Methodology for detecting in cinders

Monte · Dec 4, 2019

LovestheShiny! said:
Hey IDX, wonder if Beach Mode on the Nox would work, as wet salt water sand is highly mineralized...

I'm not an Equinox user, but I used to hunt beaches a good deal, Oregon Ocean beaches, using an assortment of single-frequency VLF detectors and did OK in the wetted salty sand and shallow water or water puddles.

Most of the Oregon beaches have a lot of very iron mineral sand and are unlike the more 'neutral' beaches of Florida. You can adjust the Ground Balance for the very negative iron mineral beach, but wetted sand and salt water are not negative. They are very low-conductive, positive conductive, so I would GB to the bad ground, and then fine-tune the Discrimination to just barely reject the low-conductive wetted salt.

Transfer this thinking to working some of the places where I encountered a lot of 'coke' or 'burned coal' and those were at some of the RR ghost towns I've hunted as well as not too far from some, like in Portland Oregon, where discarded coke was used to fill part of a city park in a few places. That pesky coke would give me a good audio response when I work with my Discrimination set to just barely accept iron nails or maybe just high enough to reject iron nails. But still accepted lower-conductive thin gold chains or thin rings and some small foil.

The hunks of coke sounded loud because they were usually shallower, and there were places in the edge to side of a playground area and also in some of the older picnic table areas where coke chased a lot of people off due to the positive responses.

There I used a few of my detectors with a broad-range of adjustment in the lower Disc. range and I simply swept over the samples of coke and gently increased my Discrimination to just barely reject that annoyance. I had GB'ed to the adjacent ground, then I rejected the coke.

Yes, it was kind of a problem, but it let me detect in the area and still find coins, especially some of the older wheat-backs and silver.

We have to remember to listen for 'double-beeps' from crossing coins that are 'on-edge' or very abruptly canted and that is because they have settled in-between some of the coke since those discarded hunks don't allow them all to lay nice and flat.

Just what I have done to deal with some salty sand conditions and also hunt in a lot of the locations where I have encountered a lot of discarded clinkers. I've used some of my favorite models with a full-range Disc. adjustment and manual GB to hunt some of the saltiest wet beaches you could imagine, and out-performed some friends using their Fisher CZ's and Minelab Explorer II's and SE Pro's and a couple of Sovereigns.

Side-by-side we compared some located signals and a few planted zinc cents, cartridge cases and lead bullets an they didn't match the depth or performance I was getting with my modified White's IDX Pro. That was out hunting the super-salty Great Salt Lake.

Monte

IDXMonster · Dec 5, 2019

Monte said:
I'm not an Equinox user, but I used to hunt beaches a good deal, Oregon Ocean beaches, using an assortment of single-frequency VLF detectors and did OK in the wetted salty sand and shallow water or water puddles.

Most of the Oregon beaches have a lot of very iron mineral sand and are unlike the more 'neutral' beaches of Florida. You can adjust the Ground Balance for the very negative iron mineral beach, but wetted sand and salt water are not negative. They are very low-conductive, positive conductive, so I would GB to the bad ground, and then fine-tune the Discrimination to just barely reject the low-conductive wetted salt.

Transfer this thinking to working some of the places where I encountered a lot of 'coke' or 'burned coal' and those were at some of the RR ghost towns I've hunted as well as not too far from some, like in Portland Oregon, where discarded coke was used to fill part of a city park in a few places. That pesky coke would give me a good audio response when I work with my Discrimination set to just barely accept iron nails or maybe just high enough to reject iron nails. But still accepted lower-conductive thin gold chains or thin rings and some small foil.

The hunks of coke sounded loud because they were usually shallower, and there were places in the edge to side of a playground area and also in some of the older picnic table areas where coke chased a lot of people off due to the positive responses.

There I used a few of my detectors with a broad-range of adjustment in the lower Disc. range and I simply swept over the samples of coke and gently increased my Discrimination to just barely reject that annoyance. I had GB'ed to the adjacent ground, then I rejected the coke.

Yes, it was kind of a problem, but it let me detect in the area and still find coins, especially some of the older wheat-backs and silver.

We have to remember to listen for 'double-beeps' from crossing coins that are 'on-edge' or very abruptly canted and that is because they have settled in-between some of the coke since those discarded hunks don't allow them all to lay nice and flat.

Just what I have done to deal with some salty sand conditions and also hunt in a lot of the locations where I have encountered a lot of discarded clinkers. I've used some of my favorite models with a full-range Disc. adjustment and manual GB to hunt some of the saltiest wet beaches you could imagine, and out-performed some friends using their Fisher CZ's and Minelab Explorer II's and SE Pro's and a couple of Sovereigns.

Side-by-side we compared some located signals and a few planted zinc cents, cartridge cases and lead bullets an they didn't match the depth or performance I was getting with my modified White's IDX Pro. That was out hunting the super-salty Great Salt Lake.

Monte

Hmmmm. Just so happens I have a modified IDXPro! You know this though Monte. :yes:

I’ll just click on the Black Sand switch and have that lower end adjustability, then work on it from there. Of course I’ll have the 5.3 on....
I knew there was a reason I still have that thing! :lol:

Thanks for the idea, I’ll put it to the test in a few days....

ghound · Dec 5, 2019

If it's proper coke it will read as 1 or 2 on your Nox, so you can quickly try test it if you have collected some from your site, standard household coal doesn't register on it.
In field 1 it seems to filter it out almost entirely without any notching and it doesn't mask targets below it.
In field 2 it's notched out on tone, but it picks it up and will mask targets if there is a gap in depth between the coke and target.
Our fields are full of the stuff as it was widely used in the industrial revolution and it's hateful to hunt in.
My Deus loved the stuff, a large piece of coke at 4 inch sounded just the same as a scratchy hammed silver at the detectors fringe depth, but near surface coke is easily distinguished.

IDXMonster · Dec 5, 2019

ghound said:
If it's proper coke it will read as 1 or 2 on your Nox, so you can quickly try test it if you have collected some from your site, standard household coal doesn't register on it.
In field 1 it seems to filter it out almost entirely without any notching and it doesn't mask targets below it.
In field 2 it's notched out on tone, but it picks it up and will mask targets if there is a gap in depth between the coke and target.
Our fields are full of the stuff as it was widely used in the industrial revolution and it's hateful to hunt in.
My Deus loved the stuff, a large piece of coke at 4 inch sounded just the same as a scratchy hammed silver at the detectors fringe depth, but near surface coke is easily distinguished.

More excellent info Hound! You’re right, I do have to determine exactly what it is I have first, and then work from there. I will report back as soon as possible....

Monte · Dec 6, 2019

IDXMonster said:
Hmmmm. Just so happens I have a modified IDXPro! You know this though Monte. I’ll just click on the Black Sand switch and have that lower end adjustability, then work on it from there. Of course I’ll have the 5.3 on....
I knew there was a reason I still have that thing! Thanks for the idea, I’ll put it to the test in a few days....

We can make a mistake and do a left turn when it should have been a right turn, but we can turn-around and do it right. In the product manufacturing business it isn't always the same. White's had a terrific set of detectors in the Classic series and only needed to steer them in the right direction.

That would have involved proper marketing of a very good product. Instead, thy made the wrong turn and dropped the Classic series in favor of a cheaper plastic-housed Prism series. No smaller coils, delayed audio response, more 'ring-time' instead of quick response & recovery & response time, and a more inferior performance design.

In this market they would have needed to turn around and head back the right direction, and if anything, simply kept the same performance buy just change the packaging a bit. They didn't. That was the end for the Classic series and a sad time in the industry, in my opinion.

No, I'm not trying to tell others that the Classic III SL (non-display) or Classic ID or IDX Pro (simple Coin ID display) models are going to out-perform everything else. I have my excellent other models, all selected for performance for different applications, like my CoRe, Relic, Racer 2, Simplex +, T2+, Bandido II µMAX, Silver Sabre µMAX and even the Fisher F-44, all set-up with my preferred search coil and all ready-to-grab.

But in this 'complement' of detectors folks will also find my modified IDX Pro w/6½" Concentric mounted, and they will also note that it is a very capable detector, too! Of course, that's something you already know. :yes:

I'll be interested to hear how the suggested setting might work out for you and the problems you're encountering. I know that not all 'coke' is created alike, and there are some locations when I encounter it and some makes/models can handle it better than others.

One of my favorite RR ghost towns has a couple of areas where a lot of the discarded coke was used and my friends with their Minelab Explorer II's had more difficulty hunting there than I did with a modified Classic III SL or modified IDX Pro. I was using a 6½" Concentric coil to their 10" and 11" DD's, and I simply GB to the adjacent mineralized ground, then toggled to Black Sand (a really dumb name for that setting) and used the lower-end of the enhanced Disc. range to barely reject the problem clinkers that had been sounding off.

Has it worked ALL the time? Nope. But it has worked SOME of the time, and that meant that sometimes I was able to hunt a site w/o being annoyed by the coke/clinkers that were there.

I hope this technique works for your problem area.

Monte

PS: For readers who don't know, White's used a coil labelend Blue Max 600, then they used the same coil parts except changed the color to black plastic from white plastic. They also changed the name to 5.3 Black Max and then 5.3 Bullseye, and for the other series they called it the 5.3 Eclipse. All were the same size housing and the "5.3" was a dumb marketing move someone thought up. The actual physical diameter is 6½" even though they call it a 6" coil.

Methodology for detecting in cinders

Monte

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ghound

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Monte

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