Posted by lytle78 on 3/22/2008, 12:04 am, in reply to "PI - iron mask and "orphan" silver"
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Thanks for the responses to my original post.
You have pointed out good reasons why deep silver in parks, etc. may be practically UNRECOVERABLE even if new technology makes it detectable – due to the depth of the targets or the need to dig everything: So no “silver rush” in parks, schoolyards, etc. due to the difficulties of deep target recovery.
There is another possible “silver rush” scenario however which does not involve deep targets or “dig it all”.
The key question – Is the shallow target masking effect Dankowski talks about real and common enough to suggest that there is lots of not so very deep undetected silver coinage around?
If so - is there anything about the way a PI operates vs. a VLF motion detector which makes it more capable of detecting high conductive targets which are masked by small junk at shallow depths?
The main thrust of the Dankowski article is that relatively shallow coins (within detectable range) are masked by small or very small bits of metallic junk. The masking targets are out of detection range of a VLF due to their small size or rejected by the detector’s minimum discrimination setting. This “shallow target masking” causes the good target which is OTHERWISE IN RANGE to return no signal. Even "dig everything" wouldn't help because no target is heard.
In his ball diamond test, he recovered 39 coins with the SD2200, MOSTLY WITHIN RANGE OF HIS CZ6A after “sanitizing” it with his CZ6A and checking it with an Excalibur. This, of course, was a dig it all operation and there were also over 1100 pieces of junk recovered.
The question then is whether a discriminating PI could inform you that you were dealing with something other than just shallow junk. It would have to detect the coin which masked by the iron or foil or birdshot.
Another issue is whether you could deal with the information you get on all the tiny bits of iron, etc which are detected in the process without having your brain scrambled by too much information.
A third issue is that without a target depth indication, you would detect to great depth and you’re back to digging those labor intensive - and socially or legally unacceptable deep holes.
Rick K.
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