GB_Amateur

Quite a nice collection of tools you use, and your description of recovery sounds benign. Does this method still work under dry conditions or do you just head out into the desert then? I've always been curious as to the composition of probes. I know some are brass but many (most?) are steel. I've epoxy coated the tip before but haven't really used one long enough to see if that wears off or breaks off fairly quickly. One of my recovery tools is a ~1" wide garden spade made of aluminum. I've never scratched a coin with it yet although I mostly use a Lesche hand digger and the tip of that can do damage if it happens to accidentally scrape across the coin's surface. The aluminum one is for working around roots. What's your damage experience with that setup of yours?

This has not been the case for my early experiences (in-the-field and in the test garden) for me with the Manticore. Do the VDI's wander higher with depth? Yes, eventually. But for good targets in my testbed I don't notice significant degradation in the VDI spread even then, except as the detection limit is reached. In-the-wild where conditions aren't as tightly controlled I may have noticed more spread but nothing that has kept me from investigating and digging. I will continue to pay attention as I gain more experience. There may be a strong correlation with settings or ground mineralization (or from nearby targets). I haven't gone above sensitivity of 23 so far. I've been confining my searching and testing to All-Terrain Hi, AT-Lo, and AT-General with recovery speed = 4, Iron Mask 8 over 3, custom five (flat) tones, and all VDI bins open (i.e. "all metal" in Minelab parlance).

What was your solution for the Eqx 800?

Any documentation that these were used during the CW and for what? That would definitely help authenticate it. Does seem kind of small if meant to be a chunk of iron intended to be repurposed. If it were lead that would be a different story. Quite interesting & tantalizing find so far, though. Some knowledgeable CW detectorists (e.g. @Chase Goldman) here yet to comment, and if that goes nowhere there are likely online forums full of collectors who might be able to help.

I think there is something new, but as of now seems like maybe just a teaser. The YouTube video Rob(CA) linked on page 1 of this thread as of a few minutes ago had the following sub-title: So unless someone is spoofing, this was put out by Fisher. It says '2 hours ago' so maybe updated since I watched it on Saturday. Would be interesting if @Joe Beechnut OBN or others intimately knowledgeable with this detector can say if the one in the video is the original or has some changes.

What are the VDI's of a USA nickel and a Zincoln? (I don't know the Deus 2 scale.)

Fantastic finds! I'm also curious as to the size of the gold coin. Just putting something in the photo for scale (such as one of the quarters) would answer for many of us. Ruler even better. Carson City minted coins are rather rare finds in the Eastern USA and even tough out West where most of them remained. Interestingly the mint seems to have gotten stamp-happy around that Centennial year, but only for silver coins. This pattern included the branch mints in Carson City and San Francisco. If you look at the highest mintage year of those three mints (including Philadelphia) for dimes, quarters, halves I think the 1876 year was either 1st or 2nd most prolific in every case. Smaller denominations and especially gold coins (except $20 Double Eagle) had, on the contrary, low mintages for their respective series. 1875 and 1877 shared some of those high mintage figures so maybe it wasn't (solely) due to the mint expecting the 1876 issues to be salted away as souvenirs.

Where do pewter buttons ID? (If you can put the answer relative to modern USA coins as well as VDI's, that would be helpful for those of us in this country not familiar with the Deus 2 scale.) I've found plenty of brass buttons but don't recall a pewter one.

I should have looked more carefully -- I now notice a photo of the recovered one above a photo of a non-recovered one. Maybe it will still clean up but likely the gilding is gone. Items like that at least give an indication of the site's age. For sites not otherwise documented it can confirm it's worth hanging around searching for old coins for those of us driven by that target.

Mark, do you mean a dry land version with ground balancing for more extreme mineralization than typically found near&in the sea? Do you have inside info / recent revelation or just remembering what was said 2-3 years ago? Not chastising, just wondering if something new has been announced because for a long time it's been crickets coming from First Texas. KellyCo jacking up the price for the base version with its out-of-the-factory warts isn't exactly heart-warming news for those who have been hopeful that more&better would be coming. Joe, I'm assuming you are referring to a submersible/saltwater-capable model, but is there news on that front also? Seems that this kind of info (and what Mark hinted at) would be worthy of some party noisemakers!

XRF spectrometers only measure the surface content. As such I don't know if they can tell plated from solid. However, your jeweler probably does know, and further I think they sometimes have other methods including their own years of experience appraising jewelry of all kinds. So I agree s/he is a good resource to have available.

Great finds, particularly the trolley button which looks like brand new. Keep that British penny in an accessible spot since it's a good calibration piece when comparing detector performance between different countries. The Aussies have an identical(?) size,shape,weight,composition version, too. Possibly other Commonwealth countries? I am a bit curious as to your recovery method given that you started out by saying digging in city parks was illegal but then you "dug" these items. I was told that Denver city parks (not that I'm trying to guess where you hunt...) had specified a certain blade (no more than 6" long and no more than 1" wide) as being allowed. And a lot of people have perfected the screwdriver stealth method which is accepted in even some of the most restricted public places.

This seems to be a common theme with 15" round DD's on today's under 4 lb IB/VLF detectors. I have two of that size (one is a Nel Attack for Fisher Gold Bug Pro; the other is a 3 kHz Coiltek for the Minelab X-Terra 705) and I've hardly used them, at least partly because of their dead weight. I'm with you on that, too. I have the Minelab 12"x15" for the Equinox, which isn't as heavy as my just mentioned 15" rounds but searching on sloped ground where more muscle is required does make things extra hard on my back. For me (certainly not speaking for others) the time saved with the 15" sweep path (think "windshield wiper coverage") is offset by the extra time it takes me to pinpoint and investigate the target, compared to the 11" DD stock coil. Coiltek has earned a deserved strong reputation for their many coils over the years. But the 15" round DD for the Equinox is a head-scratcher for many given its overlap with the already (at the time of its release) available 12"x15". Their 9"x14" DD Nox is a toe smasher as well but there was thought that this one was intended for underwater use where extra weight offsets coil buoyancy. The third Nox coil they made has been a widely praised winner, though -- 5"x10" DD.

What detector(s) were you using? Also I'm curious as to how you rejected some of your potential meteorites. You gave us a hint ('magnetic properties') but more detail would be helpful. I assume one thing that comes into play is knowing exactly what kind of meteoroid resulted in the strewn field you are hunting. And thus you require your finds to match the properties of previous finds? Good stuff!

Here's a table showing specific gravities (S.G.) of common gold and platinum alloys. If plated it would likely be right around the S.G. of pure copper (8.9). It will take a careful measurement of volume displacement via the Archimedes method, best with a scale with 3(!) decimal positions on the grams setting if available. One with only 2 might be able to distinguish S.G. ~9 vs. S.G. ~11.5 though. Notice the * about "theoretical" values. I found this table using Google Search and there was a link associated with it there but when I clicked on the link I got an article that didn't have this table. There's probably better data out there based upon actual S.G. measurements of specimens. I suspect the above are reasonably close, though.

He was in a state park??

No, I have better things to spend my time on than do other people's bidding. If something interests me enough I'll spend time on it. This doesn't qualify. I recall when the Equinox was released there were several techniques suggested and the coil pumping was one of them. I don't remember the details of how I checked it out, just that on at least one good known target it gave iron grunts. That was enough for me to leave the method on the sidelines.

Dave Johnson (who worked for several of the USA detector companies -- Fisher, White's Tesoro, First Texas) -- at one time or another, designed the X5. Troy didn't build detectors but rather came up with the concepts and then outsourced the engineering, design, and production. There is a ton of stuff about Tesoro (especially) and Troy detectors on the late Monte Berry's AHRPS forum. That forum has a user-friendly search capability to help you find hours of reading on the subject. Monte was an encyclopedia of knowledge and (IMO) likely knew as much about Tesoro detectors as founder Jack Gifford.

Some have said this works; some have said it doesn't. And they may both be right depending upon conditions. Soil mineralization, target type/size/conductivity, target depth and orientation, detector settings,... Not everyone has the same acceptance threshold. Some want to recover only the cleanest hits and others are willing to dig the 'iffys'. Some even "dig it all" so as to make sure they don't leave a desirable target behind. It seems the answer to your question might be "sometimes" but not "always" or "never".

So you can plug headphones/earbuds into the amplifier and that silences the speaker?

When did you get added to the Minelab marketing payroll?? 😏

Although the Fisher F75 is a different detector, it has common DNA with the Teknetics T2. Here is what the F75 manual (black model w/DST) says about the similar frequency adjustments on the F75: The middle (default) frequency is 12.987 kHz and the increments above starting at this base value are respectively (in kHz units) 0.056, 0.057, 0.058 and going below baseline respectively 0.056, 0.055, 0.055. Pretty small changes on the scale of things, but apparently (from phrunt's video) sufficient in some EMI situations.

OK, I'm confused. If it's not water that's the vehicle in desert alluvial fans, what is it?

I was in a location (former school) and detecting in MultiFrequency. No problems most of the day. An older guy (older than I ) came up and said he had been a student at that school some 70 years prior. He told me a good spot to hunt, where he and others used to play. It was along the property edge, next to a street and close to some houses. When I got there the EMI was unbearable so I checked some single freqs. I was hoping for high conductor coins so started at the low end. 5 kHz was terrible but 4 kHz was dead quiet. Began searching and found some Lincolns and an Indian Head cent -- best find of the day. I wondered if the EMI had chased away other detectorists, but without hearing from them (don't know who they are...) I'll never know. Consistent with phrunt, the VDI's drifted pretty badly as depth increased so I was just digging non-ferrous, but it was better than walking away. 5 kHz minus 4 kHz = 1 kHz doesn't sound like a lot. But maybe some EMI sources have a spread of frequencies that doesn't follow such a simple relationship. I.e. suppose it's a more complicated function (logarithm, exponential,...) or depend upon the ratio (i.e. division, not subtraction) or ?? Anyway, in some EMI cases there is a big advantage of 4 kHz vs. 5 kHz on the Eqx 800. As to why, IDK.

I read it. Didn't see a lot of "other good reasons", rather a lot of speculation like (paraphrased) "EMI can't be alleviated so they must just be toning things down to fool us into thinking they are" and people pretending that a one-size-fits-all oversimplification of EMI is the whole story. How about a spectrum (intensity vs. frequency) graph/plot of just one example of EMI let alone the different spectra from multiple sources. Hand waving is cheap. Evidence takes effort. It's one thing to consider possibilities but to dogmatically then jump to unfounded conclusions -- that's what annoys me. There's a difference between "it could be possible" and "it can't be done because I say so." I'm tired of conspiracy theories about why things in the real world don't conform to someone's preconceived, oversimplified views and AFAIC that's how that thread quickly evolved, and this one has been turning into. EMI is not one-size-fits-all and solving the problems it causes isn't something we can just theorize about and then conclude we are right. (When did Descarte's "I think, therefore I am" devolve into "I think, therefore I'm right"?) And then conclude that since the problem is insolvable the detector engineers are resorting to behind-the-back slight-of-hand. When my Manticore shows I'm operating at a gain that's displayed on the screen (two digits on the left side when in search mode) and I do a Noise Cancel and it doesn't change, the Occam's Razor conclusion is that it didn't change. When the screen simultaneously shows me the mode I'm in (top of screen) and that icon doesn't change after a noise cancel then I'm not going to assume that the weighting of received&utilized frequencies has been altered past what the manual has indicated -- "...slightly shifts the ...transmit frequency".