On a recent episode of The Minelab show, Gold Digger Dave presented us with a great and simple way to hunt for gold coins, suitable for both the Equinox 600 and 800.
For the beginners or those with the 600, this is a great was to get used to your machine whilst digging mainly good targets, and in the right spot, a great way to win back the cost of your machine quickly!
Click here to see Gold Digger Dave stepping us through this setup.
Now, for those that are more acquainted with your Equinox 800 and want to find some other valuable targets as well as the gold coins easily, we present some more advanced settings. This program is great for highlighting the gold coins, while giving a distinctly different sound over 1c and 2c coins and bottle caps that frequently come close to gold coins in their target ID numbers. These settings will also allow you to still find all pre-decimal coins (except post 1946 3pence) as well as large gold rings and silver jewellery.
The way these settings work are by changing where the tone regions begin and end, creating a very small tone window for targets 20-22 (gold coins), and instead of discriminating out the lower target ID numbers, we are going to simply silence them. This allows us to still see target ID’s 19 ‘and below without having to hear them. This is useful for keeping an eye on how much trash is in an area, alerting us to possible areas where people sit or congregate.
For the small tone window of ID’s 20-22, we will then change the pitch to the highest as well as the volume to maximum. The next 2 tone windows from 23 and up, we will set the pitch a little lower and have the volume set a little lower too, thus really making our gold coins (20-22) really jump out!
To distinguish the 1c and 2c coins (and bottle caps), when a high tone is heard, sweep over the target repeatedly. If we get a silence and high tone with each sweep- 19-20-19-20, it is likely a 1c coin. If we hear a high tone and lower tone- 22-23-22-23 , it is likely a bottle to. If it is a solid high tone with each sweep- it is 99.9% a $1 or $2 coin!
The next problem we encounter is the pesky squished soft drink can. These will usually give us a solid high tone and ID of 20-22. To distinguish them, there are 2 methods. Firstly when you hear the solid repeatable high tone, begin raising the coil above the target as you sweep. If your hearing it say 30cm above the ground or higher- it will be a can (or other large trash target). This will only work for shallow ones though. If the signal disappears at less than 30cm it could be a coin or a deep can, so we can work that out by pressing the pinpoint button and slowly going over the target. If it’s a short, sharp response- we have a coin! If its longer and broader- it’s a can!
These setting work extremely well with the 15” coil for open areas, and allow you to cover huge amounts of ground very quickly. If you are working a sports field (or somewhere you don’t want to dig plugs) we can also reduce the sensitivity down to 4-5 to help us focus on just the shallow targets we can retrieve with our Daves decksaver or Tyger coin popper tool.
Anyway, I hope you find both of these programs helpful!
Good luck and happy digging!
