategy to still recover a large portion of gold rings while avoiding most of the tabs. This is the reason for this chart, and it shows that you can avoid the vast majority of round or square tabs and still recover a large majority of the rings.
The tabs listed in this chart where roughly 57 or so round and square tabs taken from random locations and also when a friend was digging every signal above iron, so once again the tabs are not biased by location or by digging only certain targets zones. Again, this is the only way to take a true unbiased sample that won't favor one type of tab over another.
You could further discriminate targets by sound that fall outside of the tab numbers by only digging smooth, round, warm, sounding targets which tend to be gold rings. We found most of them lock onto one VDI #. Most trash isn't uniform in shape and so will tend to bounce around in VDI numbers. Even if they lock in to one number trash tends to sound hollow, harsh, tinny, or scratchy. That's a good way to eliminate other non-common trash targets that aren't tabs and fall outside the tab numbers. In addition, while tabs will for the most part lock into one number, we found that a lot of the tabs had a slight double sound off or slightly broken sound to them, and yet a gold ring with the exact same number sounded smooth and soft. That's a further way to discriminate by ear even if you plan to dig the tab range numbers.
In real trashy areas you could avoid the most common tab range where say 80% of them will fall. The chart below lists every tab number found and probably isn't the best way to avoid them. In the Sovereign forum I graphed all these tabs by recording each and every number they made, even if they were duplicates. This allowed me to assign a certain perctange of tabs to certain number ranges. Mainly, I found I think 84% of the tabs fell within 152 to 165 on the Sovereign GT VDI chart. A smaller percentage fell slightly outside that number range, and still yet several numbers within the entire range had zero tabs, allowing further detail to be shown. I left this random test pool of the same tabs with my friend so that he could scan them like I did to compile the GT's chart to avoid them, listing percentage of rings that fell outside of the most common number range. Today we only scanned those tabs and recorded their numbers, but did not record how many had the same number, and so that's what he plans to do so that more detail can be provided much in the same way we did for the GT.
Still, even with every single tab number listed in the chart below, you can see that there are a very large number of gold rings that do not fall on those numbers. And, like I said, when the tabs are re-scanned to graph percentages for them within certain number ranges, I feel you'll also be able to increase your number of gold rings by only avoiding the most common tab numbers (say roughly 80+ percentage of all tabs within a certain number range). This will increase your ring percentage while only bothering you with the odd 10 to 20% of less common tabs found at a location. Once you know where the beef of these tabs fall (when he posts that) you can then fine tune your "mental notch" for specific locations.
For instance, let's say you are finding certain tabs to be more common at a location that are just outside the most common range posted. You can try moving your window of undesired targets slightly higher to eliminate those tabs. When doing this you may wish to raise the lowest number your not going to dig by the same amount. If you find that you are now digging more low number tabs than you'd like you could return the bottom of this notch window to it's original number, or alter it by 1 or 2 digits at a time until you hit the right balance.
Remember, this is not an arguement against digging everything. We all know gold rings can read anywhere and everywhere. But, unless you are fooling yourself into believing that you'll spend your entire life digging every junk signal at a certain location that's too large and too loaded with trash to be realistic, you are faced with playing the odds. Much like playing cards you want to find out how you can increase your chances (rings) while eliminating your losses (digging yet another tab). With the proper numbers mentally notched out in your head you can still avoid most of the tabs and yet dig a really high percentage of the rings. We'll probably post some exact percentages for those still recoverable with certain percentages of tabs being avoided in the 80 to 90% range.
Further theory and reasoning on this strategy is discussed in the Sovereign forum under a thread with it's own VDI ring chart made with these rings and tabs. I'd suggest reading that thread if you want to get further information on why this method could be very potent in certain situtations and how to apply it properly.
http://www.findmall.com/read.php?21,1096415,page=1
These rings were found by an Excalibur water hunting over several years and at several locations, digging EVERY signal above iron, so this test pool of rings is NOT biased in any way. In other words, by people digging certain target ranges or only at one location where one type of ring (man's versus woman's) would be more common than at others. For example, you are more likely to find a small woman's gold ring at a kiddy playground, where as your more apt to find a large man's ring at a football field. These rings coming from several locations in the water digging everything above iron eleminate that kind of bias and are a true random sample.
This blows away the old slogan of "dig the nickle zone" on both machines. The reason why I feel that people always felt that way was on older machines the nickle zone was much wider and so you couldn't really seperate a lot of rings from where a machine said nickles fell. As people followed this old rule the number of rings dug in "the nickle zone" would be more than others due to people concentrating on that zone, and thus more people were finding rings that read like nickles and the bias was tilted even further.
Of course the old rule of "dig everything" still is the best approach at locations where the amount of trash is low, but there are locations where it would take you a life time to dig all the pulltabs out of that location. In these situations playing the odds is your best strategy to still recover a large portion of gold rings while avoiding most of the tabs. This is the reason for this chart, and it shows that you can avoid the vast majority of round or square tabs and still recover a large majority of the rings.
The tabs listed in this chart where roughly 57 or so round and square tabs taken from random locations and also when a friend was digging every signal above iron, so once again the tabs are not biased by location or by digging only certain targets zones. Again, this is the only way to take a true unbiased sample that won't favor one type of tab over another.
You could further discriminate targets by sound that fall outside of the tab numbers by only digging smooth, round, warm, sounding targets which tend to be gold rings. We found most of them lock onto one VDI #. Most trash isn't uniform in shape and so will tend to bounce around in VDI numbers. Even if they lock in to one number trash tends to sound hollow, harsh, tinny, or scratchy. That's a good way to eliminate other non-common trash targets that aren't tabs and fall outside the tab numbers. In addition, while tabs will for the most part lock into one number, we found that a lot of the tabs had a slight double sound off or slightly broken sound to them, and yet a gold ring with the exact same number sounded smooth and soft. That's a further way to discriminate by ear even if you plan to dig the tab range numbers.
In real trashy areas you could avoid the most common tab range where say 80% of them will fall. The chart below lists every tab number found and probably isn't the best way to avoid them. In the Sovereign forum I graphed all these tabs by recording each and every number they made, even if they were duplicates. This allowed me to assign a certain perctange of tabs to certain number ranges. Mainly, I found I think 84% of the tabs fell within 152 to 165 on the Sovereign GT VDI chart. A smaller percentage fell slightly outside that number range, and still yet several numbers within the entire range had zero tabs, allowing further detail to be shown. I left this random test pool of the same tabs with my friend so that he could scan them like I did to compile the GT's chart to avoid them, listing percentage of rings that fell outside of the most common number range. Today we only scanned those tabs and recorded their numbers, but did not record how many had the same number, and so that's what he plans to do so that more detail can be provided much in the same way we did for the GT.
Still, even with every single tab number listed in the chart below, you can see that there are a very large number of gold rings that do not fall on those numbers. And, like I said, when the tabs are re-scanned to graph percentages for them within certain number ranges, I feel you'll also be able to increase your number of gold rings by only avoiding the most common tab numbers (say roughly 80+ percentage of all tabs within a certain number range). This will increase your ring percentage while only bothering you with the odd 10 to 20% of less common tabs found at a location. Once you know where the beef of these tabs fall (when he posts that) you can then fine tune your "mental notch" for specific locations.
For instance, let's say you are finding certain tabs to be more common at a location that are just outside the most common range posted. You can try moving your window of undesired targets slightly higher to eliminate those tabs. When doing this you may wish to raise the lowest number your not going to dig by the same amount. If you find that you are now digging more low number tabs than you'd like you could return the bottom of this notch window to it's original number, or alter it by 1 or 2 digits at a time until you hit the right balance.
Remember, this is not an arguement against digging everything. We all know gold rings can read anywhere and everywhere. But, unless you are fooling yourself into believing that you'll spend your entire life digging every junk signal at a certain location that's too large and too loaded with trash to be realistic, you are faced with playing the odds. Much like playing cards you want to find out how you can increase your chances (rings) while eliminating your losses (digging yet another tab). With the proper numbers mentally notched out in your head you can still avoid most of the tabs and yet dig a really high percentage of the rings. We'll probably post some exact percentages for those still recoverable with certain percentages of tabs being avoided in the 80 to 90% range.
Further theory and reasoning on this strategy is discussed in the Sovereign forum under a thread with it's own VDI ring chart made with these rings and tabs. I'd suggest reading that thread if you want to get further information on why this method could be very potent in certain situtations and how to apply it properly.
http://www.findmall.com/read.php?21,1096415,page=1