A question about two nails at the beach today with the Vanquish

John Madill

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Did three beaches in three days with three different detectors. Today i took the Vanquish 540 to the beach.

Twice i hit targets reading as 20's, exactly where the gold rings are supposed to show up. Strong signals consistent from all directions. I was in jewelry mode.

Both times i dug up identical rusty nails. What settings or techniques might i have used to double check before digging to perhaps disprove the reading i was getting?
 
Gold rings responding in the 20s would be some major sized rings and/or high karat gold....18K or more. I have found a lot of gold rings with the Equinox/Vanquish detectors but only one came in as high as 21.

If you are using jewelry mode and you want to double check a target for possibly being iron, just press the horseshoe button and all of the target ID segments will be instantly accepted including the iron target IDs.

Rusty, bent nails will often respond in the high teens, 20s and very high 30s. If you hit the horseshoe button they will also give negative numbers and low tones. This large variation in target ID/tone responses is a indicator of possible iron or steel with or without rust.
 
Rusty iron or just plain bent nails get dug all the time. You can play with the horseshoe button. You can circle the target and try it from multiple directions. Or you can just dig them up and find out. The 20s is very high for gold as already stated. Most gold I find is nickel signal or lower. Digging iron isn't bad if you are only digging it a few times. The iron bias setting on an Equinox helps with annoying amounts. For me usually it is rusty bottle caps. But those are in the dry sand usually and venturing into dry sand is accepting the fact that junk awaits.
 
thanks for the replies....

i was perhaps making a wrong assumption about that magic number 20.

I presumed it was gold as a very pretty diamond ring sits right above the #20 on the face of the control box.
 

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Just new to this but if I was doing beaches I would dig all targets and help keep them free of junk and if i find a ring or a cool pair of sunglasses right on.
 
i was perhaps making a wrong assumption about that magic number 20.

I presumed it was gold as a very pretty diamond ring sits right above the #20 on the face of the control box.

Yes, ignore that 20. Gold can come in over a wide range on the Vanquish. Another clue when you hit the signal is when you pinpoint, you should get a very small point with jewelry. Nails will show as a larger target. Also what goodmore said about the horseshoe button.
 
Just new to this but if I was doing beaches I would dig all targets and help keep them free of junk and if i find a ring or a cool pair of sunglasses right on.

I like this method best of all! 5 years ago, my sites had quite a lot of tabs, screwcaps, canslaw. Now, years later, I search almost trash free. Newcomers don't know this so they add discrimination and leave some goodies.:cool3:
 
It's funny how most people eventually concede that digging everything is ultimately better than relying on the discrimination on even a high end machine. Certainly high end machines discriminate better and your reward/dig ratio will certainly increase, but this is deceptive statistically. More and more I'm seeing threads asking things like "why does my Minelab rate junk so high and gold rings so low?"etc. When you look at mass-manufactured stuff like nails and pull tabs, they will usually have ID's which are very predictable. That's why when most people see those IDs they dont dig them...and normally that would be the right choice. But fine jewelry is handmade and doesnt conform to such a cookie cutter level of discrimination. In fact, as we are seeing here fine jewelry often can run ID's similar to that often found to be junk. Maybe more often than we think. Just a week ago I dug a hole targeted by my Gold Kruzer to be not far off from being a folded aluminum can. However, it was actually a coin spill of 7 coins: 2 nickels, 1 dime and 4 pennies (or pretty close to that, sorry my memory sucks!). Maybe it was 2nickels, 2 dimes and 3 pennies. Anyway, I was running the GK in Micro mode, the only mode with multiple tones. The audio was garbled. It could have been a piece foil or folded can, something with multiple facets. Turned out the multiple facets were multiple sides of multiple coins!

There are other ways a piece of metal can mimic the response of a different piece of metal. Sometimes this is drastic and it's not something SMF can cure. SMF doesnt give you an infallible 3D approach to MDing. What it does is work with pre-programmed stats on what metals respond best to which frequencies. But size and shape and alloys still play a huge role in how metals respond. And beaming 3 freqs at the same time actually gives you MORE potential ways your machine's brain could get confused.

So the bottom line is, SMF increases your reward/dig ratio by eliminating bad digs, not actually increasing good ones.

Somewhere there is an overlap, even with SMF technology, where you're leaving good stuff in the ground because it sounds crappy, and occasionally digging a piece of trash that by volumetric size tricked your detector into thinking it was a "mass" hit. It still seems beyond most detectors to judge whether the target's density is more dependent on eithet mass or volume. And you don't know till you dig.

Dig? :-)
 
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