Jump to content

Multiple Large Silver Show As Trash..


Recommended Posts

I have acquired a makro simplex and am testing it with my investment silver. When I scan a single silver coin I get a good high reading but when I scan over a few coins or more it shows junk numbers.... any advice?  I sure don't want to miss out on large piles of silver coins...lol. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites


Advice?
Large piles of silver coins are very scarce. I recommend just living with this 'feature' , and get out there finding plenty of stuff that the Simplex will detect.
Detectors aren't perfect, they'll happily tell you iron is non-iron, they'll call non-iron items iron if they're deep/weak/close to iron/on-edge etc etc.

Just as a matter of curiosity, are your 'Investment grade' coins .999 fine, or are they 0.90 coin alloy? The difference in electrical conductivity is noticeable, and a pile of quarters/half-dollar coins will not read like a few one-ounce US Mint proofs.
  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I was using both types of silver. But even when I use authentic 1920s silver dollars a single coin scans very high and clean, but if I stack even two together the sound and numbers change drastically towards a junk/broken signal with lower numbers. I was mostly joking about large piles of coin. But two together I think is common enough that I want to figure out if there is a simple way people adjust anything to deal with this or like you stated, do I just need to get more practice and learn this feature.... thanks. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Large silvers on edge can on some machines come in as junk. It is because the phase shift of the target goes around called iron wrap. More common with DD coils. Nature of the beast.

Be more concerned with iron masking than stumbling on a silver horde 🙂

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 5 months later...
On 6/14/2022 at 11:18 AM, Joel kester said:

But two together I think is common enough that I want to figure out if there is a simple way people adjust anything to deal with this or like you stated, do I just need to get more practice and learn this feature.... thanks. 

No, two silver dollars together is not common at all. Like I've never seen that in 50 years of metal detecting. Maybe two close together, but not so close as to cause this issue. A complete non-problem, really.

But since you logged in just one day and are gone, you'll probably not read this, so there it is for somebody else.

  • Like 1
  • Oh my! 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's not just silver, the same goes for large coppers. I have only encountered one problem in 53+ years of detecting. It involved the E Trac and a stacked pile of colonial coppers (5, I think). I hit a signal that was terrible, barely registering, but was rather shallow. At colonial sites, this happens a lot with falsing iron. I reluctantly did not dig it and moved on. My buddy comes along and digs that signal a while later, and get 5 colonial coppers including the rarest Fugio variety known. Stacked on top of each other, the coppers in the middle only has side corrosion and minor surface edge corrosion. I asked him where he found them and he leads me to that same spot on a small slope. My heart sank 😞 but congratulated him none the less. Even though that happened, it is extremely rare. If I worried about that, I would never have fun detecting again. Most spills move sideways and are not stacked, so you should hit on part of the spill, otherwise no one would find coin spills. It's not a concern for me and certainly would not discourage a purchase of the machine. If one tries hard enough, you can make any machine fail a test.

  • Like 4
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, schoolofhardNox said:

It's not just silver, the same goes for large coppers. I have only encountered one problem in 53+ years of detecting. It involved the E Trac and a stacked pile of colonial coppers (5, I think). I hit a signal that was terrible, barely registering, but was rather shallow. At colonial sites, this happens a lot with falsing iron. I reluctantly did not dig it and moved on. My buddy comes along and digs that signal a while later, and get 5 colonial coppers including the rarest Fugio variety known. Stacked on top of each other, the coppers in the middle only has side corrosion and minor surface edge corrosion. I asked him where he found them and he leads me to that same spot on a small slope. My heart sank 😞 but congratulated him none the less. Even though that happened, it is extremely rare. If I worried about that, I would never have fun detecting again. Most spills move sideways and are not stacked, so you should hit on part of the spill, otherwise no one would find coin spills. It's not a concern for me and certainly would not discourage a purchase of the machine. If one tries hard enough, you can make any machine fail a test.

More to the point, just relying on discrimination at all of any sort will cause good finds to be lost. All systems have flaws, and everyone who passes targets for various reasons misses good stuff. The only guy missing nothing is the one digging everything. That's just the way it is.

Almost any target will get called as ferrous if deep enough in bad ground. This causes way more missed finds than something weird like stacked coins.

 

  • Like 6
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 6/14/2022 at 10:13 AM, Joel kester said:

I have acquired a makro simplex and am testing it with my investment silver. When I scan a single silver coin I get a good high reading but when I scan over a few coins or more it shows junk numbers.... any advice?  I sure don't want to miss out on large piles of silver coins...lol. 

Anyone that has investigated this phenomenon knows that the target ID tech on most VLFs uses a cyclical target ID system. So it’s not linear. After a certain point, too many high conductors in one spot will force the IDs further around the cyclical scale and back into the “ trash” zone as you called it in your title. The exact opposite can happen to low conductor non-ferrous in high iron mineralization and during iron masking. This can happen on ANY VLF no matter what it costs. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

If I remember correctly, the first thing a Metal Detector measures is the size of the object.  That's why Copper Pennies and Dimes read about the same VDI.  The second thing it checks is the conductivity of the metal.  That's why Zinc pennies have a different VDI.  I've known machines in the past that would call two quarters a half dollar!  Most machines are set up to find single objects.

After reading Clive's book on the Legend, I realized that the ground and nearby targets can affect the VDI as well.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...