ACE 250 and Plan of Attack

[alabamadan]

Today I'm going out of town and I'll have about two hours to kill before I have to be somewhere. I plan on stopping by what is basically a ghost town. It's in the middle of the suburbs of Atlanta, but a ghost town none the less. There's an abandoned general store and a football field size vacant lot beside it. Across the street is an old homesite that was torn down last year when the old couple lived there.

Now here I am, with a new ACE 250 and one day's experience. How best to attack this spot? I was thinking of going around the old store in coin mode. Or should I use jewelry mode. I suspect that all metal mode would yeild more hits than I could dig in such a short time.

Could someone give me advice on how to use my ACE 250 to go over what I hope is a honey hole?

 

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[hollowpointred]

with only two hours to hunt i would use some type of discrimination for sure. keep in mind that in jewelry mode you will be digging more junk than in coin mode.(but you will have the possibility of finding those gold rings!) in coin mode you can find coins obviously and it will detect silver(including rings) but not gold. hope that helps.

 

[alabamadan]

Well I went, I MDed, I dug, I came home empty handed. I found a nail, a peice of copper wire, a tack, a screw, a very thin piece of brittle metal, a scrap of iron, and another nail. I had the MD in coin mode with the sensitivity turned down two bars and i was getting hits all over the place.

It takes me forever to find the target in my hole once I'm digging. I spent two hours digging up these seven peices of junk. I need to be able to more efficiently identify coins and then be able to dig them faster. I think my area was a good one to be in after I left the front of the store. Judging by the red clay around the front door, I'm guessing that when the road was graded or something they threw that dirt in the front yard of the store covering the original elevation. The dirt around the side door was black for a good six inches.

I did stumble upon an old four pane window frame in the bushes. I've no idea where it came from as it wouldn't have come from that old store. It wasn't rotten or anything. I'm gonna turn it into something for my house.

So, I drove three hours to find junk. I've got to get better at this...Any suggestions on where and how to practice?

 

[alabamadan]

manual? My manual didn't tell me anything past the basics of how to assemble and turn it on. I'd figured everything like that out before I read it. I think a coin garden is just what I need.

 

[hollowpointred]

dont get too discouraged dan.sometimes thats just the way it goes.especially when you are hunting an older site.there probably isnt a high volume of coins there to begin with(could be hunted out already,coins too deep to detect,ect)....but the potential for something great sure is ....its a tradeoff.try going to a high school or an elementary school.there should be a high volume of clad coins to find and practice on there.then when you are ready, go back to the old,silver producing spots. youre not going to find great stuff every time you go out. its kind of like fishing that way!

 

[Monty]

If you had it on coin mode you should not have been recording hits on ferrous metals such as nails, etc. ?You should only be picking up coins, brass and aluiminum, etc., metals that don't contain iron. ?If you stopped just because you found a nail, you missed the target. ?After you remove the iron based junk, keep looking for the target cause that ain't it! ?It's not unusual for junk to be in the same hole with a good target. ?Your machine has a hard time telling the difference between a nickel and a pull tab, and between a dime and a penny, these are the two icons that will fool you until you have more experience. ?Listen to the tones and match the tones to the icons. ?Read the part of the manual about pinpointing and practice it until you get it right most of the time. ?I have a little more experience than you and just got an ACE to backup my other detector and I am finding it very easy to operate. ?Read my posts on testing the ACE 250, I found out some interesting things unique to ?the ACE. ?Hope it helps.

 

[hollowpointred]

oh.........a couple of things i have noticed about the ace.maybe it will help. when you are detecting and you get a solid bell tone when you sweep over it in one direction,and get a standard tone in the other direction, it usually means its a junk target.also,if your target id is bouncng around and wont lock on to a specific coin,it is usually junk (although both of these things can happen if a coin is sitting in the ground at a weird angle).try sweeping over targets like this from a couple of different directions and see if the detector gets a better read.there also is an excellent post regarding pinpointing somewhere around here but the short version is this.........when you get a target you want to pinpoint, move the coil a few inches to the side and then hold the pinpoint button and slowly sweep over your target.when you have it under your coil,slowly pull the coil back towards you until the upper scale signal drops out.when this happens the target should be right under top of ?the inner coil. try it with a coin on the surface a few times to get the hang of it. once you figure this techniche out,you will be digging those coins in no time.

 

[Monty]

I also noticed that mine bounces around and won't lock if the coin is on the surface. I have just moved a leaf or some blades of grass several times to find a coin staring back at me.

 

[mgdigger]

I just takes time to get the feel of the machine. After about a hundred hours of using the machine you should be able tell from the sound alone what the target is and useing the screen as a back up. In short, 'you need to become one with the machine'.