DetectingWales.com

Read on another forum that minelabs not good on small gold,this cant be right can it,showed someone passing gold earing over his etrac and nothing,cant comment myself as i have never found any gold YET but i will or will i. ???

I'm afraid it's quite true, Neither BBS or FBS see gold micro jewellery as the conductivity is too low.
With Explorers you can get a slightly lower signal by turning fast on and deep off. If you want micro jewellery then it's a job for the higher frequency machines 14-18 kHz.
Ironically I remember back in the 70's finding the backs off ear rings whilst beach detecting on more than one occasion and that was with the old T/R system.....so much for technological advancement  :D

So how small is 'small gold'

I know that my minelab has found gold items in the 4g range, and also some in the 2g range - what about other people?

Mind you I've never found any hammered halves or quarters, so am always concerned I might be missing stuff....

4g ? that's huge ;D ;D
Try the back of a gold ear ring, unfortunately gold is a bad conductor (in relation to silver and copper) and when you alloy it it gets worse.

always thought that  ;) i do use explorer in fast on deep off and have found 5 gold coins with it and small bits of gold {smallest 1.1g  but just the usual silver rubbish with the etrac  ;D

Huh, get a load of him.  'Usual silver rubbish'   ???

Send some my way carling. ;)

Val

In terms of conductivity:-

Electrical conductivity @ 293 K
(Ω−1·m−1)
 
Aluminium, pure 37.45 - 37.74
 Copper, pure 59.17 - 59.59
 Gold, pure 45.17 - 45.45
 Silver, pure 61.35 - 63.01

(293K is 20C)

Which in layman's terms means..........................................................
Well, what I said in the first place, gold is a bad conductor  ;D ;D

looks like a knitting pattern to me , and no before anyone asks i dont knit , couldnt understand the patterns  :D :D :D

I've heard your a dab hand with a crochet needle though ;)

get trouble tying my shoe laces nowadays let alone crocheting  ::) ::)

Feel a bit gutted now,thought if you set noise to number 1 it would run at 15 kh or there a bouts,so shouldnt it be ok on small gold,or is my understanding wrong,

thats due to all those Indian takeaways and beer ;)

And having short arms :D

according to the e trac book it is transmitting multiple frequencies simultaneosly . full band spectrum(FBS) simultaneous frequency transmission ranging from 1.5-1000khz so it should pick up gold , i have found a half sovereign a foot down on the beach and a few gold, silver, platinum and titanium ring on the local beaches with my e trac and hammered silver gives a very odd sound .

Oh dear, hear we go again lol
OK the FBS transmit one one frequency only but that frequency has many many harmonic frequencies which the Minelab uses to cross reference against each other to give a more accurate id on targets. The lower noise cancel numbers 1,2 and 3 are better at targeting low conductors as these use higher frequencies.
For people who still think the FBS uses multi frequency, here's a thought for you;
If FBS uses multi frequency then how when two machines are close together can you noise cancel one from the other ???
 ;)

If detecting were an Olympic sport,  Minelab would never get gold.  :D

OUCH !  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

my etrac gets plenty of gold ;D and trout masters  ;)

gold on a beach is way differant to gold in land,,way easier to find full gold rings {which aint small} on a beach,, i think the originall post meant inland detecting?

Whilst carrying out a couple of air tests with my Etrac the other night, I noticed it wouldn't pick up a very thin gold ring even at one inch  :'(
At first I thought my machine was coming down with something, then I tried a larger ring, and bingo, it picked it up at about 9 inches  ;D
I was surprised because the second ring wasn't much bigger than the first  ???  

try testing the rings in wet sand bud ;)

    Are you saying Geoff, that the highest freq on the Etrac at, i think,14kh approx is better than the lowest available which is about 11khz, at picking up small gold.Presumably ch 1 = 14khz and ch11 = 11khz, am I right so far?.I remember seeing a video where a guy measured the exact frequencies transmitted by the Etrac,there does,nt seem to be much difference between the highest and lowest frequencies available.

why you worryin about small gold get the big gold ;)

Thanks for the tip Badger  8)
Rumour has it there is only one Gold ring left on Aber beach.
May try and find it tomorrow  ;D

Might I just step in and help those afraid to detect using an E-trac minelab detector for small gold.
Having conducted a test that some might be aware of that showed people being unable to pick up some iron age gold.
This was using the E-trac comparing with a shadow mask 1+.
The shadow blew the E-trac away but remember that we are talking about a 1 target.
Well using the deep on  and fast off  and noise cancel channels (5,6,7,8,9,10,11) Were able to pick up the gold.
Using channels 1,2,3,4 the gold could not be picked up.

Channel 10 seemed to produce the best solid signal and I continued to use this and found a lovely hammered farthing later in the day on a DW rally in Hereford (potato farm)
Many people would discriminate against gold as the low blat is not unlike unwanted junk.
In order to find the smallest gold you must be able to open up your machine using only 1 bar iron on maximum.

Each machine has a slightly different harmonic frequency so individual testing should be conducted to get best results.
Also understand that electrical interference will affect greatly how any machine reacts.

Good luck gold hunting everyone.

Hi Richard,
Thanks for the info, a little over my head, but very interesting.
Must try it out tomorrow  ???

check out the american forums,they tend to use channel 10 or 11 for thin gold.i think i saw it on findmall treasure forum a long time ago

My best gold with the E-Trac is a hammered Henry Vi quarter noble. ;D
Is that small enough? ::)

Well Richard has muddied the water slightly by saying that the Etrac found the B A gold in the higher channels, but anyone who has witnessed how humbling this piece of gold is on 99% of top end machines, will I think realise that there is far more going on with it than just it's gold content/size and that the shape is doing some sort of Bronze Age stealth technology.
Well first you have got to realise that in metallic (signal) terms there is absolutely nothing special about gold and as I've said, silver and copper are both far better conductors and are therefore easier to find. And we are discussing "small" gold here so we are never going to get a great response from a normal consumer VLF machine.
The few VLF machines that are made for gold prospecting, run at frequencies above 60 kHz. These follow the laws of physics which are that the higher the frequency the more sensitive it is to the slightest change in the returning signal.
So yes the higher frequency on the Explorers is located at the lower noise channels, no 1 being just over 16 kHz (11 is 12.5kHz) and although only slight there is or should be an advantage in locating smaller items in the lower noise channels. ;)

And no there is nothing small about any gold coin  :-\

If you dig all your lead and foil then you won't miss much ;)

This has been posted before over the years but theres always a few folks who have not read it. ;) Jerry.