BarnacleBill
New member
Last weekend I spent 4 hours at an old railway station pictured below. The station had been in use for over 100 hundred years as the photo is believed to be pre-1900. A few things to note in the photo; there are no telegraph poles or lines visible, the station agent is standing behind a stagecoach ready to depart, and it looks like in the foreground they had to use rough hewn timbers to replace some damaged ties.
[attachment 40987 trwhit2.jpg]
The location is very tough to detect, to quote myself from a post last weekend. "The ground conditions ended up being a witches brew of the likes I've never seen before. The ballast used was crushed basalt, mixed with coal, coal slag that had rust covering it, and just for good measure they had asphalted in between the ties which was now broken up and mixed in. There was iron everywhere, old buried cans, pieces of trains and modern trash."
The only decent find I had last weekend was a more modernish conductors watch(Westclox Pocket Ben) which was only an inch below the surface.
[attachment 40988 conductorwatch.jpg]
Last weekend my tools of choice were the Minelab X70 with HF 5x10 elliptical coil and the Fisher Edge with 5.75 concentric which I have found to be great in iron while wading. I did not find my results had been stellar, as after 100 years of use there has to been coins there. Analyzing the ground conditions, what has been available for past technology, and area to be covered, I concluded the place could not have been cleaned out.
Yesterday morning I had to stick around the house, so I decided to run some tests in my asphalt driveway which tends to give detectors fits, especially when sensitivity settings are pushed. I had hoped that in some way it would mildly mimic the ground conditions around the train station. I laid out a large rusty nail, a nickel, a dime, and a rusty hasp file.
[attachment 40993 nailtarg.jpg]
The machines in the driveway test:
BH Quickdraw II with hockey puck 4 inch concentric coil.
Fisher Edge with 5.75 coil.
Tesoro Stingray II 8 inch concentric.
Minelab X70 HF 5x10 elliptical coil, concentrics 9 inch 3 kHz & 18.75 kHz
The QDII has the slowest recovery speed and did not fare well despite the small coil. The Stingray did well on separation but also signalled coin on the hasp, however without a pinpoint mode I would be digging a lot of large iron. The Edge was the most reliable in staying quiet over the iron but was suffering masking. The X70 did best of any machine with the HF elliptical coil, but only when parallel to the iron targets. As the axis was rotated(stepping 90deg) it began to be masked in a progressive manner.
Understanding that these were surface tests I decided to take three machines to the station:
BH Quickdraw II with hockey puck 4 inch concentric coil.
Fisher Edge with 5.75 coil.
Minelab X70 HF 5x10 elliptical coil, concentrics 9 inch 3 kHz & 18.75 kHz
[attachment 40994 3amigos.jpg]
At the station first up was the QDII and it was very easy to GB
. But the hockey puck proved no match for the station, after 40 minutes use it was not seeing down through the mess any better than the other detectors and I ended up with no targets found. Next I tried the X70 with it's various coils:
3kHz 9 inch concentric, it was second quietest on the X70, it signalled overload more than the other two X70 coils which leads me to believe it was seeing deeper, but would barely respond to a pulltab on the surface adjacent to a buried piece of iron. Therefore in this instance a lower frequency was less responsive to a lower conductor.
18.75kHz 9 inch concentric, noisiest coil on the X70 by far.
HF 5x10 elliptical, by far the quietest and best separation, the coil of choice for the conditions on the X70.
I used all manner of techniques available with the X70 to try and crack this nut.
The Fisher Edge was the quietest machine overall and the real time target ID makes it the easiest/quickest to use. An illustration of how bad trash conditions are follows; to find a spot to GB I walked around in pinpoint mode for about five minutes trying to find a clear space. And when I did find one it was only about a coil width wide.
Overall the finds were very meager, deepest coin type target was what look to be copper tags at around five inches deep max. But beyond that it was a pretty futile rail-ing against the wall.
The coins found were surface to one inch deep in the slag.
[attachment 40998 whtargs.jpg]
If a newbie thought that this was the first place to try out his/her new detector they would probably give up detecting straight away. As I have put eight hours into this location it is time to move on until I feel that there is a technology that can deal with it effectively.
HH
BarnacleBill
[attachment 40987 trwhit2.jpg]
The location is very tough to detect, to quote myself from a post last weekend. "The ground conditions ended up being a witches brew of the likes I've never seen before. The ballast used was crushed basalt, mixed with coal, coal slag that had rust covering it, and just for good measure they had asphalted in between the ties which was now broken up and mixed in. There was iron everywhere, old buried cans, pieces of trains and modern trash."
The only decent find I had last weekend was a more modernish conductors watch(Westclox Pocket Ben) which was only an inch below the surface.
[attachment 40988 conductorwatch.jpg]
Last weekend my tools of choice were the Minelab X70 with HF 5x10 elliptical coil and the Fisher Edge with 5.75 concentric which I have found to be great in iron while wading. I did not find my results had been stellar, as after 100 years of use there has to been coins there. Analyzing the ground conditions, what has been available for past technology, and area to be covered, I concluded the place could not have been cleaned out.
Yesterday morning I had to stick around the house, so I decided to run some tests in my asphalt driveway which tends to give detectors fits, especially when sensitivity settings are pushed. I had hoped that in some way it would mildly mimic the ground conditions around the train station. I laid out a large rusty nail, a nickel, a dime, and a rusty hasp file.
[attachment 40993 nailtarg.jpg]
The machines in the driveway test:
BH Quickdraw II with hockey puck 4 inch concentric coil.
Fisher Edge with 5.75 coil.
Tesoro Stingray II 8 inch concentric.
Minelab X70 HF 5x10 elliptical coil, concentrics 9 inch 3 kHz & 18.75 kHz
The QDII has the slowest recovery speed and did not fare well despite the small coil. The Stingray did well on separation but also signalled coin on the hasp, however without a pinpoint mode I would be digging a lot of large iron. The Edge was the most reliable in staying quiet over the iron but was suffering masking. The X70 did best of any machine with the HF elliptical coil, but only when parallel to the iron targets. As the axis was rotated(stepping 90deg) it began to be masked in a progressive manner.
Understanding that these were surface tests I decided to take three machines to the station:
BH Quickdraw II with hockey puck 4 inch concentric coil.
Fisher Edge with 5.75 coil.
Minelab X70 HF 5x10 elliptical coil, concentrics 9 inch 3 kHz & 18.75 kHz
[attachment 40994 3amigos.jpg]
At the station first up was the QDII and it was very easy to GB
. But the hockey puck proved no match for the station, after 40 minutes use it was not seeing down through the mess any better than the other detectors and I ended up with no targets found. Next I tried the X70 with it's various coils:3kHz 9 inch concentric, it was second quietest on the X70, it signalled overload more than the other two X70 coils which leads me to believe it was seeing deeper, but would barely respond to a pulltab on the surface adjacent to a buried piece of iron. Therefore in this instance a lower frequency was less responsive to a lower conductor.
18.75kHz 9 inch concentric, noisiest coil on the X70 by far.
HF 5x10 elliptical, by far the quietest and best separation, the coil of choice for the conditions on the X70.
I used all manner of techniques available with the X70 to try and crack this nut.
The Fisher Edge was the quietest machine overall and the real time target ID makes it the easiest/quickest to use. An illustration of how bad trash conditions are follows; to find a spot to GB I walked around in pinpoint mode for about five minutes trying to find a clear space. And when I did find one it was only about a coil width wide.
Overall the finds were very meager, deepest coin type target was what look to be copper tags at around five inches deep max. But beyond that it was a pretty futile rail-ing against the wall.
The coins found were surface to one inch deep in the slag.[attachment 40998 whtargs.jpg]
If a newbie thought that this was the first place to try out his/her new detector they would probably give up detecting straight away. As I have put eight hours into this location it is time to move on until I feel that there is a technology that can deal with it effectively.
HH
BarnacleBill
