Welcome to Minelabowners.com
  Why Don't I Find Rings & Hammered Coins Regularly

Desi Dunne
Contribution # 99103 submitted by Desreally
April 24, 2001

 

 

Good question.

Ever wonder why you don't come home with the results you thought you would just because you had secured a top of the line detector? Having the most expensive machine will not guarantee you will find everything there is to be found on any given site (inland or wet beach) if you do not properly understand how important it is to understand the relationship between ground effect and discrimination.

Besides plain good luck there are several other deciding factors.
Essentially, it has everything to do with the soil. The physical make up, neutral, lightly or heavily mineralised, proximity of junk items buried in the soil etc. Moisture content of the soil. It appears to be a deciding factor in depths acheivable if a site is searched while the soil is still wet, possibly soon after a recent rainfall. Of course, rejection plays its part too and by this I mean discrimination levels. You might notice on a very dry site some large items can be found with surprisingly weak signals.

Typically, an enthusiast will consider the best machine he or she can afford to do the job they want i.e find targets at good depths and discriminate out the junk items. But herein could lie your problem.
Your rotary discriminator control could simply be advanced too far. OK, it is all very well to do some tests at home to denote where items will "drop off" the scale i.e. no longer giving an audio response. Go on site and introduce some mineralised soil to a depth of a few inches, have many junk targets embedded in the soil and this can have a detrimental effect on the results you achieve (if any). Even at a moderate level of rejection, say small iron or light foil it can still determine if or not you will "see" targets at even a few inches. It would be just great if all the items we want were just under the first inch or two of soil, but they are not. So, a small ring, buried at 5" might not register a sound if you pass over this said same ring in soil which is slighly mineralised and if you have your discriminator rotary control set to reject to just beyond foil.
Now it is very obvious to the experienced detectorist that the least (preferably none) discrimination is used. But to the novice the discriminator rotary control might be unwittingly advanced so far which will guarantee no signals from small rings, some Celtic, Roman and medieval coins due to their small mass and small surface areas presented to the search coil.
If searching for these kinds of items the level of rejection should be no more than necessary to reject small nails only, in order to maintain sensitivity to these items. In some regards this is where the Explorer can come into its own as this feature is available in the Select option and is utilised by many Explorer owners.
At high levels of rejection (discrimination) only higher conductive items such as large targets, and/or large copper and silver coins will be found on a usual basis. Now in itself there is nothing at all wrong with this, indeed it is nice to come home with some nice old silver coins to admire.
But no smaller and low conductive items will have any chance of presenting themselves to you, but will be left to a more savvy, less discriminating (excuse the pun) and possibly "slower" type searcher?

So, take note, check on site to see where you should set the disc control; in air at home maybe the item started to break up at 5,6 or 7. But as I said, introduce some mineralised soil and the same target might start to break up at between 3 and 4, so essentially you will "not hear it" at all and walk on leaving it in the ground. The golden rule has to be use the least discrimination you can stand, but dig everything you are not sure of.

 

 




HOME PAGE  ] MEMBERS AREA  ] DETECTING TIPS & TRICKS ] FIELD TESTS  ] BITS & BOBS ] FIND A DEALER ] THE NEW EXPLORER ] GUEST BOOK ] DOWNLOADS ] E-MAIL ]

This site is best viewed in Internet Explorer Version 5 or above with a minimum screen resolution of 1024x768



Live Chat

 

Detector Dicks Detecting Diary. Articles Needed! Click here

Require field tests and other info. This is your site...you have the info...send it and share it Click here
.
This is where we can put some news and other stuff that might be of interest to your clients.
This is where we can put some news and other stuff that might be of interest to your clients.

 

TIPS & TRICKS

16 things

AirTests

Beach Hunting

 Coin Cleaning

Cleaning bronze and Romana

Cleaning Copper

Conserving

GPS

Going Slow

Good Beginner?

Nothing To Hunt

Restoring Coins

Quick Tips

Water Hunting with the Explorer

Why don't I find Hammered?

 

 

This is where we can put Only gold detectors left to do now..