Equinox Tid And Gold Rings

[Steve Herschbach]

On 11/13/2019 at 8:35 AM, Noah (FL) said:

I meant to convey multiple detector readings in my post but I guess I didn’t get that in there.  That being said the gold I’ve found with the EQX and gold previously found with other machines all register in the same areas of conductivity when compared between an EQX, a MakroMK , and a Tesoro.  The only high IDs I’ve experienced with the EQX involved multiple targets in the hole.  In the couple instances that happened it seemed to be higher ID one direction vs the other but was pretty apparent that there may be multiple targets.  It would be interesting to know what combination of ground mineralization or GB setting that have him experiencing the high IDs. 

Sorry I did not acknowledge your post. I was referring to the other "this ring read X posts". Yes, you indicate the readings fall where you would expect as on other machines. I just wanted to back that up as a second opinion. 

Rings sometime surprise but at the end of the day it's just the typical size and composition equation as applies to other items, helped by that magic hole in the middle. The one thing not all people realize is silver is a much better conductor than gold. The use of gold in electronics leads some to believe otherwise. That's for corrosion resistance, not conductivity. And then the other weird factor is adding silver to pure gold. You would assume adding a higher conductor like silver to gold would increase the conductivity of the resulting alloy. It is just the opposite. Due to the way atoms align pure metal conducts far better than alloys, so when you add silver to pure gold the conductivity drops dramatically. I've got a rare chart someplace that shows it... kind of stunning. Anyway, that way low karat gold reads much lower than high karat gold, white gold the worst. and why natural gold nuggets, not pure and irregular in shape, are the hardest of all, reading so low they will run into the ferrous and ground range readings quite easily. Same with micro jewelry.

I'll try and find that chart and post, it's buried someplace on my hard drive.

In theory an identical ring made of different alloys will have the low karat alloys reading lowest, higher karat higher, pure gold higher yet, and then silver above that.

Then you have the issue of basic size. All things otherwise being equal, larger heavier rings read higher than smaller rings with less mass. That’s where it generally goes nuts. Take the basics I just described above and add endless size variation and you get small silver rings reading lower than large pure gold rings, etc.

Roundness itself does matter. In the U.K. I dug a ton of 1 - 10 targets, lead and tiny brass bits mostly. I learned that anything round got a substantial boost in target id reading over a similar oddball shaped item. So much so that stuff reading 1 - 6 was either irregular shaped or very tiny round, like birdshot. Anything even halfway larger and round boosted up above 6, and I finally created a cherry pick mode to eliminate digging the vast amounts of tiny hard to recover non-ferrous prevalent in some areas. I had no worries about missing even a tiny round gold Celtic coin, as even the lowest grade example I could find read 7, with most much higher than that.

Some tiny stuff does read surprisingly high at time, especially some small brass items.

[Steve Herschbach]

14 hours ago, dewcon4414 said:

Steve its not that they are being upscaled...... its more that they raise an eyebrow by falling into a digit least expected..... both high and low based on what one expected ...... size and K.   BUT most still fall in those ring digits of 1 to 23ish.

Yeah, all detectors do that. The question is Equinox doing it MORE than other detectors. That is how I was reading the original post.

Tom said "Compared to every other TID machine I have used the Equinox is an outlier.  Rings that should hit in the Nickel range hit in the upper tab range,  Medium size bands hit zinc penny where with other machines that would be a lunker Class ring or large heavy high karat gold band."

Tom says yes. Noah (FL) says no.

Since Tom has provided no more information of settings or ground conditions I will just do some stock air tests and post soon comparing to V3i. White's is sort of a standard as they had a lot to do with determining some of the original target id data way back when.

[Cal_Cobra]

My first (and thus far only) gold ring found on my EQ800 was on my first hunt.  Was a solid 14, and turned out to be an 18K gold ring around 6 grams IIRC. 

[GB_Amateur]

On 11/13/2019 at 2:47 PM, Steve Herschbach said:

The one thing not all people realize is silver is a much better conductor than gold. The use of gold in electronics leads some to believe otherwise. That's for corrosion resistance, not conductivity. And then the other weird factor is adding silver to pure gold. You would assume adding a higher conductor like silver to gold would increase the conductivity of the resulting alloy. It is just the opposite. Due to the way atoms align pure metal conducts far better than alloys, so when you add silver to pure gold the conductivity drops dramatically. I've got a rare chart someplace that shows it...

I modified the format of the data found here and then plotted it:  https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f038/b47f83d3478be37c2c69a57db722c68a36ea.pdf

Gold gets a bad rap for its conductivity, but in pure form it's the 3rd best elemental conductor after silver and copper.  (Aluminum is #4.)  Very few items we find are elementally pure but rather all are alloys.  Further adding to gold's reputation is that copper and silver alloy well so what most people call 'silver' is actually silver+copper alloy together and still an extremely high conductor.

[Steve Herschbach]

I was making the opposite point. Gold does not usually get a bad rap for it's low conductivity. Many people think it is the best and I was trying to explain why that is not true. Ask your average person on the street what metal conducts electricity the best and see what you get for answers. Then people are puzzled by the detector readings they get. Bad rap or not the fact I deal with every day while nugget detecting is that most natural gold nuggets are very poor conductors. Jewelry hunters have it easy by comparison.

[LowTide]

I believe some people also lose sight of the fact that Gold jewelry can be significantly alloyed.

i.e.

• 18K red gold: 75% gold, 25% copper
• 18K rose gold: 75% gold, 22.25% copper, 2.75% silver
• 18K pink gold: 75% gold, 20% copper, 5% silver
• 12K red gold: 50% gold and 50% copper

 

So depending on shape, weight, and alloy the numbers can vary a good bit. 

And Aluminum.... Fuhgettaboutit......alloys up the wazoo!?

[Chase Goldman]

Also, conductivity is not the only material electromagnetic related property the determines the degree of phase shift that is used to determine target ID, though it is probably the most dominant.

[Steve Herschbach]

Using the chart GB so thoughtfully provided, consider that U.S. common 14k jewelry is 58.3% gold which puts it right at the bottom of his chart, less than one-quarter the conductivity one would expect from pure gold.

Most naturally occurring gold is going to run from 60% to 90% pure though it varies wildly from location to location and sometimes even in the same deposit.

 

[pinpointa]

Hi Guys,

Here is a test with the v3 on gold rings. I tried 25 rings with vdi starting at 9,10,11,13,14,15,17,18,19,23,25,27,28,32,34,35,39,41,51,52,62,75,

Pull tabs were 18,21,22,28,30,35,36,38,39,41.
These were the only pull tabs i had so there is sure to be more which is close to the gold.

Regards  Pinpointa.