Do this test. Take a beaver tail pull tab with the tail still attached and a gold ring and lay both on the ground about foot about and then thumb the discrimination knob to the exact point where each discriminate in and out. You will notice that the discrimination point where the gold ring discriminates in and out will be narrow and there be little to no popping and cracking of the audio response on either side of its narrow discrimination point.
On the other hand, the discrimination point on a beaver tail pull tab will be wider and there will be popping and cracking in the audio response in that wider discrimination range. In other words, a gold ring will discriminate in and out cleanly and a beaver tail pull tab won't.
Just for practice, layout some small pieces of cardboard on the ground and have someone put beaver tail pull tabs under some and gold rings under the rest without you knowing which ones are which. Then do your thumbing. I'm certain that I can get a pretty high score picking out the gold rings from the tabs.
beephead
I have found 3 dozen gold targets in my 8 year career hunting mostly parks and a couple of other public areas.
About 1/3 of those were found with either a Vaq or a Compadre.
They were all trashy and I mean to the extreme, the areas where I found that Tesoro gold were, anyway.
Most were found after I started doing my high percentage method of mostly digging just the targets that come in solid with little or no noise.
Every one if them came in exactly that way from foil on tiny or white gold rings up to zinc on big class rings...silent until I thumbed down and then bam, they were just there solid and loud.
That's why they all got dug, except for two large class rings which acted this way but also sounded different than any other target I ever dug with a Tesoro.
All were in trash ranges so every one was a surprise but I got into this hobby for those kinds of surprises.
They were sitting in areas surrounded by foil of all sizes, can slaw from tiny to big, those hated round foil freshness tops off of bottles, square tabs and a range of pull tabs from old to younger and sizes from small to large that came in at a large range.
Plus a million pop tops, bits of iron and all the other kinds of junk we find in public parks because people are basically pigs.
Most of that junk was exactly as beephead described on the ends, noisy, crackling...just not like coins, tokens, relics, silver and gold.
Believe me I dug tons of those noisy targets before I finally one day just stopped digging them, the bad targets were noisy and the good ones weren't...dig hundreds of each kind for long enough and your confidence grows.
I finally reached my breaking point and from then on never looked back.
Now I dig about 15- 20% of the trash I come across out there, the rest I walk on by and nothing bothers me about doing that anymore.
This was a huge change for me but I did it, I am glad I did it and I will continue to do it this way until I figure out something better.
Seems to work pretty much the same on all the chains I have found with the Compadre, Vaq and my Mojave too which is a bonus.
