I’m a numbers/stats geek, so I finally finished the stats menu item which tracks the different types of older coins I’ve found.  I don’t know why I do this, why not?  Sometimes its nice to know how many barber dimes or half cents you’ve found, I guess (and all silver guys track their silver, of course).

Economists like to look at stats and data to see if anything interesting may be in there.  The one thing I’ve always looked at more than anything else is my wheaties to silver ratio.  That had consistently been at 2.5 for a very long time, and whenever it moves a few points either way, it always seems to drop back.

I don’t exactly know what that ratio tells me, but when it seems to get out of whack on the high side, it tells me I’m doing something wrong.  That is because wheaties are slightly bigger than silver dimes, and the copper leaches into the ground, unlike silver, making them easier to detect than silver dimes, ceteris paribus (a fancy economist phrase that in this case means at the same depth as each other and so forth; I love using it cause it makes me sound smart).  So, if the ratio goes high, I’m finding the easier wheaties, and not the harder silvers, which means either slow the swing speed or check channels.  Whether this is bunk or not, who knows?  I have used it in the field and made adjustments and brought more silver dimes in and the ratio in, so maybe it works, maybe its luck, maybe its bias cause I hate digging wheates (except as tells for a zone), so maybe I conscientiously or sub-conscientiously stop digging them.

(As an aside, the ratio I observed using a White’s V3 was north of 4 to 1.  That thing was a wheaties machine, but not so much of a silver one.  I went thru the same zone later with the E-Trac and pulled more silvers and not so many wheaties.  So, I think there is some science here.  Of course, the V3 has so many programming options; I had more patience to write complicated security protocols than figure that thing out, so maybe different programming would have brought it in, who knows?)

But, there’s more.  My ratio now is 2.36, and has pretty much been in that range since about August or so.  And that is a material change, especially given that that is a career number, so the actual ratio since the summer must be much, much lower (I don’t track that), to move the career average that much.

What does that mean?  What has changed?  The obvious thing I can think of is that in the summer I started using the big 13 inch Detech Ultimate.  Maybe hitting a few more silvers now down there with those wheaties I could always see with the pro coil.  Perhaps the best evidence so far that that coil is producing more silver than the pro coil would.

Of course, correlation is not causality (a fancy way to say that the change in numbers doesn’t prove anything; you still have prove the Detech performs better on the same target), but I think this change is stats is suggestive enough for me.  Stats often do point you to the experiment you need to verify the cause (I’m just too lazy to change coils on enough iffy targets to form a large enough sample size to prove this)

Now, one could counter that if you are finding deeper silvers with the the big 13 inch unit, why aren’t you also finding deeper wheaties as well, thus keeping the ratio constant?  Who knows?  While I can pretend to be an economist, I can’t pretend to be a soil scientist (I have no clue why coins sink at all, tho I think its about grass piling up on them and decomposing more than anything else), but one thing I’ve noticed is that there seems to be a point where the dirt gets harder, there is bedrock, the earthworms and grubs don’t seem to live in that lower level to push the coins down, and so forth.  Maybe there is just a limit to where those wheaties are.  Also, our highly mineralized soil could be putting an overall physical limit on the depth, who knows?

Anyway, the stat page is done, and these are the sort of geeky things I think about while out in the field. Maybe its spot on science, maybe total bunk.  Who knows?  But, I do know I like that Detech Ultimate 13.