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Vaquero Teaches Valuable Lesson


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This note will probably take longer to read than the time I actually spent on the ground… but here goes…

I was itching to get out between rain showers today… I think I may be in raingear for about a week if I want to get out and hunt… so I had a little time between con calls and took advantage of a break in the clouds at lunch

I have this little park near my work.. it is a place that over the past year, I have pulled 21 wheaties and 4 silvers (lawnmower quarter, merc, rosie, war nick)… most in one corner of the park.  I have covered this same ground with the AT Pro, Etrac, CTX, Explorer, ATX, and today, for the first time the Vaquero… with most of my coil combinations over the year.  As you can imagine… the ground has quieted down a lot, since I also tend to dig some junk targets everytime I go out there.  I usually spend 30 to 60 minutes hunting when I go… since I can get there and back to work fairly quickly.

Anyway… I decided that today, rather than hitting a new tot lot in the area, I would take the Vaquero to “my park”.  By the way, I have seen other detectorists there in my 12 months of going (AT Pro’s mostly) and I am sure other area detectorists have pounded this park over the years as well.  It is a 1920’s park in the middle of the oldest neighborhood in my town, so it isn’t a secret to anyone looking. 

I wanted to see if I could get any new hits in the area I have hunted most, using the Vaq and the 5.75 widescan.  Also, I grabbed a clad quarter and a copper penny out of my car to do some testing.  My normal setup is to ground balance, then set a little negative, run in silent disc mode just above iron (but below nickel), sensitivity up around 8 or 10 and listen for the beep.  Then thumb the disc to see where the target is sitting… take a guess as to the target and dig.  I dug a piece of can slaw and a newly dropped bottle cap… but I wasn’t getting many solid signals.  I finally got out into an open area that was pretty quiet on the machine and decided to drop my coins.  I dug a 4” plug and placed the copper penny flat in the bottom, and covered it up.  Then about a foot or so away, I dug a 7” plug (length of the lesche blade) and placed the quarter flat in the bottom… then covered it up.  Grabbed my Vaq, and took a pass over the copper penny.  A pretty solid signal, ringing all the way up into copper… definitely a digger.  Then I passed over the quarter… nothing.  I passed over it several times… occasionally getting a chirp, but nothing that said “target here”.  I played with the sensitivity and re-ground balanced, even setting it more negative… and was able to get a little better response… but that also made the machine false all over… still the beep wasn’t something I could repeat on subsequent passes.  So I decided to try putting the machine in all metal… I haven’t used this mode with the Vaquero, but had only read about the setup, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.  I tried to set the threshold to a nice quiet hum, but it seemed to have only two options as I turned thee knob… on or off.  So I set it to on… and proceeded to sweep the targets.  Over the penny I got a nice response above the threshold… so went to the quarter… and it wasn’t as pronounced, but it was a solid bump in the thresh and repeatable in the exact spot I buried it. I switched back to disc mode, and the quarter was all but gone.   

So, armed with this new tool, I switched back into all metal and chose a line through my most heavily detected area toward my car… and hit a few threshold bumps and dug them to find some old rusty iron, or a pop top… each time checking the target in disc before I dug… they were iffy or silent in disc, but in each case I dug a target of some kind from the all metal/thresh bump response.  Targets I would have walked over in disc mode.  One target was completely silent in disc, but was giving me a nice mellow bump in all metal.. so I dug it to find a full ring pull (ring and beaver tail attached) at least 7 inches if not 8.  So there is no issue with the Vaq going somewhat deep while in all metal.  Of course, there is no way to tell what type of target you have, because you can’t get a hit in disc.  Kinda like running the Pi machine.

But here is where the story gets interesting.  I got back to my car, and decided I had a few more minutes before I had to leave, so I grabbed the etrac out of the back loaded with the 13” Ultimate running the Andy S. pattern and headed out to my makeshift test garden in the middle of my park.  To my credit it took me a little while to find it thanks to careful plug and replace technique as to maintain the park landscape.  When I finally found the penny, it was a sweet multitone melody, solid hit in all directions, forward and back on the swing… but here is the kicker… while the conductive number was reading at 40, 41, 42 consistently… the ferrous number was reading 07, 08, 09… never up to 12… on a 4” copper target.  Now, the tone was solid and sweet, and no way would I have passed that up… but still, I was surprised to see the ferrous numbers so low on such an easy target.  So I moved over to the quarter at 7”.  I thought there was no way I wasn’t going to get a solid tone using the Etrac with the 13” coil on a flat quarter… but I was wrong.  I got a bit of a chirp on my first pass, then it was gone, I would get a chirp every 3rd or 4th pass, but scratchy.  I shortened my swing, and targeted in on the chirp and finally was able to get a semi repeatable tone… enough that I would dig it in the wild during a hunt… but it wasn’t banging like a screen door by any stretch.  I tried both in auto +3 and manual (22 I think) and was getting 16 or 17 in auto… but to difference in the tones from the quarter.  And the most surprising thing… was that while the tone was ringing high… the id was reading in the 20’s for ferrous on 4 or 5 swings out of 8.  Every now and then I would get a 12-46, but mostly it was 22 or 24 -45/46/47.  I was shocked at the way the ground was impacting such an easy target.  

Anyway, to finish my version of War and Peace… I started thinking about all the iffy targets I walked over in the past with the etrac and ctx because I was putting too much emphasis on the id readings.  I mean, I knew that at depth, the id would start moving, especially the ferrous id… but nice moist soil (granted, no halo because it was newly buried), laying flat, at 7”… I really thought it would be easy for the etrac, and even for the Vaquero in disc mode… but I was proven wrong.  So I headed back toward the car, looking for a nice high tone squeak, with id readings with FE in the 20’s.  I walked over one target that ended up being a rusty nail, but the next target came in as 22-41, with a high tone.  It was a wheat penny, at about 5”, that I have detected over the top of at least a dozen times, if not more, and assumed it was iron, either by it being disc’d by the machine or it being disc’d by my brain.  I just wish I would have had the Vaq with me to test it (left it in the car), both in disc and all metal, to see what it sounded like.   

So, in conclusion… I learned a valuable lesson today with the Vaq and the Etrac.  How discrimination impacts depth, and how relying on the machines assumption of the target too heavily can potentially cause you to miss good targets.  I am looking forward to taking another run at “My Park” with this new information to see what else I have missed.  Also, I am happily surprised by the depth of the Vaquero in AM.  At least in today's test and in my ground, it was as deep if not deeper than the etrac.

Tim.

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Nice post.  Personally I don't mind the length.  I like the 'story' and it shows how real detecting goes, not just the cherry-picked highlights.  Even better, it can indicate (as here) things in my detecting that I may have missed, too.

I once thought of an idea, but never suggested it, because it takes work and I'm not willing to expend the energy right now.  I also don't like people who come up with ideas and then, thinking that was the hard part, expect someone else to finish the job.  My idea was a website, possibly built on top of Google maps, which showed ground balance settings.  Detectorists would enter (or send in) what settings they used in a particular location.

The reason I bring this up for your post is that I'm wondering how mineralized your ground is.  Sounds like pretty strong.  However it makes me questions whether I've had the same issues in my (moderate) ground.

Obviously a complication of my idea, maybe even worse than the lack of Target ID scale standardization, is the difference in ground balance settings of detectors.  For example, in my ground the Minelab X-Terra 705 balances in the 30-35 range (and unlike the Fishers, lower numbers are worse mineralization) whereas my Fisher Gold Bug Pro balances in the high 60's and the Fisher F75 in the low 60's or high 50's.  (All those readings are with the small coils:  5 in. or 6 in. rounds.)

Another issue is that it appears to be coil dependent.  For the GBP, the larger the coil the smaller the GB value.  At least that's what I've found in my back yard.

Anyway, thanks for the post and I'd like to know how bad your ground mineralization is.

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Another problem is the ground balance setting is not a true indication of how mineralized the ground is.

Great post Tim. I see constantly the effects of ground mineralization and adjacent trash on target id numbers. In my magnetite laden ground I can get coins down to six or seven inches. The coin target id numbers shift to ferrous at depth. Coins next to other items can read all over the place. And nearly all detectors have issues with some ferrous items giving off partial high coin readings. The bottom line is there are clearly good targets, there are clearly bad targets, and then there is every variation you can imagine in between.

The Ferrous/Non-Ferrous Overlap

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Thanks Steve and thanks for the link.  As usual, you have a previously posted and completely thorough response to things I am just starting to realize. 

Every day I hunt, I am leaning more toward the "zero discrim" side of things, whether that be running the Vaquero in All Metal, or placing the ATX arm cannon on and heading across the field digging everything that peeps.  I'm not sure the actual level of mineralization I have here in my area, I'm not sure I have any piece of equipment that will accurately measure that.  I just know that I have seen targets give very strange readings, and in some cases disappear completely (or get masked inside a ferrous reading) as was the case yesterday.  I think it boils down to the 80/20 rule.  Good discriminators like many of the multi tone/and variable id machines we all use, probably grab 80% of the good stuff.  The problem is, at least in general terms, over the years... that 80% is all but gone.  It is the 20% we are all searching for now, and as you so aptly pointed out, it is hidden for various reasons.  From my perspective... while frustrating at times that I'm not returning from a hunt with a pocket full of oldies... I love "the hunt" for those hard to reach targets... feel all the better when I find one.  Tim.

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5 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

I once thought of an idea, but never suggested it, because it takes work and I'm not willing to expend the energy right now.  I also don't like people who come up with ideas and then, thinking that was the hard part, expect someone else to finish the job.  My idea was a website, possibly built on top of Google maps, which showed ground balance settings.  Detectorists would enter (or send in) what settings they used in a particular location.

The reason I bring this up for your post is that I'm wondering how mineralized your ground is.  Sounds like pretty strong.  However it makes me questions whether I've had the same issues in my (moderate) ground.

Great idea for an interactive application to track readings across the world GB! 

As I mentioned in my note above, I'm not sure I have the right tools to measure my actual ground mineralization, but would be happy to share my settings on any machine I have.

Tim.

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Vaquero vs. Pounded Park Part II

As my learning curve continues, as well as my excitement, with the Vaquero... I took 45 minutes at the pounded park I talked about above today at lunch to see if I could execute against all the great advice I have received over the past several days.  I wanted to better understand how the Vaquero discriminates and how increased discrimination impacts the depth. 

I set out to the area of "my park" that I have pounded myself many times, as I outlined above.  My settings:  Ground Balance slightly negative.  Sensitivity just into the red.  Threshold at about 2:00.  Discrimination at 3:00 (looking for high conductive hits... zinc, copper, clad, silver).  In this area, I felt very comfortable that any shallow zinc or clad had long since been removed, however there does seem to be a replenished supply of bottle caps and square tabs due to the after hours visitors of this area of the park.  So discriminating past tab eliminates small gold and nickels, but this was a short test hunt, and I will go back (probably many many times) to hit this area with more open disc...

Looking for any beep in that disc, and digging it, I popped out two wheaties (crusty, but 1940 and 1938) at a solid 6" that had eluded me in all the previous passes with my other detectors.  One of which was laying next to a rusty nail. 

Vaquero - 2.... Park - 0.

Amazed!  Tim.

 

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Hey GB_Amateur.   On the Xterra 705, my ground balance number was a 2.  Some places would get better at a 4.   

HH
Mike  

 

 

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1 hour ago, Mike Hillis said:

Hey GB_Amateur.   On the Xterra 705, my ground balance number was a 2.  Some places would get better at a 4.

In that case I'm bringing my TDI when I come visit.  :biggrin:

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A cool find (to me at least) yesterday at the infamous park.  About 6" deep.  Missed countless times before.  Same settings as above.  Sorry for the blurry pic and pre-cleaned condition.  I believe this is a 1950's promotional ring issued by Red Goose Shoes.  :)

Vaquero - 3.... Park - 0. 

Tim.

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