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The Garrett AT Max And Aluminum Siding


mh9162013

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1 hour ago, Flydog said:

OK I'll throw in my 2 zincolns.  If you may only get back there a limited amount of visits, and be less tiring, and less damaging to the yard, why not just dig the targets that ID solidly as coins. The high probability targets.  Relatively modern coins that is, I mean I have no idea what REALLY old coins come up as ( I should be so lucky ). 

I think the issue was the shear number of targets and the larger coil making it difficult to isolate them. Not a bad thing to cherry pick just the higher tones but still tough with a coil too large. Just saying as I had similar aluminum trash in my yard but I purposely dug the aluminum to clean up.

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4 hours ago, mh9162013 said:

That's really good to hear, as it implies I'm not an idiot and that what I perceive as a challenge is due to the fact that it's actually hard to do

Yes, indeed!  Hunting any heavily littered site with a dense mix of ferrous and non-ferrous debris IS a challenge.  One reason why most hobbyists don't hunt those types of places.  I do because I enjoy the challenge of the environment, and also enjoy the good finds that eventually make their way into my hand.

 

4 hours ago, mh9162013 said:

With respect to the larger targets, those were far larger than a coin, and only rang up as an 80 or so. I imagine a large cache of silver coins would ring up as a 90 or higher with an AT Max?

Usually, IF the detector circuitry and coil used work well at responding to a silver 'stash' or a tight cluster of silver coins, then you'll usually get a higher-range VDI read-out.  It would be in the mid-to-upper 90's with your detector.

Be aware, however, that not all detectors will produce a good response on a "short-stack" of larger silver coins.  I use my 'Silver Short-Stack' of 5 Walking Liberty Halves on top of a Silver Dollar, all making metal-to-metal contact, and many detector will not give a good audio or visual response.  Generally the reason is related to the Discriminate mode's Ground Balance setting, but that's a different discussion.  Sometimes the detector's circuitry is good, but a coil change can make a good audio response become a broken-up or negative (none) audio response.

 

4 hours ago, mh9162013 said:

Yes, I was using the stock 8.5x11 coil yesterday with my AT Max. The more I hear people talk about that coil compared to the 5x8, the more I wonder why Garrett made that the stock coil! I want that coil for the reduced weight, if for no other reason. Then tack on the fact that it's better in trash, and it looks like the only reason not to get it is if I find an Equinox 600 for cheap.

Why th8½X11 DD as 'standard'?  Because back in '88 we started to see manufacturers switching to larger-size coils s 'standard' because so many hobbyists kept asking or "more depth -- more depth".  White's went from an 8" to the round 950, and thn others started as well,  By 2006, just 15 years ago, we had Minelab going to 10" and then 11" round DD's, White's to an 11" DD, and oh3rs followed or thy went to the 7X11, like Teknetics in '06 with their 11" BiAxial on the T2, and then that coil size on so many models from Teknetics and Fisher.  Nokta and Makro from '14 to now used their 7X11 and in the last couple of years to a round-shaped 11' DD.    Garrett to their 8½X11 DD.

Personally, if I owned a metal detecting business, those bigger-size coils would be optional Accessory oils, not standard.  I'd use something like a mid-size coil as 'standard' such as a 5X8 or 5X9½ elliptical or a round-shaped coil in the 7" to 9" diameter, not bigger.

 

4 hours ago, mh9162013 said:

If I go back to that old house (with or without the 5x8 coil) with the primary goal of finding silver coins, what's the advantage of only setting my discrimination to 35? Is there a realistic chance that my AT Max could detect a silver coin and have the VDI ring it up in the 40s?

Thanks again for your advice here; it's much appreciated. 😀

Realistic or conceivable?  Yes, but less likely.    But using a lower Disc. setting helps a detector process targets better when you have a lot of very close-by Iron trash that causes good-target masking.  The more Discrimination or rejection you use, the more negative behavior you'll have from the unwonted junk and that can often make it more difficult for a detector's circuitry to recover and process a good or higher-conductive target.  Even when a good target is in plain sight on top of the ground.  I have a couple of test scenarios and in-the-field encounter examples I use to describe the issues with using a higher Disc. setting.

If you go back, try to have a smaller coil, like the 'Ripper', and work slowly and methodically.  Pay more attention to the audio response and less dependence on the visual VDI report, especially when it is very trashy.

Monte

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12 minutes ago, Monte said:

Realistic or conceivable?  Yes, but less likely.    But using a lower Disc. setting helps a detector process targets better when you have a lot of very close-by Iron trash that causes good-target masking.  The more Discrimination or rejection you use, the more negative behavior you'll have from the unwonted junk and that can often make it more difficult for a detector's circuitry to recover and process a good or higher-conductive target.

That makes a lot of sense; thank you for the explanation.

As for relying more on sounds and less on VDI, are you referring to the decision to give a target a second look or the decision to dig? When it comes to a potential target, I always rely on sound first. Only when I get the high tone (or mid time, if I'm willing to dig for nickels or gold), do I look at my VDI. However, even with a high tone, if it's in the 70s (or really jumpy and all over the place) and I don't feel like digging a penny, I'll let it go.

So are you suggesting that if my goal is to get silver coins I should dig all high tones, no matter what the VDI is doing?

Thanks again!

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I'm always curious on what I might be missing, more so than what I'm finding, I hate thinking that the sound, the one I didn't dig, was the real treasure of the day .. this has lead me to not rely on the TIDs of the machine .. I only use them when in all metal, and then only to see where some good sound is in relation to the iron break of my machine .. if you are only digging the TIDs that are close to perfect for the targets you are seeking, you surely are passing by some good targets ..especially in heavy or moderate trashy sites.

find a couple pieces of trash, (aluminum or other, pull tabs and pop tops or what you think will be the trash in the area you're hunting), that ring up with a mid-tone TID or another tone or TID not where you would be looking for a silver coin to be at .. get a silver dime and silver quarter .. place the trash on the ground so that they are all under the coil only a few inches apart use the dime first, then replace it with the quarter, placing the coins between the trash .. swing over them like you were out hunting and wouldn't know they were there .. do this from different directions .. pay attention to what your TID numbers do .. you will see that those numbers aren't where a silver coin would or should be, if it was isolated .. then consider depth .. or take a penny, nickel, dime and quarter (or any combo of things) and lay them all down so they are touching (representing a real world pocket spill) where is the TID now? .. probably not something you would dig?

to me and in my short time as a detectorist, TIDs are good for the shallow coin shooter (8 inches or less, depending on soil) and even then only 70% accurate at most, not much else ..where as the tones up your odds by a bunch. .. it is after all the tone that stopped you and caused you to investigate .. if you really think it was the number, try turning the sound down so you don't hear it .. do one pass with the sound off, then do one pass with your screen covered and the sound on .. dig everything you normally would and compare the two passes.

 

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25 minutes ago, ScoTTT2 said:

in my short time as a detectorist, TIDs are good for the shallow coin shooter (8 inches or less, depending on soil) and even then only 70% accurate at most, not much else

That's my experience, too. The majority of my hunting has been shallow coinshooting in parks. We're talking coin targets 3 inches or less below the surface...and my AT Max and Vanquish are pretty accurate (each within a few VDI points).

But when it comes to digging targets 4 inches deep or more, I have much less experience; most of my experience is in my yard. The good news is that my soil at my home is fairly comparable to the soil in the parks I hunt at.

The only notable experience (that I can remember in great detail) I've had digging a coin target that was deep (8-10 inches) was with 2 clad quarters. The AT Max's VDIs were all over the place, but would occassionally hit some numbers that indicated there was at least a penny in the ground. I also got a high tone in at least one direction. In a park or permission, I'd normally let this signal go, as it's a deep dig and I assume there are other good targets that are easier to dig up, ie shallower. But this was my heavily pounded front yard, so I had the "what the heck" attitude.

I have no problem taking this approach with a permission, but only if: a) I'm confident there's no pipe or wire I could hit and b) I'm confident I've already found all the good targets that are much shallower. I'm guestimating here, but I imagine I can dig 2 or 3 shallow coin targets (3 inches or less) in the time it takes to dig 1 deep coin targer (6 inches or more). 

So what am I saying? What I'm saying is that I will "triage" my digs based on my prediction as to the density of "high value" targets. As a case in point, a week or go so I was digging around a public pool at a local park. This park would normally give me plenty of pennies and dimes, with the occassional quarter. But around the pool, I was getting quarter after quarter after quarter. In the end, I found 18 quarters in a span of about 1.5 hours. This is an incredible quarter:other coin ratio that I had never seen before. So there came a point that I was actively passing up penny targets so that I had more time to find and dig quarters.

But of course, I've spent over a dozen hours hunting that park, so I was familiar with its soil and types of targets it has. I had no such familiarity with the old house. So i wanted to make sure I did at least one pass over the front yard, back yard and sidewalk areas looking for the "easy" targets before spending time on the iffy (relatively speaking) signals. I guess this just goes to show how it takes more than 2 hours to learn a site...

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another consideration would be when was the house sided? .. aluminum siding really didn't start until the 1940s ..towards the end of the reign of the mercury dime .. so most of the silver or old coins would have sunk below this aluminum and may not be findable until the siding is removed.

I don't have a test garden, but I do have a test park .. it is a 60x60 foot park .. last year I dug every signal .. they mostly went to 8 inches ..but once this was done targets from 8-15 inches started coming out of the ground .. I didn't expect this .. this park was hit heavily by the guys detecting in the 60s, 70s and 80s .. a lot of those guys have stopped and told me they cleaned the good stuff long ago .. but I have pulled many silvers and indian heads, also gold .. so, yes, they cleaned the "easy" stuff, but not all the good stuff .. about every third or fourth time I detect this park now, it gives up a good target .. the targets now are mostly at the limits of my detector and in a bed of nails and charcoal from a fire of a building that I can find no reference of (no one knows when or what was there or burnt) .. a few of the silver dimes I've found here wouldn't be dug if I was a 'looking for the right numbers guy' .. they were far below where a silver dime should be, and a mid-tone in the descrim side of my machine, I've also pulled a few buffalo nickels from here that were way high for what the TID of a nickel should be but lower than a silver.

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ScoTTT2,

What machine do you use?

As for the old house, I have no idea when it was sided, but it wasn't recent, that's for sure. The owner told me his front yard was tilled, graded and leveled, so I wonder what effect that had on the silver coins that may have been there. Assuming it was never hunted before, it was probably a bad thing, as far as metal detecting is concerned. But if it's been hunted before, I suppose it's a good thing.

But it's reassuring to hear about how once you get the shallow targets (trash and desirable items), that the lower items begin to show up. Looking back, that explains my front yard. I've found so much clad and after the most recent hunt, I'm always telling myself, "yup, got all the coins!" Yet when I hunt my front yard again the next time, I almost always find a few more pennies. They're not recent drops, so I know this is an instance of me learning my ground better and digging up prior targets which could have masked or otherwise distracted me from the recently found pennies.

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I'm usually swinging a T2se, but I also have a simplex and vanquish 340 ... as far as the tilling goes, I was a landscaper through the 80s and 90s, there were a few yards I leveled with a rototiller and the amount of things that were tilled up was amazing ..if only I was a THer back then .. those lawns are a good 3 hours from me now, but I think of that often.  but that would depend on how much dirt was brought in. .. for the most part it moves thing from deeper towards the surface and visa versa ..much like plowed fields.

in your yard, try digging every signal, including iron, and see what happens .. try and make it so the detector is quite when it goes over your lawn .. it doesn't need to be the whole lawn, just pick an area that is easy to define, so you can hit the same place over and over .. I think you'd be surprised on what is down there masked by something you normally wouldn't dig. .. I gridded the area four ways twice and things got deeper as I went .. I wish that I kept records of how that experiment went, in hindsight I should have .. I might do the same next year at a different location and record it all. .. I still get hits that are shallower than some, in the layer I considered cleaned, but for the most part any good targets now are coming from the 8inch plus layer and some as deep as 15 inches. .. though this is not exact measuring, I am using the 7 inch blade of my digger and 9 inch rule on my pin pointer along with the pinpoint function on my machine which gives a real close depth reading,  but it is real close.

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6 hours ago, ScoTTT2 said:

in your yard, try digging every signal, including iron, and see what happens .. try and make it so the detector is quite when it goes over your lawn .. it doesn't need to be the whole lawn, just pick an area that is easy to define, so you can hit the same place over and over .. I think you'd be surprised on what is down there masked by something you normally wouldn't dig

I may do that! When I've got the itch to hunt (or test batteries), but don't feel like going to a park or knocking on doors, that's definitely something I can do.

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Monte said:
 
          Realistic or conceivable?  Yes, but less likely.    But using a lower Disc. setting helps a detector process targets better when                  you  have a lot of very close-by Iron trash that causes good-target masking.  The more Discrimination or rejection you use,                  the more  negative behavior you'll have from the unwonted junk and that can often make it more difficult for a detector's                        circuitry to  recover and process a good or higher-conductive target.

mh9162013 said:

That makes a lot of sense; thank you for the explanation.

As for relying more on sounds and less on VDI, are you referring to the decision to give a target a second look or the decision to dig? When it comes to a potential target, I always rely on sound first. Only when I get the high tone (or mid time, if I'm willing to dig for nickels or gold), do I look at my VDI. However, even with a high tone, if it's in the 70s (or really jumpy and all over the place) and I don't feel like digging a penny, I'll let it go.

So are you suggesting that if my goal is to get silver coins I should dig all high tones, no matter what the VDI is doing?

Thanks again!

I go by an audio response most of all because that's how I started in early '65.  We didn't get visual Target ID until '83 from the original Teknetics, but that's also the same year we got an excellent slow-motion detector with a quick-response and fast-recovery that handled common ferrous trash quite well with the Tesoro Inca.  I concentrated most of my detecting time back then to hunting renovation work, old building tear-down sites, and such in urban applications, and mostly trying to get out of town to work homesteads, pioneer and military encampments and fort sites, signally-located school, church and dance hall sites, ghost towns, etc., etc.

Initially, most visual TID detectors required a very fast-motion sweep speed that didn't work that well in heavily littered and densely brushed-up old sites or dealing with building rubble.  The new slow-motion detectors handled it better, and they could isolate non-ferrous targets in places with masking ferrous debris much better, so I used them the most.  Also, the visual TID that detectors feature is going to be more challenged when there are a lot of different sizes, shapes and types of metal objects very close together, and that also makes a Target ID unit less accurate when it comes to producing a good, functional visual response.

Therefore, it is more important to rely on hearing a good audio response.  Also, depending upon the particular make and model detector and how the circuity processes the audio response from various targets, you can learn to listen closely to a detector's response and learn its language.  But, not all detectors speak the same  language or have the same accent or characteristics.  For example. here in the USA we all (should) speak American English.  But then you have the drawls or other accents or pronunciations associated with different regions, such as some folks from Texas or Wisconsin or localized areas of the NE or SE, and sometime others don't quite hear it right or understand it.  Same with some detector audio responses.

Many of the more modern detectors with a digitally-based circuitry design also don't "speak the same language" of some of the better analog detectors we had.  And most detectors used to produce a single-tone audio response with a language all their own that users could learn, whereas most of the newer models the past couple of decades use a digitally-processed multi-tone audio.  It might be a 2-Tone or 3-Tone, maybe a 4-Tone, 5-Tone or many, many more audio tones.  And those individual Tone pitches are based on the target's conductivity range and how the detector's circuitry is designed and the cut-off audio break-points for the different tones.

An individual coin, laying flat-to-the-coil and within maybe 2" to 4" or so with no other metal objects close by, just might produce a 'proper' audio tone pitch.  However, if a desired target is in a canted or odd orientation, and especially if there is one or more other metal objects too close to it, you will get a "blended' signal based of the different types of metal within in the detection field, and that might produce a very different audio Tone ID.    Mix some higher-conductive and lower-conductive targets together and you can get a mid-range response, and that makes using audio Tone ID even less reliable, if  you are trying to rely on it for a dig or no-dig decision.

The same applies to the visual Target ID, too.    Yes, I have visual Target ID on my Garrett Apex devices, Nokta CoRe and Relic units, and I do glance at it from time-to-time just to get an idea or hint as to what I might be about to recover.  I do the same with the audio Tone, if using a 3-Tone on the Nokta models or 5-Tone of the Apex units.  However, I listen mainly for the audio information from a target, just as I do with my single-Tone, non-display Tesoro Bandido II  microMAX and Silver Sabre microMAX models.

Depending on the make & model detector I am hunting with, I use one of three Discrimination levels.  With my Tesoro's I have the control always set at minimum because that's very close to the Ferrous / Non-Ferrous break-point and for the most part I am just barely rejecting  most Iron Nails.  On my Nokta CoRe and Relic have have the Disc. set just low enough to barely accept  Iron Nails.  Then there are times with very little trash that I set a Disc. level at or close to Zero / '0' to find both types of metal targets.

Although I do have and use some very good modern detectors with Visual Target-ID and Audio Tone-ID, I have enjoyed this great sport for over fifty-six years relying on audio responses, and for over a thirty-eight years making a lot of great finds in challenging sites using slow-motion / slow-sweep detectors with a Quick-Response / Fast-Recovery, and either barely accepting or just barely rejecting common Iron Nails.  No reason for me to change a successful approach.  Just listen and learn what a detector & coil combo are telling me.

Monte

 

 

 

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