Metal Detecting With The Garrett Ace 250 by Crawfords MD

The design of modern metal detectors aims to eliminate many of the hassles and disappointments associated with the hobby. These include the noisiness of a machine going off when it scans over top of any piece of metal, no matter how worthless, and an overly sensitive product. Old machines used to get excited about beer bottle tops, but the new ones can determine what type of metal they are looking at.

Not too Sensitive

The Garrett Ace 250 is a relatively quiet machine in the field. It alerts the user when metal is found but without too much feedback, if any, so you can set it to high sensitivity. Its default setting is fairly high already. The major caveat is that you set your metal detecting device correctly before going out.

When you find something, your machine will let out a sound according to the item. Low tones indicate low-value metal (iron, nickel), but higher tones are indicative of higher-value metal (silver, gold). If you remember the electronic game "Simon Says," the tones given off by this machine will put you in mind of that old battery operated game.

This means you can read your machine or just listen to it. If you get a crick in your neck after a few hours of metal detecting just listen and stop watching.

Setting your Machine

What this means is pressing buttons (bright yellow on a decent-sized console here) to indicate which metals to be alerted to and which to omit. Use the "discriminate" button to determine if you want the detector to overlook iron, nickels, pennies, etc., or pick up all metals. Set it to a silver-only setting or customize the setting to find exactly what you want. It is advisable to play around with the buttons a little to get the feel for how much you can do with the Ace and how easy it is to press the wrong button.

Screen Size and Setup

The LCD screen is a good size, if a little dark. Be aware that light will affect your ability to read it and you might want to shade the screen which has space to clearly show what metals you are looking for, the sensitivity setting, battery power, and other features. It shows depth from 2" to 8"+ in 2" increments.

The Package

A Garrett Ace 250 comes with an instructional DVD, 6.5x9" coil, batteries, and headphones plus a pouch for storing treasures. Those are nice extras, though you can probably get a lot out of a Youtube video where instructions are concerned. Once you watch the DVD and use the machine just once, this could be easy and fun to use, but there are a lot of buttons to get accustomed to.

Pricing

As a hobby machine, you had better hope to land on a metal-rich bit of beach because this is not cheap but just bear in mind, the Garret Ace 250 works best on dry sand. By shopping around online you can find the best available price, so do not settle for your usual online shopping site. You could be surprised where the best deals are to be found on new metal detecting machines.

Biography

Crawfords MD has been supplying metal detectors to the community for over 15 years. The business was started by Craig Allison who prides himself on respecting customer needs and providing a high quality of service. If you’re in the market for a range of metal detecting equipment, please visit our site: http://www.crawfordsmd.com/

Gold Auras

Many people say gold does not give off an aura and they’re absolutely right – if the gold is not influenced by an electromagnetic field.

I was sent this photograph of a lady’s gold neck chain she was wearing, taken with a Canon DSLR camera fitted with an infrared filter. Had the chain been placed on a table and photographed in the same way, it would have produced a pretty uninteresting more or less blank picture. But because the gold is being excited by the electromagnetic field produced by the wearer it is emitting infrared radiation that is being picked up by the camera. This is exactly what happens when gold is buried and excited by the Earth’s electromagnetic field, which is a lot stronger.

A graduate scientist explained this process fairly simply to me. Gold, as all substances, is made up of atoms. Atoms consist of a dense positively charged nucleus surrounded by negatively charged electrons, all being held together by electromagnetic force. Under the influence of an electromagnetic field the electrons are excited into an orbit further from the nucleus and then spontaneously return to their normal orbit releasing energy in the form of infrared radiation.

Film for Polaroid Cameras

As many of you will know, with the rapid advancements in digital cameras, Polaroid ran into difficulties and the Dutch factory was sold to the management. The factory, under the name of The Impossible Project, is again producing SX-70 film to a different formula and slightly faster speed. The first of the new film was called PX-70 Color Shade but that has now changed to PX-70 Color Protection. I bought a box of 8 PX-70 Color Shade and tried it on my test site, which only contains a very small amount of gold (1/4 oz) and silver (2 oz). Happily the film has produced an aura, which you can see to the left of centre. This seems to show that it is the SX-70 Single Lens Reflex camera that produces the auras, rather than the film. So if you are buying an SX-70 camera for aura photography, make sure you get the SLR type which views through the lens. The non-SLR or box type has a separate viewfinder. For film and refurbished cameras, start here:

http://shop.the-impossible-project.com/allabout/colorshade/

Gold Coin Find

I was very pleased to receive this aura photograph with the following message: Hello David, I found 13 gold coins at 185cm depth. Thank you so much.

The photo, which led to the find was taken with a Canon DSLR camera with standard lens and infrared filter. The coins, I learned were pre-Roman, weighing 8.4-8.5 grams each so that is equivalent to 110 grams (3.85 ounces Avoirdupois or 3.5 ounces Troy) of gold. This is particularly interesting as it shows the camera is capable of picking up a relatively small amount of gold at 6 feet depth or more.

The finder sold the coins for $20,000!

The Lost Silver Ring

I had a distress call the other day from a guy who had lost his ring in the sea.  Apparently he is a canoeist and was upside down in the water performing an Eskimo roll when his heavy silver ring fell off his finger.  All credit to the man as despite his situation at the time, he did manage to work out where he had lost the ring with some accuracy, it transpired.

I met him the next day at low tide, when he showed me where he thought he had lost the ring.  This was on the sloping part of the beach not far below the high tide line and we thought the ring would have rolled or been washed down on to the flat part of the beach, where stones are dropped and accumulate.  I was using my preferred beach detector, an old Minelab Sovereign XS2A Pro, fitted with a 15 inch WOT coil, which gives good and fast coverage, good discrimination and good depth.  The guy was also searching diligently – eyes only.  We must have spent more than half an hour on this patch before I decided to start again at the loss point, searching up and down the beach from the high tide line, over the pebble patch and a few yards out into the muddy sand.  I figured that if the ring was going to be carried, then this would be in the direction of long-shore drift to the west and spent another half hour searching up and down in that direction.  As I felt I was too far away from the loss spot by then I returned to the loss spot and followed the same procedure in an easterly direction.  After around twenty minutes a sharp signal revealed the ring at two inches deep in the sandy slope, ten yards to the east and five yards above the supposed loss spot.

So I guess the ring had gone more or less straight into the sandy bottom and stayed there.  Had I realised that, I could have found the ring in less than half the time by initially circling the suspected loss spot and once the high tide line had been reached, switching to a ‘U’ pattern sweep from the high tide line, out to sea, under the loss spot and back up to the high tide line on the other side.  Nevertheless, it was one happy bunny who went home with his ring that afternoon.

Treasure Aura Camera and Filter Set-up

I get quite a few questions about filters and camera settings so I have put together a short video on the subject.  You can view it here: http://www.truetreasurebooks.net/treasure-aura-camera-and-filter-set-up

Accidental Treasure Auras

 Auras can be photographed without even trying it seems.  I am grateful to Rich Labate who has given me permission to publish his photograph above.  Using a Nikon L1 pocket digital camera on automatic, with no filter, Rich was just taking a picture of the view across a valley in New Mexico. The resulting picture shows a bright green flash on the hillside – local knowledge says that there is a copper mine or copper deposit under the hill.

This is not an isolated case of auras accidentally appearing on photographs.  I was sent a photo of the site of an Iron Age village in continental Europe, culled from the Internet, which shows what can best be described as a fog patch immediately above the village site.  Similarly, my friend Dave was investigating a treasure site and turned up Google Earth aerial and street view photos of the site, which both showed a patch of isolated fog.  Unfortunately the site turned out to be a scheduled ancient monument so it cannot be investigated without government permission.

The moral of this story is to take a close look at any photographs of possible treasure sites you have, or come across and if you spot anything that looks as if it might be an aura, you could soon be digging up a fortune.