Mark Gillespie

Amazingly I had a similar but not exact situation happen yesterday while hunting an old park (loaded with modern pull tabs) with my two hunting buddies.  I had dug several old, flat bottle caps (ID came in the 30's) and many twist off bottle caps (ID 20-22) while hunting deeper targets.  I was purposely running field 1 with no discrimination, 50 tones, recovery 7 and listening for the hint of a higher tone than the normal tone of 20-22 because this area had yielded many Barbers, Indians and Mercs in the past. My first slightly higher tone was so well mixed I almost walked away, the Id floated between 20 and 23 but the 23 caught my attention so I decided to dig and at less than 5" and laying vertical beside a huge rock was a 1936 wheat penny.  My next target was completely different in that it had solid ID's 18-19 with associated tones but just the hint of a higher tone in the mix.  This target ended up being a 1919 wheat penny. 

I might add, even though I've got some time on this machine, I'm not an expert by any means but the audio characteristics are coming with use.  Audio first, ID second..........

On ‎3‎/‎30‎/‎2018 at 2:50 PM, Steve Herschbach said:

I have made mention several times that every search profile has its own ground balance and so it is critical in bad ground to ground balance each search profile separately. Again, in milder ground just leave it be. How to know when to ground balance? In any mode, hit the horseshoe button and detect over metal free ground. If you get lots of puttering in the -9 and -8 and possibly -7 area that is the ground signal as is shown in the phase chart above. This is another reason why running full tones (no items rejected) can be beneficial as you do hear the ground signal. You might eliminate that signal by dropping the sensitivity a notch or two. But if it is persistent it does indicate you probably should be ground balancing the detector. Even when you notch out this region the ground signal is still there and so trying to get that negative range to settle down is the best bet for most people to help eliminate ground masking effects. For shallower targets you might also ground balance, then jack the sensitivity up and block out the negative numbers. This will make shallow targets like perhaps small gold nuggets pop but does risk deeper items going missed due to ground masking.

Absolutely, positivity 100% true Steve.  Amazing how you put technical data in layman terms.

Still a nice ring

40 minutes ago, cjc said:

A machine with the sophistication of the Equinox is much more readily able to identify iron by how it responds on the cross-sweep

This is a good point, the Equinox is very good at discerning multi sweep target identification.

Nice

Awesome, very ornate find.  Gold cross fantastic. You off to a good start............

The gold will come.......

Very nice...........

Awesome finds, silver and gold, you must have a very good site.

Awesome............

But when might be the question.  New developments can take years to engineer and test.

Always good to hear from Carl.

Fantastic  I've never found an eagle, wow you've got a great place to hunt.  Thanks for sharing your story.....

4 hours ago, DDancer said:

Mark this may sound a little blase but "A rock is only worth what one is willing to pay for it."  Its something I say often because... well its true.  But don't let that put ya off.  The tourmaline specimen might be worth a buck or two and the citrine can be worth up to about 10 bucks to the right person.  My opinion.

Thanks for the kind words all.

Citrine is kind of a generic definition based on coloration of quartz.  Yellow and gold coloration of true citrine is due to iron and is not very common.  Most common citrine is actually smoky quartz of very light coloration and then you have the type that is an alteration by heat treatment of other minerals.  The specimen Mark has shown falls in the latter type to me due to the strong darkening at the tips.  But I'll not rule out native simply because its not in my hands ;)

Jim, thanks, you point out the geometry of tourmaline nicely with those pictures.  The specimen shown has some cross section bits that helped identify it but for me the outside luster, layering and angles *not to mention having picked up bunches of this stuff ;) hehh* were pretty clear for what is shown.  Not as nice as those gemmy pieces your showing but I'd stick it in my collection.

Jeff, I've not picked any citrine up in the area your describing but I'll keep an eye out for it.  Clear, smokey, rose and amythest are all I've seen in the Carolina's.  Still hoping to score some good blue though.

Thanks for the information, I'm asking for the landowner whom gave me permission to hunt his property.  Have to keep relations good for all.

Are they worth anything?

8 minutes ago, Steve Herschbach said:

A couple notes. Even at Recovery Speed 7 Equinox gets the depth in bad ground. I also think fast Recovery Speeds plus 50 tones does accentuate the tonal difference between nickels and square tabs. And I have no proof of this, just a gut feeling, but Equinox seems to not lose any appreciable depth from aggressive notching . These last settings were super quiet and would make a good "silver program" for places unlikely to have the oldest coins. Like 1930 and newer.

I sure like this detector! My ear just keeps getting better with it. Anyone giving up on Equinox with less than 100 hours is not really giving it enough of a chance. There is nuance and power here aplenty that reveals the more you use the machine.

100% agree on all points.  I truly enjoy detecting with this machine.  I love hearing all these success stories.  Everyone needs to keep in mind the good finds don't come every time out, regardless of what machine you use.  But the Equinox does give you an added edge.

Thanks so much for the information. 

Got permission to hunt and old home site this afternoon.  The owner was very willing to show me two rocks of some sort he found in his yard. 

What might they be?

Thanks in advance.

I can’t add to this excellent report but I can submit an actual occurrence I had some 15 years ago.   At the time I was using the very best VLF machine that a particular company sold.  I had been using the machine for about 2 years so I was in no way a novice and can say I’d found some very nice items. 

I was hunting an old school yard where many silver and copper coins had been found in years past.  I was hunting around a huge oak tree when I came across a very faint, repeatable signal.  Thinking, “This must be a super deep target.” I dug a nice plug about 12” across and 7” deep (the large plug actually causes less damage) and proceeded to check the hole, nothing.   Knowing from past experiences a detector can have problems seeing a deeper target once the plug is removed I carefully extracting another 3-4” of dirt, I check the hole and nothing.  By now I was completely confused and somewhat frustrated so I filled in the hole and returned the plug just to hear the same faint, repeatable signal.  To be honest at this point I was determined to find this target regardless of what it took.  So I removed the plug and started to scrap off inch by inch of dirt from the bottom up and then at less than 3” from the grass layer was a silver Roosevelt dime.  Now this was before I knew about terms like masking and partial masking.  So my conclusion was the machine must be out of calibration.  A few days later I boxed up the detector and shipped it back to the factory for a tune up.  Two weeks later the machine returns with a note in the box “calibration and testing indicated there were no problems with the detector”. 

9 hours ago, Dubious said:

Unless someone goes to the trouble to reverse engineer the hardware and software--and explains it all--we'll never know the details.  But it shouldn't matter at all in terms of using the Nox effectively.  What Minelab says about the modes and the weighting given the frequencies is a good starting point; and beyond that it's experimentation all the way down :)  Already a lot of good user experiences with modes and settings in different conditions posted. 

Awesome reply.

Doesn't look to impressive does it?  Only one wheat penny!  Several old memorials, is that all you might say.  One old copper ring and a two piece button with gold gilt still showing.  You might be thinking, why Mark would post such a picture, well there is a story behind yesterdays very enjoyable hunt.

It all started over 10 years ago for this particular site.  An old school where they've burn coal for heat and discarded the coal waste in and around the entire school property.  This waste ranges from nickel to BB size and most will attract to a common magnet.  The material has always played havoc (reduced depth and continuous ground chatter) on all the regular VLF machines that have hunted this property, and I might add, the most expensive machines on the market at that. 

Now what I'm pleased about is finding these items in what I would consider a hunted out site.  

Wanting to hear everything I started with park 1, ground balanced, then set to tracking, opened up the discrimination, set the tones to 50 and did a noise cancel.  During the hunt I also tried park 2 and both the field programs, all of which performed very well for me. 

While hunting I listened closely to the audio response of the ground and all the iron signals I was hearing.  After a few minutes and no success I started noticing mixed high tone bleeps and stopped to sweep the coil over each and before long discovered these coins either mixed in or around some of the iron audio responses I was getting.  Carefully rotating around some of these signals I noted, if the audio cleared up and gave a repeatable tone it was a coin or similar non-ferrous target.    If the audio stayed a more iron audio it was always a nail of some sort. 

Even though no silver was found, I counted the hunt extremely successful and enjoyable at that.  Already looking forward to next time!

Awesome, I'll have to try that next time.  Thanks

I never pass up a nickel because over the past 20 years I've found many women's gold ring digging nickels and below.

I've not actually noticed such a great difference.  You might try resetting the EQ and try pairing again. 

I thought I had a similar issue today with the depth meter.  Almost always 4 bars were showing and thinking deep target, I dug a nice plug just to find the target in the plug.  After an hour of this type depth indication I decided to find out why the depth meter was indicating deeper than the target actually was.  Trying to adjust my hunting I started getting a very accurate pinpoint of the target in question. 

As I rotated around the target I noticed the ID would be a little jumpy , never locking in on a solid number, this was my first clue.  Decided to open up the discrimination and check around the target and found part of my answer to the incorrect depth indication.  Iron audio reports very close to the target, or rather within the range of the outer rim of the search coil.  By this I mean, more than one metal object under the coil at the same time.  This adds to the seemingly depth meter being wrong, but not really wrong since the machine was trying to determine depth by the total return signal from the target.  Keep in mind, any metal object in the same area of a good target changes the return signal and causes erroneous type VID, audio and or depth indications.  The following video show what I'm trying to say.