DIGGER27
In Memory Of
I was going over some advice I have compiled and saved and I again came across this little gem from Rudy that is about 4 years old...
http://metaldetectingforum.com/showthread.php?t=15664
"When I am hunting with my MXT in an area where these bottle caps are plentiful, the easiest way to identify them, rather than digging them, is to take another pass over them in discriminate mode, but this time do it with the edge of the coil, instead of the coil centered on the target. "Rimming" the target this way will let the detector show them up as ferrous targets. This technique will work with just about any VLF detector.
Try it!"
Now I love hunting with my big DD coil on my Vaq, not so much for depth, but that large, almost foot long, scanning field gives me confidence hunting the large open park settings I tend to hunt.
I don't have the "what if's" in my head so much concerning missing targets with this one.
I probably still do to an extent, but I can walk away and still feel pretty confident about finding the largest volume of targets in my time spent at these large sites.
What I don't like about DD coils, and just about everyone that hunts with these will tell you this, is how they sound off on bottle caps.
DD coils are great in mineralized soils, and I already mentioned that wide scanning field, but you do lose some discrimination ability with this type of coil.
With the standard concentric coil on my Vaquero, I eventually learned to deal with bottle caps because it is much easier.
I am talking about the steel or aluminum ones that come in on the high end.
On my Vaq, most of these types will disc out before you max out the disc so they are usually easy to distinguish from high tone coins like dimes, quarters and the like.
Find a signal, move the disc knob up to max and it is gone, back that knob down just a little and they come back in but sometimes scratchy and not as low as the zinc area on the knob...and that is usually going to be a bottle cap.
I am a dig it all kind of hunter usually, and even though I pretty much know what this signal is going to be, I have still dug plenty.
In this hobby weird things happen and you never really know 100%...but 99% of the signals in this situation have been bottle caps or coin size can slaw so I have made my piece with that.
About 6 months after purchasing my Vaq, I was contacted by another member about purchasing his 10X12 DD coil at a discount.
He lives in Ga. with heavy mineralizatin like I had in Alabama, but he hunts in forests for relics and that size coil turned out to be hard to maneuver in the dense underbrush.
One smooth transaction later, I had my new coil mounted on the Vaq and for the most part, it has stayed on there ever since.
The first thing I noticed is I love hunting with that wide scanning field and the great target separation ability these coils have.
The second thing I noticed was that those blasted bottle caps lots of times did not disc out anymore, and they also sounded pretty much exactly like quarters to me...again!
Just like when I was a noob, just starting out and almost every signal sounded almost exactly the same.
This is the trash from one of my first hunts with this coil at an old and extremely trashy park...
"Sigh"...
Life is like that, sometimes.
Give and take, the Ying and the Yang...but you learn to deal with it and move on.
Since that time, I have continued to hunt and find some great stuff, but I have also continued to learn.
The learning never ends, in my opinion, in this hobby or in life.
I have learned that most high end bottle caps don't really sound like coins if you really listen.
Some still do, but most don't.
Bottle caps have a...switching to the Tesoro language here, they have a "bright" sound to the signal that coins usually don't have.
Coins are smoother and fully rounded and sound beautiful.
Bottle caps and can slaw sound "bright" and really "sharp" and annoying.
Hard to explain, but coins to me sound beautiful and have a distinct sound I love to hear, and compared to that, trash like this usually has an extra component that gives me the same reaction like when I hear fingernails scratching on a blackboard.
That is most of the time, but not all the time.
After re-reading that article and re-educating myself with Rudy's advice, which is something I have not tried up to this point because I am old and forget things easily, I decided to go out last night to my closest neighborhood park and instead of digging good targets I was going to look for some bottle caps and see if this rimming the target thing works with my DD coil.
I started at a picnic area next to the public bathrooms that had lots of trash and tried this technique.
There are several ways to pinpoint with a DD coil, and for me, the quickest and easiest is the wiggle and pull back method.
Find the target, wiggle over it till it is right in line with the center of the coil, continue to wiggle and pull back till you get to the point where the signal drops out.
If the target is shallow, within a few inches, the target should be directly under or right behind the front rim of the coil.
Deeper targets will usually be right in front of that coil.
This will narrow the target area down to an area no larger than about 2 inches, and then I use my Propointer to scrape the surface and zero in on the exact area and dig.
For me, this gets me to my target quickly 100% of the time.
I proceeded to do this and started looking at max disc for those high tone coin signals or bottle caps that don't disc out.
Found a few that I suspected were bottle caps and I did the pull back thing till the signal was gone.
I then kept the coil in the exact same spot and thumbed that disc down to iron and wiggled side to side.
The signal came back...loud and clear!
Thumbing the knob back up to max disc the signal was gone again but by moving that coil forward an inch or two and wiggling I acquired it again.
Dug it...bottle cap!
Hey, this rimming thing seems to work!
Love learning new things, and this is just one more thing to add to the arsenal of knowledge just in case I don't feel like digging every single signal I ever come across in this world, and so I won't get those "what if" feelings if I choose not to dig them.
Didn't stay long, but these are the results from my little experiment last night.
Some of the trash...
Most of these reacted perfectly with this rimming technique.
This one did not...
From what I remember, this one sounded nice and smooth like a coin and did not come back in with the leading edge of the coil behind the target and the disc down to iron.
Luckily, most bottle caps I come across are not smashed flat and rusty like this one.
This target also fooled me...
That's fine, not as many steel nuts in the ground like bottle caps, anyway.
This one acted perfect also, and it was in a different part of the park and about 6 inches deep.
That "bright" sound I talked about isn't so predominant on deeper targets like they are on shallow ones, mostly because the volume is lower and they are further away, I assume, but this rimming technique did work all the same.
Thrilled!
I was also very happy that this rimming thing did not work on these targets.
So there you have it.
One more piece of the puzzle, one more positive experience and some knowledge that will stay in my head and I can use on my hunts, if needed.
I hunt some real trashy parks, sometimes...it's needed.
Since I started this hobby I have scoured this forum and others, read thousands and thousands of posts and articles from veterans and newbies alike, just trying to get the edge on this detecting thing and to somehow tip the odds a little more in my favor any way I can.
On almost everything in life this is what I do...this is how I learn.
Thanks Rudy, for your experience and willingness to share it.
Thanks to all the others I have learned from, too.
The more I learn, the more satisfying and fun this hobby seems to get.
If that is even possible.
HH
http://metaldetectingforum.com/showthread.php?t=15664
"When I am hunting with my MXT in an area where these bottle caps are plentiful, the easiest way to identify them, rather than digging them, is to take another pass over them in discriminate mode, but this time do it with the edge of the coil, instead of the coil centered on the target. "Rimming" the target this way will let the detector show them up as ferrous targets. This technique will work with just about any VLF detector.
Try it!"
Now I love hunting with my big DD coil on my Vaq, not so much for depth, but that large, almost foot long, scanning field gives me confidence hunting the large open park settings I tend to hunt.
I don't have the "what if's" in my head so much concerning missing targets with this one.
I probably still do to an extent, but I can walk away and still feel pretty confident about finding the largest volume of targets in my time spent at these large sites.
What I don't like about DD coils, and just about everyone that hunts with these will tell you this, is how they sound off on bottle caps.
DD coils are great in mineralized soils, and I already mentioned that wide scanning field, but you do lose some discrimination ability with this type of coil.
With the standard concentric coil on my Vaquero, I eventually learned to deal with bottle caps because it is much easier.
I am talking about the steel or aluminum ones that come in on the high end.
On my Vaq, most of these types will disc out before you max out the disc so they are usually easy to distinguish from high tone coins like dimes, quarters and the like.
Find a signal, move the disc knob up to max and it is gone, back that knob down just a little and they come back in but sometimes scratchy and not as low as the zinc area on the knob...and that is usually going to be a bottle cap.
I am a dig it all kind of hunter usually, and even though I pretty much know what this signal is going to be, I have still dug plenty.
In this hobby weird things happen and you never really know 100%...but 99% of the signals in this situation have been bottle caps or coin size can slaw so I have made my piece with that.
About 6 months after purchasing my Vaq, I was contacted by another member about purchasing his 10X12 DD coil at a discount.
He lives in Ga. with heavy mineralizatin like I had in Alabama, but he hunts in forests for relics and that size coil turned out to be hard to maneuver in the dense underbrush.
One smooth transaction later, I had my new coil mounted on the Vaq and for the most part, it has stayed on there ever since.
The first thing I noticed is I love hunting with that wide scanning field and the great target separation ability these coils have.
The second thing I noticed was that those blasted bottle caps lots of times did not disc out anymore, and they also sounded pretty much exactly like quarters to me...again!
Just like when I was a noob, just starting out and almost every signal sounded almost exactly the same.
This is the trash from one of my first hunts with this coil at an old and extremely trashy park...
"Sigh"...
Life is like that, sometimes.
Give and take, the Ying and the Yang...but you learn to deal with it and move on.
Since that time, I have continued to hunt and find some great stuff, but I have also continued to learn.
The learning never ends, in my opinion, in this hobby or in life.
I have learned that most high end bottle caps don't really sound like coins if you really listen.
Some still do, but most don't.
Bottle caps have a...switching to the Tesoro language here, they have a "bright" sound to the signal that coins usually don't have.
Coins are smoother and fully rounded and sound beautiful.
Bottle caps and can slaw sound "bright" and really "sharp" and annoying.
Hard to explain, but coins to me sound beautiful and have a distinct sound I love to hear, and compared to that, trash like this usually has an extra component that gives me the same reaction like when I hear fingernails scratching on a blackboard.
That is most of the time, but not all the time.
After re-reading that article and re-educating myself with Rudy's advice, which is something I have not tried up to this point because I am old and forget things easily, I decided to go out last night to my closest neighborhood park and instead of digging good targets I was going to look for some bottle caps and see if this rimming the target thing works with my DD coil.
I started at a picnic area next to the public bathrooms that had lots of trash and tried this technique.
There are several ways to pinpoint with a DD coil, and for me, the quickest and easiest is the wiggle and pull back method.
Find the target, wiggle over it till it is right in line with the center of the coil, continue to wiggle and pull back till you get to the point where the signal drops out.
If the target is shallow, within a few inches, the target should be directly under or right behind the front rim of the coil.
Deeper targets will usually be right in front of that coil.
This will narrow the target area down to an area no larger than about 2 inches, and then I use my Propointer to scrape the surface and zero in on the exact area and dig.
For me, this gets me to my target quickly 100% of the time.
I proceeded to do this and started looking at max disc for those high tone coin signals or bottle caps that don't disc out.
Found a few that I suspected were bottle caps and I did the pull back thing till the signal was gone.
I then kept the coil in the exact same spot and thumbed that disc down to iron and wiggled side to side.
The signal came back...loud and clear!
Thumbing the knob back up to max disc the signal was gone again but by moving that coil forward an inch or two and wiggling I acquired it again.
Dug it...bottle cap!
Hey, this rimming thing seems to work!
Love learning new things, and this is just one more thing to add to the arsenal of knowledge just in case I don't feel like digging every single signal I ever come across in this world, and so I won't get those "what if" feelings if I choose not to dig them.
Didn't stay long, but these are the results from my little experiment last night.
Some of the trash...
Most of these reacted perfectly with this rimming technique.
This one did not...
From what I remember, this one sounded nice and smooth like a coin and did not come back in with the leading edge of the coil behind the target and the disc down to iron.
Luckily, most bottle caps I come across are not smashed flat and rusty like this one.
This target also fooled me...
That's fine, not as many steel nuts in the ground like bottle caps, anyway.
This one acted perfect also, and it was in a different part of the park and about 6 inches deep.
That "bright" sound I talked about isn't so predominant on deeper targets like they are on shallow ones, mostly because the volume is lower and they are further away, I assume, but this rimming technique did work all the same.
Thrilled!
I was also very happy that this rimming thing did not work on these targets.
So there you have it.
One more piece of the puzzle, one more positive experience and some knowledge that will stay in my head and I can use on my hunts, if needed.
I hunt some real trashy parks, sometimes...it's needed.
Since I started this hobby I have scoured this forum and others, read thousands and thousands of posts and articles from veterans and newbies alike, just trying to get the edge on this detecting thing and to somehow tip the odds a little more in my favor any way I can.
On almost everything in life this is what I do...this is how I learn.
Thanks Rudy, for your experience and willingness to share it.
Thanks to all the others I have learned from, too.
The more I learn, the more satisfying and fun this hobby seems to get.
If that is even possible.
HH
