AQ Gold Vs Iron Test?

[bklein]

I vaguely recall the original AQ videos that seemed to show iron reject and detect a gold ring right on top of iron. I don’t have any black sand but should I be able to get a discriminating tone from a nail or tent stake? I only get tone differentiation in the Reject 9-10 range - and it’s pretty useless. What is the real world scenario where this works. How do I test this?  Oh yeah, just for kicks I tried to see if it could detect a 5g nugget….nope.

[tvr]

I didn't set up tests other than finding a non-desirable target that I was digging a lot of (rusted sheet metal screws) and testing on the beaches where I was digging them.

ATS and discrimination settings interact. You can make those tent stakes and soda cans go full low tone as well as pennies, dimes and quarters while still getting high tone on most gold. I found discriminate setting of 7 and ATS around 8 to 8.5 to be useful. If you run ATS much higher you start to loose the bigger gold pieces and will only hit mid-sized and smaller rings. With discriminate around 7 and ATS just a hair above 8 most lead sinkers are not seen; I was only digging the lead sinkers that had a brass swivel or clip attached to them as the AQ, on those settings, hit the brass fittings, but not the lead. I'm getting better on bottle caps because they exhibit a wider signal than most of the desired targets ... but I'm still digging nearly all the bottle caps because I have not become confident enough yet on walking away from the wider signature. It is my headspace issue on that, not the detector because the headspace is saying "you never really know until you dig".

Here is what I wrote a couple months ago:

On 1/13/2022 at 7:05 PM, tvr said:

So here are some of my thoughts on what "useful discrimination" is related to the AQ LTD:

Back when I got a CZ20 to start getting serious about finding gold at beaches, it was tuned so that nickels were mid-tone. I could choose to detect and dig only the mid-tones with the theory that doing so could maximize return on effort at the beach by only digging the range where most of the gold was. Thinking back on that recently, I was inspired learn what I could with the AQ LTD with respect to useful discrimination.

I've been hunting nearly all in all metal mode with the AQ LTD. Shortly after I got the AQ LTD I took a trip to one beach specifically to see how the AQ handled a beach filled with hot rocks and learn a little bit on how I could handle them using its discrimination capabilities. I had not done much with discrimination since then until the last two weeks. Had a long trip to a wide open beach and I figured it was time to really learn the discrimination capabilities. One thing I previously figured out is that it is difficult to get rid of hair pins on any setting; I still found that to be true, yet they do give that classic double beep that makes them easy to walk away from. I decided to pick a couple of targets and set up to hear the tone shift in tone mode that would tell me to walk away from those targets that otherwise do not give a lot of clues.

The problem targets I picked to set up with were some small screws that I had dug while thinking they were going to be good targets, but were not. Setting up to identify those screws as "no dig" in tone mode had me at Reject = 7; ATS just shy of 9. I spent a few days tweaking the settings but staying pretty close to those; ending up with Reject 7 and ATS just a hair above 8. If I chose to just dig the sweet high tones and none of the warbles or grunting sounds then about the only iron I was digging was the occasional hair pin and a couple of round washers. The hairpins were still walk-away signals because of the clear double beep. I was not digging tent stakes. I also wasn't digging pennies, dimes, quarters, lead sinkers or soda beer cans! I dug most targets for nearly a week to see what the audio was like. With those settings, zinc pennies, small fishing sinkers and most of the tent pegs were a warbling mid-tone, copper pennies, big sinkers, dimes, quarters, soda and beer cans and the rest of the tent pegs were low tone grunting. The biggest problem target remained bottle caps. I’m not doing well identifying them for what they are.

After the last couple weeks I think I'm pretty confident that the AQ LTD does have useful discrimination and that if I want to just focus on the most likely gold range and not dig coins, cans, sinkers, tent pegs or .50 caliber shells; I can do that. There is a chance I will not dig that huge monstrous gold ring when set like I'm set, but the focus will be squarely on looking for the majority of gold jewelry and not digging otherwise. In the middle of fresh drop season, I think it could be a productive way to go!

 

[Joe Beechnut OBN]

On 5/1/2022 at 8:39 PM, bklein said:

I vaguely recall the original AQ videos that seemed to show iron reject and detect a gold ring right on top of iron. I don’t have any black sand but should I be able to get a discriminating tone from a nail or tent stake? I only get tone differentiation in the Reject 9-10 range - and it’s pretty useless. What is the real world scenario where this works. How do I test this?  Oh yeah, just for kicks I tried to see if it could detect a 5g nugget….nope.

Got many video's of this, fine tuning is the secret with the AQ...just a 1/20 of a inch adjustment can affect how well it works. Best to set yourself up a test rig and see what affects what...See if I can find a video without giving to much away..

 

[CCadrin]

Great video OBN!

 

[Gldseeker]

I love that testing setup Joe!