DetectingWales.com

Here is the video of today's rally, enjoy!  ;)

Detecting Wales Bridgwater rally (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WtekFLntv4#ws)

Great video Steve well done mate. ;)

Fantastic, I could almost imagine being there  :)

well done steve great video

Great stuff, enjoyed watching that   ;D

Really enjoyed that, nice to see all the things we 'missed'

Well done on your finds

Rookypair

Excellent video,Steve.I really enjoyed that.Next best thing to being there myself. :)

Great Vid Steve,some nice finds the to.

Thanks for that Steve. I had to drop out at the last minute, so it was nice to see what I missed.

Great video Steve - Loving the Stones at the end!

Cheers
Neil

Nice footage Steve and interesting to see the £1999 machine performing. :) Jerry.

Great video made up for missing the rally.

                                           Pat. ;) ;)

Great video Steve and nice to meet you too ;)
Neil

Yes it was a nice day out, although the ground could have been softer, must be getting weak in my old age ;D

I've just cleaned up the video a bit, it should now be in HD.

Detecting Wales Bridgwater Rally (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkYsiCGfRZ0#ws)

Excellent 'atmospheric' video Steve.

It’s nice to get people chatting, rather than just showing find after find coming out the ground, makes the video more interesting.

Although I was even more interested in the Minelab CTX3030 ;D

Nice video Steve,ah the gold test I remember it well,not many machines will even pick it up on the surface


I notice a member on here has taken it upon himself to post a direct link from detecting Wales thread, and show the video on the Blisstool forum


Is this allowed  ???


I would not like to think that anything I post is been shown on other forums,without permission

No problem Shaun, it's just the vexatious blogger with incredibly itchy underpants who has to pay £500 a time ;D Oh and Gordon Hemorrhoid from MLO TV  ::)

I enjoyed the video and we all know that the CTX3030 is not Gods gift to metal detectorists.

Its OK having GPS and even been made aware of the time but not at the expense of missing gold. ;) :)Jerry.

Great Vid that makes me want to have been their even more. Following on from the Hereford Rally it was nice to see the £2000,00 be all and end all of detectors fail with the Bronze Age Gold. Thanks for posting Sir.

I never thought in a million years it would find it, but I have an open mind and you can’t diss a machine before you test it. I will continue to test machines this season, and try a few more Minelab CTX 3030 on it. If you require GPS mapping then this is the machine for you, but it’s not the Golden Goose, it will not go where other machines have feared to tread, it is no better than all the other top of the range machines, but if you fall in a deep puddle then you’ll be fine down to 3m. ;D

What I will do next is produce a list of machines that  will find it or respond in a positive way at a set depth. This is not meant to be a test to knock any particular machine, but just see what they are capable of. I don’t give a stuff what machines finds it, as long as it’s a descent signal , which you would dig.
I think we would all like to know, why some machines are responding better than others on a fragment of gold.

Out of curiosity Steve have you tried the Explorer XS on it? If so, how did it fare?

Cheers,
Alan

Yes, it's on an earlier video somewhere. What I will do is produce a tick chart, and take it along to the Central Searchers rally and test 100+ machines on it. I will give everyone equal opportunaly to tweak their machines for best performance and see what the results are.
If anyone can think of a fairer way, let me know.

I think as we said Steve the problem with machines finding it is the shape of the gold not the gold itself. So you have got to ask how many pieces of gold are out there with that exact size and shape, not many I would imagine. As far as I've seen only the G2 has given a "good" signal when it's buried and with normal settings and of course that is marketed as a gold machine, have you tried the GoldBug as it's meant to be the same?. Minelabs are no good at small gold, in fact most VLF machines have trouble with micro jewellery. A sobering fact is that I remember finding two gold earring backs with a Whites Coinmaster 5 TR machine (pre VLF) back in the 70's, so have we progressed?

The goldbug and G2 both find it, however in reality it is not a true test and only causes you to doubt your machine.

The sceat I found was with my Etrac and gave a small, but very positive signal. It was about 3" deep. I reburied it so a couple of friends could test their machines and both machines found it ok ( F75 and minelab 705), but I couldn't get a signal at all on my Etrac and yet I found it with it. Ait tests and items recently buried do not give true tests, have confidence in your machine and you will find !

I think an anwser will be to send it off to the various manufacturers and test the machines in a lab environment on a oscilloscope, spectrum analyser and waveform generator, and see what's going on. It would be in the interest of all detector users, and as you say Geoff it is a strange shape but how many people find Saxon Thrysmas, probably only a handfull of people, this maybe the reason why.

I'll put in my 2pence worth here.

I found a coin sized piece of chopped gold at the Ham Hill dig with my Etrac. I was searching in all metal with sensitivity turned down coz they wanted to find items close to the surface. It was a squarish shape and cut from a gold plate or cup. It was about 6 inches down and gave a good, clear, diggable signal.
The display showed 16/30 and the audio signal was a high squeek, more like the sound modern coins give.

I had found a silver iron age coin 4 inches down the day before with the same settings so the Etrac is capable of finding these objects. I wonder if the gold object you are using is difficult to pick up because of the air gap caused by the plastic bag you keep it in.

My CScope also picked up both coins but was giving confused signals and bounced around a bit by the way.

Eric

Hi Meatslicer most silver coinage will give a good reading unless it’s very small, thin or debased. Many of the gold items we often find are 9-18ct and contain a percentage of silver, so this helps give a better signal.  24ct gold in the form of a gold stater, noble or guinea seems to offer enough surface area  to produce a good signal without  much of a problem.

 I think the problem begins when you find a thin gold ring with a break in it or a small piece of jewellery which is misshapen. Perhaps this confuses the circuitry into thinking the item is iron, so ignores it.

We have all experienced signals which are iffy only to dig them and as we get closer to the item, gives a cracking signal, and you think to yourself you could have walked away from that thinking it was junk.

As Steve says silver will always give a good signal as it is the best conductor by a mile, copper is next and gold, unfortunately, is in last place of the metals we tend to search for. But one slight correction, adding silver or copper to gold to produce a lesser carat, logically should give better conductivity but in fact increases it's resistivity and therefore lessens it's conductivity. ;)

This came from across the big pond a few years back.  ;) Jerry.

I think you may have the anwser Jerry, but some machines are still performing better than others.

I think its the trade off factor....you either have a very sparky machine that picks up small fragments of gold but doesnt handle mineralisation so well (t2, f75) or a machine that can handle mineralisation but doesnt pick up on the small gold (minelabs)....some of us are lucky to have both ::) ;D

and I still havnt found anything good :D

Loved the video Steve, wish I could have been there; next time hopefully. Well done to all.

try out a different machine at each rally steve? nice vid  :)

Great video, and fab choice of music.  :)

To go back to the gold test a lot depends upon the purity of the item, found or very old gold may have a lot of impurities so the actual gold may be split so to speak into smaller parts, newer gold items refined to a better degree at higher temps etc will be a much better signal. Hope that is understandable thinking of tweaking a machine to give a better signal to "old gold", now i know where to find a target it may spur me on to getting something done. Aussie gold searcher sites have plenty of info sorry i don't have a link 

Hi Steve,
Any chance of a picture of the piece of gold you were testing? Perhaps with a known object for perspective (help to demonstrate shape/size).
All you could see in the vid is a plastic bag.
Cheers
Mike

Mike there was nothing in it it was just a plastic bag!! :P

Herbie

 ;D ;D

Cracking video, thanks for sharing.