Nox Continues To Sniff Out Oldies From Heavily Hunted Parks

[Chase Goldman]

1 hour ago, Tom_in_CA said:

When push comes to shove, @ the time of comparing flagged signals, that their Etrac can/could equally "call" the targets ?

I'll let raphis answer this but want to point out that if Equinox is primarily initiating the flagged targets, that is telling you something right there about the combined skills of the detectorist and the capabilities of the detector whether or not the eTrac can call the target after it is flagged.  The Equinox generally has the edge over the eTrac in thick trash due solely to its undisputed higher recovery speed which will give it the edge in initial detection, EVEN if the eTrac can come over and wiggle in to make the correct call (In other words, the question is, would the target have been picked up on the initial search sweep with the eTrac?). So with the flagged target question, the answer depends on who's doing the most "flagging".

[GB_Amateur]

16 hours ago, Raphis said:

My Oldie finds have been building up for the past month or two....

Nice haul there, as always.  Your "month or two" is more like my half year, and I'm probably putting in more hours since I have less responsibilties leading to more time to detect.  But quality (skill) tends to beat quantity (time).  Glad it's not a competition.  😉

A significant difference (and there are likely quite a few others) between your sites and mine are the number of hours they've been detected previously.  One would think that would be to my advantage, but it doesn't seem so obvious, especially with your results.  (Many more variables leading to those result comparisons, though.)  Regardless, you give me hope that there are plenty more worthwhile targets in my ground, I just have to figure out how to find them.

BTW, are the pennies in that pile (LH of the last photo) all Wheaties?  I assume so since the only reverses I see are Wheats and I don't think you'd mislead us by making sure all the Memorials are heads up!  If so, can you give us a silver dime to Wheat penny ratio?  (And I'm assuming you don't ignore either of these targets, even if you can separate them by dTID.)

[Raphis]

5 hours ago, dogodog said:

That floral ring looks familiar to me, hard to tell from the photo. I found one a couple of months ago.

Yes, it’s the same ring style.  I’ve been finding that floral sterling style of ring regularly over the past 14 years. Thanks for the reply.  Your absolutely correct about how owning a top of the line machine does not correlate to instant deepies success.  If it was that easy, we’d all be buying Tiger Wood’s golf clubs and making millions! 😅

[Raphis]

4 hours ago, schoolofhardNox said:

Nice job. Deep finds are hard to do at trashy parks. Speed is your enemy 😄 Since you found Seated and Barber, you already know there is another layer lower than most people can figure out on how to get to. The constant renewing surface trash is slowly making it impossible to hit that Barber layer. It gets harder and harder every year to finds a clean enough section to punch deep. Looks like you are hitting that '50's layer solidly. Great selection of rings too. You need that bulldozer guy to scrape off 6" for you. 🦺

Thanks for the reply!  Nearly every park here in So Cal that I’ve hunted (the count is close to 500), is fairly trashy.  Like I mentioned to Phrunt in my reply, I’m in my element when it comes to finding deepies in trashy turf.  I look forward to it and have much confidence that I will find deeper, keeper targets hiding in the trash. The Nox has upped my game since my Explorer SE swinging days...It picks thru the trash better and hits deeper targets better.  A lot of the local hunters have given up on many parks around me because they are trashy and all they dig up is trash and clad. Only a small handful, I surmise, have reached a level of competency where they are finding the oldies on a regular basis. 
 

The only nuisance trash targets that prevent me from hearing deepies in an old park are surface clad and crown caps and crushed screw caps.  I pick up all crown caps off the surface when I see them.  Foil and pieces of can slaw ranging from ID’s between 1-15 on the Nox are not a problem for me.  The iron (when it’s not in blankets, which is the case in my parks most times) is not generally a problem for me either. 

[Raphis]

On 9/5/2021 at 6:55 AM, Tom_in_CA said:

So, Re.: the current the Nox vs your old-school arsenal :   What would you say, to the assertion by "certain persons", who say that:  When push comes to shove, @ the time of comparing flagged signals, that their Etrac can/could equally "call" the targets ?   And/or that : At the end of the day (when averages are done over-time, tallying multiple hunts) that :  There's no appreciable difference between your Nox tallies vs their Etrac tallies ?   Are they full of sh*t, or.... what ?   🧐

 

 

Hello Tom! I know we’ve been over this discussion a few times now, and Chase‘s reply to your comment would be near verbatim to my reply.  That “certain” person you mentioned is my long time hunt buddy and is a highly capable E-Trac hunter on land.  Calling someone over to listen to a flagged signal is much different than finding those obscure signals on your own...I remember one day last year, my Etrac buddy and I went to a well hunted park we’ve been to many times (almost 2 dozen) over the years.  This hunt, however,  was my first hunt there with my Nox. At the end of the day, I had found 13 silver and 27 wheat pennies....My buddy ended up with 3 silver and 18 or so wheats.  Most of the coins were rather deep and obscure targets in higher than normal mineralized ground.  You could surmise my buddy just had an off day (he’s always on his game), or the Nox was superior to the Etrac, or I’m generally always finding more oldies than my buddy does on any given hunt we’ve been on over the years.  It’s hard to draw an exact conclusion, but I clearly remember all the hunts I had at this park over the years with my Explorer, and that one initial Nox hunt was the most oldies I ever found at that park in a single hunt.  “Some things just make you go hmmmm“...Food for thought...🤣

[Raphis]

3 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

Nice haul there, as always.  Your "month or two" is more like my half year, and I'm probably putting in more hours since I have less responsibilties leading to more time to detect.  But quality (skill) tends to beat quantity (time).  Glad it's not a competition.  😉

A significant difference (and there are likely quite a few others) between your sites and mine are the number of hours they've been detected previously.  One would think that would be to my advantage, but it doesn't seem so obvious, especially with your results.  (Many more variables leading to those result comparisons, though.)  Regardless, you give me hope that there are plenty more worthwhile targets in my ground, I just have to figure out how to find them.

BTW, are the pennies in that pile (LH of the last photo) all Wheaties?  I assume so since the only reverses I see are Wheats and I don't think you'd mislead us by making sure all the Memorials are heads up!  If so, can you give us a silver dime to Wheat penny ratio?  (And I'm assuming you don't ignore either of these targets, even if you can separate them by dTID.)

Thanks for the reply, GB.  When I used to avg over 500 silver coins a year, I was digging nearly 50 silver a month, but I was averaging almost 4 hunts a week back then, and my hunts were 6-8 hrs avg.

You also have to take into account the foot traffic of the parks I’ve hunted in my locale to yours over the years.  The 40’s/50’s era where I live was booming...lots of people, great weather, and the parks were packed throughout the year.  That equates to a lot more coin drops (and trash drops).  Some of the parks where I have been detecting, I have recovered over 300 silver coins (and counting).  There are also a handful of parks where I’ve dug over 200, while most are under 100 silver coin parks.  I don’t have a lot of Barber/Indian penny era parks where I hunt (under a dozen), yet I have found barbers in 40’s and 50’s era parks.

Aside from 3 wheat era Canadian pennies (grouped on the right side of my wheat pic), and an older cinco centavos coin, the rest are wheat pennies (even the chopped pieces in the upper right).  I never post my clad coinage (just not my style), but I do find a decent amount of quarters and incidental dimes/pennies that I thought could be silver/wheats on every hunt. My wheat:silver ratios have always averaged around 5:1 since 2007.  Sure, I get some hunts where I’ll find over 20 wheats and maybe one silver, and also hunts where I find 5-6 silver and just the same number of wheats, but if there’s been a trend each successive year I hunt, I’d say my wheat:silver ratio is slightly declining to near 4:1.

[GB_Amateur]

55 minutes ago, Raphis said:

My wheat:silver ratios have always averaged around 5:1 since 2007.

Just checked mine.  Since start record-keeping (beginning of 2017) mine is 7.8 Wheats for every silver dime.  But my lower counts lead to larger uncertainties so with 95% confidence it's between 5.4 and 10.2.

 

1 hour ago, Raphis said:

...incidental dimes/pennies that I thought could be silver/wheats...

Do you ever ignore dTID's above Zincolns, assuming they sound like good coin candidates?  I know some claim they can tell a silver dime from a clad dime or copper Memorial and I don't doubt there is some separation under the right conditions, but I've always erred on the side of not getting too hung up with trying to dig only the best targets.  For example, I dig a lot of aluminum screw caps which dTID right where most of my Wheaties hit.   My ear isn't good enough to distinguish between the two, other than possibly cutting between loud ones (more likely screwcaps) and faint ones (more likely Wheaties).  In my case there aren't so many of those trash targets that digging them overtaxes my time allotment.

[Raphis]

2 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

Do you ever ignore dTID's above Zincolns, assuming they sound like good coin candidates?  I know some claim they can tell a silver dime from a clad dime or copper Memorial and I don't doubt there is some separation under the right conditions, but I've always erred on the side of not getting too hung up with trying to dig only the best targets.  For example, I dig a lot of aluminum screw caps which dTID right where most of my Wheaties hit.   My ear isn't good enough to distinguish between the two, other than possibly cutting between loud ones (more likely screwcaps) and faint ones (more likely Wheaties).  In my case there aren't so many of those trash targets that digging them overtaxes my time allotment.

I ignore a ton of targets between 20-25 tID on my Nox.  There’s a catch though....those targets that I pass up are typically shallower than the wheats/silver I’ve been finding at that specific site.  More specifically, a dig-able target, for my sites, typically equates to at least 4-bar depth on my Nox.  Every one of those targets in my two pics I posted were showing at least 4-bar depth.  If I have a 27 or above tID, I dig those every time, regardless of depth.  Sure, there’s parks with lots of gopher activity that I’ll dig less than 4-bar depth, but it’s not the norm.  Yes, I may just pass over a shallow, small sterling ring that id’s in the 20-25 range, but if I were to dig every 20-25 ID target at the parks I detect, I’d have $4-$5 worth of new pennies/dimes, and a whole lot less oldies. That’s not how I want to hunt.  A Successful hunt for me first and foremost is determined by how many oldies I have in my pouch at the end of my hunt (in relation to the difficulty of the spot I’m hunting).....the total amount of clad I recover is a distant second.  Even so, it’s surprising how many clad dimes/copper pennies I do recover though, because they were at 4-bar depth....I’d hate to estimate how many 1959-1969 copper pennies and 1965-1975 clad dimes I have recovered over the years, but I know it is a very high amount!
 

Forgot to mention, there’s also incidental clad dimes/pennies I’ll end up digging because they were part of a pocket spill of new coinage that I initially ID’d a quarter signal in, or the spill cumulatively ID’d above 25.  Also, I do like how the Nox up averages the ID’s of deeper targets.  I know some hunters may find that a negative quality, but the up averaging allows me to dig very small pieces of copper or smaller pieces of sterling at depth...I have found some cool items at depth with my Nox I don’t think I would have dug with my Explorer.  I’ve witnessed on many hunts the Nox up average very deep 20-25 ID’s in the mid 30’s.  

[Joe D.]

  Great post Raphis,

 And follow-ups by all! You definitely have the Nox, and your skills, dialed in to your intended targets! Keep them poppin' out of that trashy ground!!🍀

   I do have some sorta unrelated questions, since you have so many hours on the Nox/11" combo! Any issues with coil tabs breaking?, and in line with that, do you keep your coil loose, and able to swing, or reasonably tight, in a fixed position? And what kind of life are you getting out of the coil washers? Also, wireless ML, or aftermarket, or wired aftermarket headphones? Thanks!!👍👍

[mh9162013]

24 minutes ago, Raphis said:

if I were to dig every 20-25 ID target at the parks I detect, I’d have $4-$5 worth of new pennies/dimes, and a whole lot less oldies.

That's interesting, b/c that's the exact opposite of how I hunt (in parks). I only focus on coin targets that are shallow enough where my F-Pulse pinpointer can detect it from the surface. This means, as you might expect, that I only get clad and miss out on the silver/older coins. But I take this approach to avoid major digging in parks.

But I also take this approach b/c most of my parks are fairly new and I don't expect them to have much silver. Additionally, there are so many clad coins, I can't bear to skip over them out of principle. However, there is one park that has some older areas where I might look into focusing on silver instead of clad.

In my front yard, which is (was) basically virgin soil from a landscaping and metal detecting perspective, my wheatie to silver ratio is about 6:1.

Thanks for your post; it's produced a lot of interesting responses.