John Henry

2 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

From this webpage:

More the size of a flip phone than a smartphone.  I'm skeptical any IB/VLF would pick this up at 3 ft depth.  Even 2 ft sounds very difficult to impossible even under ideal conditions.  Also, it's not a good assumption that a stack of identical (touching) items would respond as an equivalent single piece of metal that size, either in its digital Target ID (dTID) nor its signal strength.  Often the (metal) container of a buried cache results in the detector signal, not the individual treasure items.

One problem with searching for deeply buried, even large objects with a standard metal detector (IB/VLF or PI) is that small items closer to the surface will also signal.  Two box detectors have an advantage in that respect since they are insenstive to small sized objects but I don't know if they would pick up something this small.

I would expect the dTID (i.e. maximum value) to be very high and hope it wouldn't wrap around to iron.  But that only applies to an air test.  Unless the ground is white beach sand there is likely to be considerable change in dTID due to the soil mineralization.  So using discrimination probably is a bad idea.

The typical advice for finding a cache is to discover as much as possible about the tendencies of the person who hid it, e.g. favorite haunts (shop, garage, garden,...) hoping for clues to narrow down the location.  A needle in a haystack is easier to find if you first can narrow down the part of the haystack it is located.

I have read the silver bars would pick up better than gold.? Would be 4 gold and 4 silver placed together thoughts?

3 hours ago, rvpopeye said:

Welcome aboard John !

I'm guessing your budget is around the 540 price ?

Stepping into a PI could be a bit more.

If you've never detected before , learning what the machine is telling you is job #1 .

what do you recommend for around 3-4 ft depth I can invest 

25 minutes ago, abenson said:

If you want to know if it even has a chance put a  couple of soda cans on the ground and see how far away you can get and still detect them. Then take off 20% to allow for the ground. A pulse induction machine will get that deep on targets that big.

Going by that test it will not have any trouble at all at depth of 3 ft deep 

I buried some aluminum bars at 1.5 ft turned sensitivity to halfway and it detected them at a reading of 26…so hoping since the gold/silver are larger it would detect a little deeper. 

My wife inherited some land from her grandfather. It is told he buried 4- 1kilo size gold bars (size of iPhone plus) and 4 silver bars on the property. Would a vanquish 540 pick it up? If buried all together 2-3 feet underground? And what do you think the readout number would be?