Saturday, August 12, 2017

8/12/17 Report - Detector Signals Produced by Three Different Complex Targets and The Effect of Position.


Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.

Source: nhc.noaa.gov
It looks like the weather shown on the map above will become a cyclone in the next few days, but will probably stay out to sea and go north of us.  At this point I don't expect the Treasure Coast to get much from it.

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I had to correct yesterday's post.  My description of the signals produced by the watches in the video was incorrect.  I described the wrong video.  That must have been confusing.  Sorry about that. I corrected it last night.  If you read that post before I made the corrections, you might want to go back to read it again.

Today I'll describe a third video on detecting watches.  I'm sure some of you will think I've already done too much of that, but I'm illustrating a variety of important points.  There are some things that are very difficult to correctly identify unless you dig them.  It isn't limited to watches.

Complex and irregularly shaped targets are not as easy to identify as coins or rings.  I've also shown in the past that when a ring is buried so that it is standing on end, it will produce a very different signal than the same ring laying flat in the ground. I posted a video on YouTube about two years ago that shows that.  The position of a watch will affect the signal too.  The signal is more unpredictable due to the irregular shape of watches, the variety of materials that can be used in a watch, how the watch is laying, as well as how the detector is used.

In the next video I used the same three watches and put them on the ground so that the face is facing up instead of being perpendicular to the ground as they were in the previous two videos.

Here is the link for that video.

https://youtu.be/lqZ9XJiKy7o

You probably noticed that the first watch (Polo Club) produced mostly a low tone signal.

The second watch was very inconsistent: sometimes producing no signal, sometimes a Bell tone and sometimes a lower tone signal.

The third watch ( large high-end Seiko ) consistently produced a Bell Tone, no matter which direction the coil was moved.  The ID meter gave a meter ID that was in the coin range.

The lower tone (produced by both the first watch and sometimes by the second watch) was accompanied reading of something between a pull tab and penny on the ID meter.

If you were only digging targets that produced the Bell Tone, you would have dug the third watch, maybe dug the second watch, but probably left the first watch in the ground.

Target ID is not always simple.  Of course different detectors give you more or less information, but no metal detector can identify everything correctly, and as a result you can easily miss something very good.  It is important to really know your detector and how it responds to different types of targets.

Targets such as coins are easier to identify than complex or irregularly shaped targets such as watches.  You can often get more information about a buried target by changing the angle of your sweep and comparing the signals obtained by sweeping in two different directions.

One thing I hope you see is that there are some very good targets that might not sound good or read as good on a meter.  At helps to really get to know your detector.  I highly stress the value of experimenting with test targets.  Most targets will not be as complex as watches, however they might be more complex than you think.  Various things, even those as simple and common as coins, can give signals different from what you might expect.

For example, coins sometimes seem to disappear when you are digging.  They can slip deeper into a hole or  stick to the side of the hole.  A coin sticking to the side of a hole so that it presents the narrow edge of the coin to the coil will be much more difficult to detect and can seem to disappear.

As you probably know, I do a lot of different kinds of posts on a variety of topics.  I'll undoubtedly be back on some other topic before long.

I hope you find the videos useful.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net