Newbie questions, signal strength, foil, target depth

[skyhead]

First I'd like to say thanks to everyone who's answered my other questions. This forum is the best!. So I'm new to detecting and I live in northeast Ohio. Some of the places tried so far are limited to my back yard and the local school. I have a Tesoro Compadre and it seems to detect everything that's close to the surface. I want to make sure I don't miss anything but if I set it to discriminate foil it will still give a strong signal on a tiny piece of foil close to the surface. And it will also strong signal iron that is 10 inches deep.

I'm trying to keep it on the foil setting and dig everything but I'm doing a lot of digging for foil and pencil erasers, pull tabs. Once I do hit a clad coin it does make quite a difference in the signal strength. Here are my questions for anyone that willing to answer

1. can a silver dime on edge say more than 4 inches deep give a different or weak signal? what about other coins?

2. I imagine it depends on soil conditions but how deep should I be looking for older coins?

3. how does a tiny piece of foil make its way down to 4 inches or more deep?

4. I'm in the Akron area, are there any metal detecting clubs or groups close to me?

Thanks in advance everyone

Dave

 

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[Rifleman]

A coin on edge will give a different signal than one that is flat. It can sound different and not give as strong of a signal. Old coins can be anywhere from a couple of inches to 14 inches or more. It depends on the type of soil, material from trees and plants being deposited over the years, fresh soil being deposited and other factors. That's why foil gets deeper also. You might have to clean out the upper layer of junk to be able to detect the coins at deeper depths. A smaller coil can help get around the junk, but you will give up some depth. If you have found an area that should hold older coins, it might just be worth the effort to clean out the surface junk. Mark off an area about 5 or 10 square feet and work it in all metal mode with no discrimination. If you don't find any deeper objects after the surface stuff is gone, you might want to move on somewhere else.
Keep after it and you will start finding the older, deeper coins.

Good hunting, John K

 

[skyhead]

Thanks for the good ideas John. I never thought about using all metal mode and removing the junk and then taking second pass at it.

Thanks again

 

[Charlie P. (NY)]

Foil and aluminum bottlecaps are the nemisis of my Musketeer. My F-75 is much better at spotting foil. One trick I use is, if you get an iffy signal, sweep back over it in an "X" pattern. Then repeat very fast. The foil will usually break up on audio and always hops around on the VDI numeric display when doing this. That's where a detector that give a true audio pitch & intensity signal as opposed to just an alarm ring will save hours of digging. Bottle caps usually will also. Though a shallow and shiny one laid flat usually gets me digging in hopes of a ring. If you ignore all foil and pulltabs you'll probably not find many gold or silver chains and darned few rings. One of those trade-off choices life is full of.

Soil "percolates" with frosts and the action of worms, lawn aireators, plows, silt, etc. It is amazing how deep things can get in a short time. My local town park floods every spring. I found a 1996 Roosevelt dime at 8" last year (ticked me off - I thought silver for sure). I also found an indian head cent on the surface at the same park (setting on a flat piece of shale and worn smooth on the obverse).