The REAL Challenge!

[Anonymous]

From two years and many hours of personal field experience and learning from forums and books on my Minelab II, I have become "proficient" with the machine. Maybe 7 out of ten times I can identify a coin and not a piece of junk. For me, 70% is an acceptable average for coins, save nickels. So, to better myself with nickels I decided to go out last summer for a weekend and ONLY swing for nickels! I did pretty well until the first Mercury dime I could not resist, then nickels were not foremost on my mind. To make a long story short, I thought I got nickels down pat. On better days I'm roughly 3 for 8 in the nickel department, and some days I'm 1 for 10? The point being nickels can not be identified as easily as most other coinage in my experience. Any nickel experts out there for some advice?
HH and Thanks!

 

[Anonymous]

Unfortunately we are dealing with V, Shield, Buffalo and Jefferson nickels which all have a different metal composition as I am a advanced digital screen user usually look for a 5 or 6 in Conduct.Deep nickels even Jefferson can sometimes read different than a shallow one. I personally am a silver coin hunter but usually hear all the non ferrous targets and to me a nickel just hits harder than tabs or mimicing junk and go for deep ones...Explorer is sure not your best nickel machine especially if you are going by the cross-hair screen..3-4 is a good number also as most thin gold womans rings with nice stones come in just below nickel on the digital screen..To me the dreaded end of shotgun shell will drive one crazy if hunting has been done in the area..

 

[Anonymous]

My post was in response to a fellow wondering out loud (complaining) about the Ace 250 notch rejection not offering fine enough control.
My reply was entitled "Not much you can do", and I have made some typo corrections so I don't look too much the fool...
-post follows-
if the bad target exactly mimicks a good target. My Minelab Explorer will give two readings for each target, sometimes the readings are IDENTICAL for a nickel and a square tab.
Sometimes nickels vary by one digit (Jefferson), 10-05/10-06 sometimes the pulltab varies 10-04/10-05/10-06/11-05/11-06/11-07. Sometimes they look exactly like a nickel, sometimes only VERY slightly different. With 32*31 possible discrimination "notches" the Explorer offers a theoretical 992 notches. In real world conditions (soil/tab depth/tab orientation/etc...) it would be ill advised to notch out square pulltabs and hope to dig only nickels.
Look at how many people display "this weeks finds" with ANY machine. Lots of quarters, lots of pennies (zinc or bronze), lots of dimes, lots of other goodies, but almost never are there lots of nickels. The ones that show a nice cache of nickels are the ones that dig lots of tabs, or are blessed with litter free sites where IDENTICAL interference singals do not exist.
As for rusty bottle caps, that's even more fun since the act of the rust diffusing through the ground makes for an ever changing target. One year a particular cap might look like an easily rejected piece of iron, the next year it might show up like a "clean" quarter to MOST machines.
The goal then is to reduce the trash signals to a manageable level, but when the signals you are searching for happen to be identical to the signals you wish to ignore, your only choice is to approach the target from many angles and try and decipher it's true comosition by the subtlties your detector provides.
In summary, square pulltabs are hard to discriminate on a machine offering 992 discrimination points, it will by definition be harder to discriminate them on a machine barely breaking double digits. (12 in the case of the Ace 250)
Does that mean the Ace isn't up to the task? Not in my mind, since in order to make it up the the task, it must offer nearly 1000 "notches", and even THEN will still not prevent you from digging junk tabs!!
Let's not forget that gold looks like "junk" too, so we just have to grin and bear it sometimes. If we're smart, we collect those tabs we dig, they represent the effort we put in, give us practice making clean holes to refill nicely, and most important, get them out of the ground so next time we sweep that area all we get are good signals.
Have a great day, and don't let the tabs bust your chops!
-end of other forum post-
See my post below in response to Cody "Good to hear from you" below. So far, the custom discrim pattern I gets me to nickel/tab in no time, then the digital meter lets be decide whether or not to dig. If I use the parameters I listed above in this post (10-05/10-06) for nickels (and sometimes tabs), my hit ratio is exactly 50% over the course of two days (8 tabs, 8 nickels). Not bad!
Of course it's asking for trouble (losing good finds) to use such a narrow discrim table, but the same principals can be used if you have Barbers, V's and twenty-cent pieces on hand to "learn".
DAS

 

[Anonymous]

Got to agree coinshooter,
Nickels are real tough. Not going to say the toughest; think the smaller gold denominations, nickel 3 cent peices, and fattie indians/flying eagles are the worst. But that may be just because we get many more chances to practice with nickels than with the others.
This year I found more Shields, Vs, Buffalo, and War nickels than my previous years combined. Only thing I can say is that when deep or near junk they do not often hit in the classic nickel area. This is the reason why I think patterns are for the birds, if you don't have the screen opened up to see where the icon bounces you won't know when to dig.
That said certainly get fooled by nickel signals way more often than copper/silver. I think copper/silver are generally much easier to ID. Because of their high conductivity they will dominate most signals when averaged with trash. Almost all of the time this means that it will hit at the top of the screen, perhaps bouncing over to the iron side. Generally the only question is iron falsing vs good signal.
Not only do nickels hit way down where there are tons of junk signals like pull tabs and chunks of foil that can hit in the exact same place, they also don't seem to dominate the signal as much and adjacent trash can move the target in almost any direction.
What I'm saying is that even if they hit 100 percent of the time in the exact same area, you would still dig trash sometimes, as Varmint is saying below. To make it worse in trash they bounce around much randomly than higher conductivity targets.
But, what I've found is that nickels mixed with iron (the most probable junk item by far), is that on repeated sweeps you'll see the icon in the nickel area and then bouncing to the left and upward, slighty higher just left of the nickel area and then sweeping up quickly as you get closer to the left of the screen.
Other hints are that they bounce in the above pattern more consitantly then thinner bent pull tabs. It seems that thin metal that is bent in many facets seem to give a much more random bounce pattern as you sweep over it multiple times. At one time I was convinced that nickels usually had a fuller polytonic sound (I hunt ferrous) than junk but now I am not so sure. It's a good sign when you get a fluty signal (more likely to be a nickel) but certainly can't eliminate signals because they don't have this feature.
So..
Only shallower nickels or nickels in real clean ground will consistently hit in the expected area. Nickels in iron give a fairly reliable signature. But Nickels mixed with most other trash will always pose a challenge. In some parks I hit if there is a ton of pull tabs and similar junk I'll just blank out the entire bottom of the screen and concentrate on Silver.
In many sites the number of nickels left behind is quite high because over the years many people have discriminated them out and cleaned off all the copper/silver. Plenty of practice to be had for anyone willing to spend the time (too bad they corrode so badly). Nickel hunting really seems to rely on more of a gut feeling than any easily explainable technique.
Hopefully next year will gain a few more clues and have even better numbers.
Chris