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How Long To Swing A Coil Over One Acre?


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Recently read Lucky's post about his Rye Patch adventure.  Nice job guys and gal.  He mentioned "we cover hundreds of acres with our coils a day".  I'm pretty sure he didn't mean that literally, it just felt that way.  Anyway, it got me wondering how much ground are we covering with our coil in day.

For the sake of simplicity let's assume we are swinging a 12" coil in a 6' arc.  Therefore we cover 6 sq. ft each swing.  To cover an acre (43560 sq. ft) we need to make 43560/6=7260 swings.  Also let's assume we are taking 3 sec./swing.  Then 7260 swings x 3 sec/swing=21780 sec or 21780/3600sec/hr=6.05 hrs.  So to put your coil over an acre of ground with a modest swing rate takes about 6 hours excluding any digging, eating, or whatever.

You could cut that time by swinging faster or using a bigger coil, but covering an acre takes a fairly long time.  You also could move faster and pass over ground between each swing, but your coil is still only seeing one acre.  Food for thought.

Damn, I got to get a hobby.  

 

 

 

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Hawkeye; no matter which coil or rate of swing the coil does see a lot of ground on the surface. Now you could compute how many cubic yards of matrix the coil processes...so many variables. No wonder there is always something missed.

fred

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 Now add 265 rocks to swing around, 49 large trees 152 small trees, one steep sided gully, 38% brush coverage, one hornets nest, a rattle snake.........My god, I would love to detect where I could make a 6' swing.

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Except you have not really covered the acre. So let's go 50% overlap of the swings to get decent coverage at depth. 12.1 hours. And hit it from at least two different directions 24.2 hours.

And you still missed a nugget or two!

More food for thought. A one acre park in a city, detected for the last forty year by thousands of people with different detectors still gives up a silver coin now and then.

One the flip side the first people on the first passes really do get the bulk of the targets. The easy stuff depletes fast. Then we spend decades eking out leftovers.

metal-detector-sweep-patterms.jpg

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36 minutes ago, Steve Herschbach said:

A one acre park in a city, detected for the last forty year by thousands of people with different detectors still gives up a silver coin now and then.

Another sort-of datapoint:  Many coin/treasure (not nugget) hunting clubs have organized park hunts where they plant tokens/coins and redeem them for prizes.  Although I've never been on one, I think they get a few hours to cover a few acres, and searched dozens of detectorists.  By the end, there are still planted targets that haven't been returned.  My sister's club used to plant valuable items but did away with that and now plant worthless tokens which are redeemed for the valuables -- that way the club at least doesn't 'waste' any good stuff.

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You guys ae makin my head hurt.......:biggrin:

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And I've seen relic hunters in the US and overseas showing the finds that blow the mind and claiming to have covered several acres in a day. You'd have thought I was attacking them for suggesting I would love to hunt behind them to dig what they missed.

Maybe it's the size of the acre, lol.

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1 hour ago, Steve Herschbach said:

Except you have not really covered the acre. So let's go 50% overlap of the swings to get decent coverage at depth. 12.1 hours. And hit it from at least two different directions 24.2 hours.

And you still missed a nugget or two!

More food for thought. A one acre park in a city, detected for the last forty year by thousands of people with different detectors still gives up a silver coin now and then.

One the flip side the first people on the first passes really do get the bulk of the targets. The easy stuff depletes fast. Then we spend decades eking out leftovers.

metal-detector-sweep-patterms.jpg

I always enjoy following the guy on the left in you illustration...... The golfer......

 

 

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