Question about how U.S. gold coins read on a metal detector

[Texas Jay]

My #1 detecting goal for 2019 is to find my first gold coin after detecting for 49.5 years so I have an important question for members who have found U.S. gold coins or who have tested them to find out how they register on the meter. I found a post, last year, by someone who said he has found a few U.S. gold coins and that all denominations register in the same range. I think he said they show on the penny range but I'm not sure and I haven't been able to relocate that post.
Late this week, I'm traveling to a Texas ghost town that has never been detected before and I think it offers me the best chance at hitting my goal that I've ever had.
Can any of you tell me which ID range U.S. gold coins fall into, according to denominations, on my detector? I'll be bringing my Garrett Ace 350 with a large coil and Ace 250 with a standard coil and also my trusty Garrett Scorpion Gold Stinger which doesn't have an ID meter. Do all denominations fall into the same range, example "penny/dime" range, or do they vary according to their denomination?
Thanks for your assistance.
~Texas Jay

 

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[SD51]

Texas Jay, each of the gold coin demoninations will have different conductivity numbers on my E_TRAC and will do the same on your Garrett's meter.

The $1 gold coin reads in the range of bottle caps, nails and aluminum can slaw pieces.

The $2.50 coin reads in the range of small pieces of the old style pulltabs.

The $5 coin reads in the range just above old style pulltabs.

The $10 coin reads in the range of a new zinc penny.

The $20 coin reads in the range of a quarter.


Now, keep in mind, the reading will also depend on how the coin is sitting in the soil, (horizontal, vertical or somewhere in-between).

So here's what I recommend, don't reject any thing and dig all signals. The site you are describing shouldn't have any pulltabs (hopefully) but your most likely targets will be iron. Last year, I decided to detect an open field in a park and dig every signal and two gold rings surfaced that I would have typically left due to the low conductivity reading that were in the pulltab range. Good luck!

 

[ToddsPoint]

Good info SD51. I'll probably never need the info around here, but you just never know. Gary

 

[SD51]

Good info SD51. I'll probably never need the info around here, but you just never know. Gary

I know what you mean Gary, I haven't ever done the "Gold Coin Dance" but we never know. Hope it someday happens for you! Steve

 

[sprailroad]

Makes me wonder how many hundreds if not thousands of gold coins I've missed over the years. Kidding aside, SD51 is of course right, and in 30 yrs of detecting I too have never found one, a lot depends on where you are detecting, and how many times you can get down on one knee and back up again. Sounds like you will have a GREAT place to detect Texas J, after 49.5 years of detecting, man, I hope you come away with one of EACH denomination.

 

[Clad2Silver]

in 36 years of detecting I've found only one gold coin and it was a bullion coin minted in Australia at the Perth mint for distribution at the Shawnee Reservation starting in 2002. The coin contains one fifth of an ounce of pure gold and rang up in the penny/dime area on my White's Eagle II that I was using at the time. The coin itself is roughly the size of a dime.

 

[uglymailman]

Dig em all Jay, ya never know. Where ya goin? Trickem or Cotton Gin? Good luck.

 

[IDXMonster]

They definitely weren’t used AS much as silver or copper but one would have to think that they ARE out there! From what I understand,the 5$ gold piece was the “workhorse” of the gold coins circulating,so on the CTX3030 I dig signals that are stable in the 12-30 range(12-28 to 12-31) when in a site that has a good probability of having them. This machine doesn’t lie about other coins,I’m not expecting it to lie about gold!
With that being said,I’ve never found a gold coin. But I will. I can SMELL it!
Good luck Jay. With that kind of hunting behind you it is WELL overdue!

 

[Ammoman]

Good advice given. I would add to that by saying your best chance of digging a gold coin would be to dig without looking at the meter. Go by sound. Meters are filters and filters sometimes block the very thing you are looking for.

 

[smokeythecat]

I have found more than one. The big 2 Escudo was shallow and on my Deus rang up in the 90's a true high tone. It was 4 or more inches down, but not much more than that. My Cibola nailed my first gold, a 1774 British Guinea, the Cibola has no meter but it blew my ears off.

The $5 US gold was on a beach and with the Deus, again, high tone and blew my ears off, it sounded much like a clad quarter. The $1 US gold I found awhile back with the Deus rang up horribly. No vdi, just a noise, and I dug it anyway. Surprise!

Anyway, dig it all or lose out. I would have missed the $1 coin, which is probably the one most likely any of us should find.

 

[Ammoman]

My first and only gold coin came in the form of a bullion coin encased in a gold ring. It was the sound that told me to dig. If i had gone by the numbers, the coin would still be in the ground today.


I do believe that luck is part of the formula to digging gold, but hard work is the biggest factor to success.

 

[smokeythecat]

Cherry pickers will never find gold. Unless its on top of the ground!

 

[Texas Jay]

Texas Jay, each of the gold coin demoninations will have different conductivity numbers on my E_TRAC and will do the same on your Garrett's meter.

The $1 gold coin reads in the range of bottle caps, nails and aluminum can slaw pieces.

The $2.50 coin reads in the range of small pieces of the old style pulltabs.

The $5 coin reads in the range just above old style pulltabs.

The $10 coin reads in the range of a new zinc penny.

The $20 coin reads in the range of a quarter.


Now, keep in mind, the reading will also depend on how the coin is sitting in the soil, (horizontal, vertical or somewhere in-between).

So here's what I recommend, don't reject any thing and dig all signals. The site you are describing shouldn't have any pulltabs (hopefully) but your most likely targets will be iron. Last year, I decided to detect an open field in a park and dig every signal and two gold rings surfaced that I would have typically left due to the low conductivity reading that were in the pulltab range. Good luck!

I sure appreciate the excellent information and suggestion, SD51. Most, if not all, of the old ghost town site is located on about 300 acres that has been owned by the same family since the 1870s. The family knows that it has never been detected before so I'm very excited to get the first shot at it. The only pulltabs that may be there are those that have been thrown away by deer hunters over the years but I don't think there will be too many of those.
I and 2 other members of our Central Texas Treasure Club will go there this weekend and detect some of it for a few hours. The good thing is that we're welcome to return whenever we want (except for deer season) and detect as much as we can. The main thing to worry about is rattlesnakes and there are plenty of them there during warm weather.
Thanks again!
~Texas Jay

http://centraltexastreasureclub.webs.com

 

[Texas Jay]

Dig em all Jay, ya never know. Where ya goin? Trickem or Cotton Gin? Good luck.

I think I will at least begin digging everything, uglymailman, but if the place is overloaded with rusty nails and small iron pieces, I may go back to Jewelry Mode which is what I run my detectors in 99% of the time anyway. It picks up everything from foil on up.
No, I won't be going to Trickham or Cottonwood. I hunted Trickham many years ago and it's been detected a lot over the decades since but when I visited there last year, it was so grown over by brush and small mesquites that it looked like it was impossible to detect anyway. I'm still negotiating with landowners in Cottonwood, trying to get permission to detect some of the old townsite.
You won't find this ghost town mentioned on the Internet and very little is even known about it and I want to keep it that way. But we do have many ghost towns in this area, a few of which have never seen a detector, and several of the others have been detected very little. Thank you and everyone for the "Good Luck" wishes.
~Texas Jay

 

[SD51]

I sure appreciate the excellent information and suggestion, SD51. Most, if not all, of the old ghost town site is located on about 300 acres that has been owned by the same family since the 1870s. The family knows that it has never been detected before so I'm very excited to get the first shot at it. The only pulltabs that may be there are those that have been thrown away by deer hunters over the years but I don't think there will be too many of those.
I and 2 other members of our Central Texas Treasure Club will go there this weekend and detect some of it for a few hours. The good thing is that we're welcome to return whenever we want (except for deer season) and detect as much as we can. The main thing to worry about is rattlesnakes and there are plenty of them there during warm weather.
Thanks again!
~Texas Jay

http://centraltexastreasureclub.webs.com

Keep us posted on how you guys do and we all hope you get to dig your first gold coin!

 

[Tom_in_CA]

.... has been owned by the same family since the 1870s. The family knows that it has never been detected before....

I think the others have done a good job at answering the TID question of USA gold coins. Eg.: round tab-is ($2.50), to beefy square tab-ish ($5.00), to corroded zinc or IH-ish ($10.00), to copper penny-ish ($20.00).

But I have a question about the quote I've captured above: I certainly hope it's true. But I've got to tell ya : In my 40+ yrs. of this, so too have I heard the same things said by property owners. Yet sometimes, I know that it's not-the-case. Because perhaps I personally have hunted it in the past, or know others who have. Here's the variable scenarios of the reason for this :

a) whomever you're talking to NOW (the mom, the dad, the aunt, etc...) wasn't the one who gave permission to some other dude 10 yrs. ago. And even though they might THINK (even to the point of insistence) that ... they would certainly have heard from their siblings, yet.... they just didn't know or hear.

An example of this is a yard I detected, that an elderly man said "yes". A year or two later, I knocked on the door again (to try a new detector and wanted to compare to some place I'd already worked). An elderly lady said "sure, go ahead. No one's ever md'd it before (I didn't bother correcting her). The a few years after that, wanted to test a new detector at a place I'd worked hard, so I knocked on the same door again. A younger lady answered the door. Said that it was her parent's house, and that they'd gone to live in retirement home, but ... she didn't see a problem, and granted me the permission. And as she did, told me "No one's ever md'd it before" (after all, she should know, the house had been in her family for 50 yrs, right ?)

So as you can see, sometimes people will say that , and ... simply don't know.

b) a caretaker or ranch-hand said "Ok" to their cousin billy-bob 10 or 15 yrs ago. And figured that was in their domain of say-so, since they work there.

c) and sometimes ... well ... some md'rs don't ask.

As I say, I hope in your case it's true. But just sayin' .... I've had several situations/locations where that was told to me, yet I knew the places had been hit hard. And in each case, the person telling me this, is very confident in the statement.

 

[sprailroad]

Tom, talk about raining on a parade....Texas J, the place you a friends are headed out to, (and it sounds like a large area) would be a "Field of dreams" for a lot of us out here. Aside from a possible gold coin, (and it is a long shot) you can't help but wonder what OTHER targets may just be out there. Who knows, the area may be a "gift that keeps on giving" kind of place.

 

[IDXMonster]

Tom likes to use the term “devils advocate”....

 

[Charlie P. (NY)]

Haven't posted this for a while - so for the benefit of coin shooters: Here, on a scale of 0 to 99, are coins (and other common items) from my logbook and how they read.

 

[RelicsRings]

I rarely post on forums, mostly just read them. But I thought I would offer some info on this thread since I've been lucky enough to find 6 gold coins in my life so far. All US 1-$5 1-$2 1/2 and 4-$1's, in all cases I was very surprised when I turned the dirt and was staring at a gold coin. These all came from sites that have been absolutely pounded by others for 40 plus years but for whatever reason were never dug.

I say I was lucky but I think there are factors to consider when going after gold coins that will improve your chances of finding one.

First-You have to hunt sites that have the potential to have gold coins present. Places like military camps and mining camps people were paid in gold coins so the potential of finding one goes way up. I read or heard one time that gold coins were used more in the Western US than in the Eastern US. Also, the wealthy were more apt to have and use gold coins vs the poor so hunt sites that wealthy people visited like beach resorts, mountain resorts, amusement parks, etc.

Second-You've got to dig everything. A $1 gold on my detectors falls in the foil range, and like I said I was surprised in every case when a gold coin turned up in my dirt pile. The key is that I was persistent in digging signals that others had chosen not to dig. i wonder how many countless people, including myself had passed those gold coins up because they didn't sound like a good signal?

Third-You have to have a positive mindset and believe you will find a gold coin. The first gold coin I found ($5) I was not expecting at all, I was like everyone else and thought I'll never find one. But I did and that changed everything. From that point forward I knew it was possible and I believed I would find more of them. I don't know why but I really wanted to find a $1 next, not a $20 but a $1, I guess I figured it would be to easy for someone to miss a $1 vs a $20 or $10. So in the back of my mind I believed I would find a $1 gold coin and one fall afternoon it happened. I had just purchased a new detector and took it out for the first time. I was digging junk trying to learn all the sounds and had just dug a piece of wire and got another signals right next to the hole I'd just dug. The signal sounded about the same and I thought it was going to be the rest of the wire. Boy was I surprised to see a $1 gold coin. Every time I go metal detecting I tell myself I'm going to find a gold coin today and since then I've dug 4 more gold coins.

I don't think it matters what metal detector you're using. I've heard of people finding gold coins with $100 Bounty Hunters all the way up to $4000 Minelab gold machines. The key is incorporating the 3 points I made above. Like the old saying says, "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity"