How Many Pull-tabs?

[strick]

If you hunt polluted areas such as modern parks and trashy beaches and every time you dig a target you think to yourself this is a gold ring then you will be wrong thousands of times. If you hunt the same areas and dig a target and say to yourself this will be a piece of aluminum you will be right thousands of times...and when you are right thousands of times then you begin to think you are a bad ass and can tell the difference between gold from aluminum...I've seen lots of bad asses on the internet. 

strick

[Pyriteboy]

300 or so targets for 2 silvers and an 18k bomb sounds like a good day to me. Beats the beach when we're in the doldrums.... 

-Jerry

[Tom_in_CA]

6 hours ago, Digalicious said:

....
A detector that can distinguish gold rings from the various aluminum trash, would be by far, the ultimate game changer in this hobby. .....

Dude, even if the ratios (of mistaken IDs) were 50  to 1, I would GLADLY go out to junky blighted parks, and get fooled that many times for each gold ring.   

When I challenged someone (making these claims) to join me in a duel at a junky blighted parks (that everyone has cherry picked the deep high conductors out of), he quickly adjusted his claims to assure me that the system isn't exact .  And that there are still aluminum items that would fool him.  But he would not venture to put down any ratio guesses.   And after much scrutiny, it seemed like it was going to end up being nothing more than random eventual odds, and selective memory bias.   Yet he could not bring himself to admit this.   And insisted that gold will tend to sound different, blah blah

 

You say : ".... One can take a particular ring and a particular pull tab, wave it in front of the coil at a particular orientation, and a particular distance, and they'll probably notice a difference. ..."

Well sure:  SO TOO will every aluminum & foil blob "sound different from each other".  And SO TOO will each gold ring "sound different from each other".

 

[Digalicious]

38 minutes ago, Tom_in_CA said:

You say : ".... One can take a particular ring and a particular pull tab, wave it in front of the coil at a particular orientation, and a particular distance, and they'll probably notice a difference. ..."

Well sure:  SO TOO will every aluminum & foil blob "sound different from each other".  And SO TOO will each gold ring "sound different from each other".

 

Exactly.

That's why I also said:

Too bad finding stuff in the ground doesn't work like that. Pulltabs, foil, can slaw, aluminum caps, and gold jewelry, come in different sizes, shapes, types, depths, orientations, etc. All of which results in various tones and various ID's, that in no way can determine aluminum trash from almost all gold jewelry.

[Chase Goldman]

7 hours ago, strick said:

If you hunt polluted areas such as modern parks and trashy beaches and every time you dig a target you think to yourself this is a gold ring then you will be wrong thousands of times. If you hunt the same areas and dig a target and say to yourself this will be a piece of aluminum you will be right thousands of times...and when you are right thousands of times then you begin to think you are a bad ass and can tell the difference between gold from aluminum...I've seen lots of bad asses on the internet. 

strick

Agree but I have an alternate related take on this "phenomenon". 

Agreed it is near impossible to tell the difference between gold rings and aluminum junk, especially pull tabs.  Those who say they can are indeed fake bad asses. Similarly, iron discrimination and notches and even target IDs are not foolproof and can lie to you.  You're never really 100% sure what you have until it's out of the ground and you can actually see it.

But mindset and positive attitude are important because they affect your ability to concentrate effectively on what your machine is telling you.  If you are "in the zone" - in sync with your machine and nail a few keepers early on or a good run in the middle of a session, the resulting confidence can linger and make it seem like the good targets are just popping out of the ground even though your treasure to trash ratio hasn't actually changed significantly overall.   On the flip side, if you are fighting your machine, experiencing audio fatigue or EMI, getting skunked and are tired, hungry, dehydrated or distracted by your surroundings, the junk targets start to dominate your attitude and the experience becomes a drag.  

One way to combat the doldrums is to keep your attitude positive and steady.  The best way I have found to do this is set expectations accordingly.  If you are going to "play the odds" and skip targets your machine is telling you are junk then be honest with yourself that you are likely going to leave a few keepers behind and be sure you are OK with that for the sake of expediency (i.e., cherry picking) or because you know you'll have another shot at the site.  Similarly, if you hit a signal that can be either gold or aluminum, set your expectations according to the odds.  Tell yourself that you are verifying this is really a pull tab.  You are either going to be exactly right or wrong and pleasantly surprised.  If you tell yourself it's a possible ring every time, you set yourself up for a lot of disappointment.  FWIW.

I had a similar experience to Compass but relic detecting.  Apologies to all who have heard this one already.  At a heavily detected relic site that hosted several group hunts and that was primarily detected with PI Detectors due to soil conditions, I decided to focus on an area near power lines and where roadside trash, especiall aluminum cans, had accumulated.  The detectorists with PI machines avoided these areas.  I took my Deus 2 and started paying my dues. I knew I was going to dig A LOT of cans and canslaw but felt that there might be a gem hiding in all that trash.  I was right.  I eventually dug a both pieces of a fractured US Civil War breast plate basically rung up no different than the junk aluminum cans and a NY regimental coat button and some other brass and lead targets.  This wasn't skill but perseverance and a positive attitude that something good had to be hiding in the trash based on the amazing targets that were pulled out of the adjacent no trash, no EMI sections of the battlefield.

So yeah, sometimes you gotta just forget discrimination and cherry picking, pay your dues with a positive attitude and wade into the trash to get to the good stuff.  If this was easy, everyone would be doing it.

[strick]

A great video from our own @Gerry in Idaho on the subject of aluminum tabs 

 

 

[Compass]

 

42 minutes ago, strick said:

A great video from our own @Gerry in Idaho on the subject of aluminum tabs 

 

 

Thanks strick, I agree that it is a numbers game. That does not mean that notching out targets is always necessary. There really is no wrong/right answer. I think it depends on a lot of factors but it comes down to what one's goals and capabilities are.                            

[Tom_in_CA]

48 minutes ago, strick said:

A great video from our own @Gerry in Idaho on the subject of aluminum tabs

 

This video is nothing other than "ring enhancement program".   AKA notching.

SURE !   But this is not telling aluminum apart from gold .   

And so you know :  Any TID machine, (from 1983's first Teknetics TID machine to the present) can do the same thing.    There is nothing about that 705 that sets it apart.  And trust me :  When you get to a place where lawn mowers have turned cans into shrapnel, and foil wads abound, then these #'s games go out the window. 🤔  But does it work with "recurring uniform types of junkage" ?  Sure.   But it is not telling aluminum apart from gold.  You will still miss rings and you will still dig aluminum.

 

[strick]

11 minutes ago, Tom_in_CA said:

 

This video is nothing other than "ring enhancement program".   AKA notching.

SURE !   But this is not telling aluminum apart from gold .   

And so you know :  Any TID machine, (from 1983's first Teknetics TID machine to the present) can do the same thing.    There is nothing about that 705 that sets it apart.  And trust me :  When you get to a place where lawn mowers have turned cans into shrapnel, and foil wads abound, then these #'s games go out the window. 🤔  But does it work with "recurring uniform types of junkage" ?  Sure.   But it is not telling aluminum apart from gold.  You will still miss rings and you will still dig aluminum.

 

Agreed the only thing I ever notch out is the iron..and most of the time I don't even do that and hunt in all metal....

I actually love hunting trashy parks with a small coil...I don't do it exclusively but there are times when I look forward to seeing what I may find that others were too chicken to attempt.. besides the beach is 1.5 hours from me and I can be at a park in 5 minutes...we are all a product of our environment...Let me ask you a question Tom..when you hit an old relic site (house or old ghost town) and you are in a spot covered with nails and other forms of trash do you just ignore it and move to a less trashy spot or do you take your time and pick through the trash? 

strick 

[Digalicious]

27 minutes ago, Tom_in_CA said:

 It is not telling aluminum apart from gold.  You will still miss rings and you will still dig aluminum.

 

Yep.

...and you'll still dig a lot of whatever you notched out, because of the TID change due to condition, depth, and orientation.

In other words, the notching avoids a very particular aluminum dig, only to trade for a different aluminum dig. So nothing has actually been gained, and gold is missed.

Granted, a notch would be beneficial if all of the site's aluminum trash only had one TID lol.