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Hello From Ca


Cheese

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I finally broke down and bought my first metal detector. I caught the gold bug while working at my last job.  I worked for a company that sat on huge piles of dredge tailings and  it also had a creek that ran through the property.  I used to pan the creek sometimes during the week and pick up some minor gold. The whole process was very enjoyable and it got me started on the path of researching old CA gold mines.

I bought the Minelab 800.  So far it has been a bit of a learning curve, but this is the first detector I have ever used.   Im sure it will probably get better with some practice.

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Welcome to the forum! The Equinox is a high end, high performance detector priced like a mid-range detector. It is not hard to learn if you stay with the presets and lower the sensitivity if it is unstable. Take your time to simply dig things and match what you are finding with how the machine was reporting it.

It is a little bit like learning a musical instrument. Grasping the basics is not hard but true skill comes with practice.

The best part is you are unlikely to outgrow the Equinox. The power is there you just have to learn to harness it. Good luck and thanks for joining the forum!

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Thanks for the responses.

I made it out to the foothills last weekend and found some targets.  The equinox had no problems finding some lead, copper, and an old hand shovel. I feel like lead definitely made a cleaner and more consistent sound.

I plan on searching a local park for a little more practice this Friday.

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I made it to the park today for some practice and found a ton of targets. Finding the coins was as easy as could be. The problem I am having is figuring out what the tone or number should be for rings and such.  I buried my wedding band in the backyard and I could hardly get a decent hit on it.  My band is 18k white gold and is fairly large. 

What are recommended settings for parks to find rings?  I feel like I passed up a ton of targets today that could have possibly been something good.

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19 hours ago, Cheese said:

What are recommended settings for parks to find rings?

That's a simple question without a simple answer.  Many things: ground mineralization, electromagnetic intereferece (EMI), depth of target, purity of alloy, size of target, size of searchcoil, etc. affect the detector response to jewelry, including rings.

Park 1 mode, default settings is a good place to start.  TID's can be anywhere from +1 to +20 (and I wouldn't rule out lower or higher in rare cases).  Rings tend to give a consistent TID, regardless of approach angle, but nearby trash can negate that consisency.

Relative to coins, jewelry is a tougher read.  Jewelry detectorists tend to dig a lot of trash because jewelry reads like trash (in terms of TID).  If you are serious about finding jewelry, start digging everything with positive TID and refine your search criteria from there.

Oh, and welcome to the forum!

 

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