Finally Some More Time With The Equinox

[GB_Amateur]

April hasn't been kind to me regarding hunting time.  Job, bad weather, taxes, two weekend funerals, a 6 day trip,....  Finally Sunday I got in 5 hours at my best yielding spot!

This particular park is right next to a hospital and (apparently) the ambulance 2-way radios wreak havoc on the Eqx frequencies.  Fortunately the farther I get from the hospital the less it's an issue.  Still, I wanted to search a strip of grass next to a sidewalk which was close to the hospital so started there.  No way could I get multi-freq to work at a gain even as low as 15 so I decided to find out which individual frequencies were being barraged.  As it turns out the two extreme frequencies (5 kHz and 40 kHz) were the ones picking up the EMI.  I decided to put all four of Park 1,2 and Field 1,2 in the other three, with Park 2 @ 10kHz being my main hunting mode.  Definitely ground balanced all of these single frequency modes.  I did find a Wheat penny about 5 inches deep at 10 kHz but the going was slow and I felt I wasn't taking as much advantage of the Eqx as I wanted so I reverted to a quieter part of the park after about 1.5 hours and switched to multi-frequency Park 2, 5 tones (custom breakpoints -- more below) with default recovery speed (6), iron bias (0), gain of 19 (to avoid EMI).  I rebalanced ground cancel and off I went.

I was primarily covering ground which I had hunted previously, mostly with the Fisher F75 but even some I already hunted in Park 1.  Found one of the two nickels (below) early on in ground I'm sure I had passed a coil over 2 or 3 times previously.  Then I hit the edge of the razed house footprint, possibly a region I had not hunted carefully before.  Finally I went along the curb strip between sidewalk and street before having to head home for dinner.  Since I never try to clean coins in the field I didn't know what I had, but was pretty sure there were some Wheaties since the Lincoln Monument on copper Memorials tends to show up easily even coated in crud.

Arriving home I soaked the copper pennies separately from the nickels just in case an adverse chemical reaction might occur.  Per Cabin Fever's suggestion I didn't add soap, just water.  After a couple hours I was able to get a look and was quite pleased to see that I had found my first ever V-nickel (see photo below).  All five coppers were Wheat cents, dated 1919, 1930, 194x-D, 1944-D, and 1945-S.  (Still hoping the 'x' is a 3, which would make it only the 2nd known 1943-D copper penny, worth 7 figures.  OK, more likely I win the Powerball buying one ticket....)  None of the listed dates+MM is scarce but always glad to land Wheaties.  One (typically) badly corroded Zincoln and one recently dropped clad dime, my only non-oldies, were not cleaned but are also shown in the photo.

I still have less than 30 hours with the Equinox so it's difficult to reach much of a conclusion.  I quickly got comfortable with the 11 in. coil which is a signifcant change for me since I've lived with 5 in. and 6 in. coils on my other detectors because of the serious iron.  I still run in 'all metal' exclusively, and 5 tones.  Can't seem to get comfortable with either discriminating out the iron or with megatones.  (Never could get used to those with the X-T 705 or F75, either.)  My custom tone breaks are as follows:  top of iron = 0, 'foil' range (lo tone) = 1-->10, 'nickel' (hi tone) = 11-->14, 'pulltab' (medium tone) = 12-->18, high conductors (hi tone) = 19-->40.  If something is jumping between zones (e.g. 18-19 could be an Indian Head penny) I can decide to dig based upon age of location.  Same thing with gold rings, if I'm after those and in an area I think they could be then I'll consider digging the low tone region.

One final comment.  I've read people write things such as "nickels are solid 13" and "if you hear iron mixed with the high tone don't dig".  Ditto "you need to get a solid, repeatable tone coming at the target from 90 degrees...".  None of these things hold for my sites.  For example, one of the nickels (don't know which one) read all of 11,12,13,14 (yes, mostly 12 and 13).  One of the pennies hit 24 and 29 besides the numbers between.  I think the main reason I'm seeing broader TID value ranges is all the iron in my sites.  I'd say for this particular hunt, fully 75% of good finds still showed iron tones after I had dug and replaced the plug.  The site speaks to you and you gain by listening.

 

[Guest Tnsharpshooter]

Nice report.

Thanks for sharing.

[Tometusns]

Congrats GB on your first v- nickel!! If I were to guess I would say that's your culprit with the lower id numbers. Good luck!! Tom

[Steve Herschbach]

Great post!

3 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

I've read people write things such as "nickels are solid 13" and "if you hear iron mixed with the high tone don't dig".  Ditto "you need to get a solid, repeatable tone coming at the target from 90 degrees...".  None of these things hold for my sites.

This are just comments not rules. If you dig solid 13 readings you will get nickels plus some trash. That does not mean all nickels read solid 13. Newer ones tend to, older ones tend to 12, and outliers can read higher and lower. Mixed iron tones can be a clue, that’s all. And solid repeatable tones from 90 degrees is a cherry picking tip - many items only read good one way.

Metal detecting is a game of true nuance when making dig or no dig decisions, and anytime an item is left in the ground you will never know if you passed on trash - or left a good item behind. Even digging all non-ferrous misses non-ferrous items that are reading as ferrous, and that happens a lot. Ultimately we each have to learn our detectors and our ground / targets and do the best we can. The tips and tricks help but only when applied with experience and judgement, not as hard and fast rules.

Anyway GB_Amateur thanks for your detailed and thoughtful posts. Much appreciated!