Just to put my 2 cents worth in, the reality is that Gold is extremely hard to detect, and when
detected give off a weaker return signal than other metals.
In this way if you have a metered machine, you can see that a Silver ring reads very high, and a Gold
ring reads very low, but it depends on the size and amount of gold that is in the object detected.
A chain looks big to you and me because we see it in its entirety, but to a metal detector, its
looking at the little links, individually and something so small in Gold is almost impossible to detect
regardless of machine, as the return signal of the target is so weak.
There are machines made that are hyped up by the manufacturer to detect those really weak signals
hence we have those gold machines such as the "Gold Bug" or "Lobo" but these are so sensitive
that in wet salt sand or high trash areas they may become too unstable to use.
I have a Whites DFX, and when its sensitivity is all the way up it does better than some of my
previous machines at getting the small Gold chains, but it won't get them all.
On the other hand I had a Fisher CZ-6 Quicksilver that got coins on the beach very well,
but in "Salt Mode" you would walk over small gold rings because the salt mode filtered out those
weak signals..... hence no noise in the wet sand.
If you have the nerve, or the resources you can test this theory by taking a small gold ring, and cutting it open in one place, while the 2 cut ends are touching note the signal you get, low but
good, as the machine see's the ring in a circle, but if you open the ring suddenly the only thing for
the machine to "see" is that very thin band a 10th of an inch wide.
Now your machine won't respond to the open ring... Same amount of gold, just a different view.
Twice in my life, I got a good signal, and knew something was there, only to have it vanish
when I went to dig.... knowing I had a signal I looked around in the Sand (on the beach)
and found a gold wedding band..... I had clipped the ring with my shovel and opened it up and then
it would not register on my machine.
Hope this helps
Richard
