Park Hunt Ratio

Did a quick after work 2 hour local park hunt this evening. Not a park where I would expect old coins, but certainly capable of producing the occasional Wheatie or Silver. So here is my question. When (if) you hit a local park......what do you think the typical ratio is for quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. My CZ-3D score tonight was a total of 46 coins.

2 quarters = 4.3%
2 dimes = 4.3%
0 nickels = 0%
36 clad pennies = 78.3%
6 copper pennies = 13.0%
(pennies therefore account for 91.3% of the total)
no Wheaties or Silver tonight

It might be interesting to track the ratio of copper to clad pennies since it seems more and more folks are keeping the copper. In my case copper pennies comprised 14.2% of the total pennies found.

Statistics are interesting to work with and I certainly need many more hunts to establish a credible ratio. Tom has done a great job explaining percent ratios in his beach finds. Just thought it would be interesting to see if we can establish a similar ratio for our local "active" parks. Any guess on what your ratios are like?

My park quarter ratio is about 15% & dimes approx 20%.

There is a tremendous amount of things that can change those figures. Our club had a year long clad and coins competition where we had to keep track of our finds. Man i wished i would have kept that data. Its an eye opener and can really be used to adjust your hunting habits. Try it for a month.... you will be surprised. While doing that save your pocket change and check the ratio there as well. Think it will be about the same?? There may well be a correlation between what we find and what we carry.

Dew

First let me say I can understand how individuals could be interested in percentages as I counted my first 2,000 coins. Seems to me too many factors to dial in to come up with any accurate analysis even if one only hunts several locals parks not alone many thousdands from 50 States. I will interject over the years seems to be a lot more quarters than 20 years ago and try to stay away from pennies if I can as one quarter is equal to 25 bends and digs and would rather spend the time looking for larger denomination coins.Again whatever works and certainly two schools of thought on the pennies as many valuables will come in as a penny and those that investigate come up with the goodies...

FB, This is very interesting. I wonder what you or anyone with enough overall knowledge could ascertain from your finds ratio?

One of the first things that comes to mind is coil frequency, being that the higher frequency detectors are better on low conductors and vice versa.

I would venture to guess that with enough of this data, it would be easy to ascertain what freq. detector one was using and possibly even where a given detectorist might be detecting........interesting if finds correspond to a given model across the board in diff. parts of the country..or if
they did not....would that correspond to a given anomaly, ie (EMI) , or a problem with the detector , should the results veer to far from the norm.

It has been said that google keeps every search from every search engine query indefinitely.........makes one wonder just what IS known about all of us..............." Data Its Not Just for Breakfast Anymore" ...............


Tri



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/22/2011 01:44PM by Tri.

Tri.....all good comments. I am approaching the question from my personal belief that Statistics Don't Lie. Statistical analysis based on good data, and good data reduction techniques leads to some very interesting conclusions. You make excellent points regarding different soils, EMI fields, coils, talent of the operator etc. But a large "sampling" of data always normalizes an answer. Just ask you friendly insurance man when he thinks you are going to die.......(believe me, he makes more money than he loses knowing the answer based on statistics.) Call up your friendly State Lottery office ...or visit Vegas...they know the same answers...and not a one of them is paying out more than they are receiving. The point to all of this is that IF we had enough data (or even our own personal data) we would be able to draw conclusions that over time would play out to be typical expectations when we go into the field.

Tom has those stats nailed for the beach...and I know he has some stats in his back pocket for inland hunting as well. For example.....for every X number of clad pennies you find, you will find Y number of copper pennies and Z number of Indians, etc. etc. It's just the engineer in me playing with numbers and hoping to use them to my advantage and having a little fun at it while I do.

Bob,

Here in my area the main criteria is whether the beach or park has parking meters. The people have to carry quarters to fed the meters so a lot of them are lost. Another factor is some areas (Clearwater Beach) have a high number of wealthy residents so the penny and nickel count seems to be much lower. It seems that without the meters and outside of Fanatasy Land the count would parallel yours. One of the club members working Clearwater Beach a couple of years ago found a gold coin that was probably a tourists pocket trophy. At todays prices kinda foolish carrying one around. This coin was deep enough to lead one to believe that it had been there for a while. Unfortunately that member wasn't me!!!

Suncoast Wally

Nearly 40 years of detecting.....and my ratios for inland dirt are:

For every 5-1/2 copper pennies = 1 clad dime
For every 5-1/2 late wheat pennies = 1 silver Roosevelt
For every 5-1/2 early wheat pennies = 1 Mercury dime
For every 5-1/2 late Indian Heads = 1 Barber
For every 5-1/2 mid-year Indian = 1 Seated

It has been a very large (collective) overall aggregate data-point that has given this resultant. Yes,,,,, there are times when I may have a day whereby I find 27 wheats and no silvers. Then.....one of my next hunts...........I walk away with 4 silvers and 1 wheat.

Due to nickels being one of the hardest targets to PROPERLY ID........it's ratio is 'skewed'. The CZ-3D.........by far............is the best (with proper ID) 'nickel' hunter in the industry; yet, is not perfect.

I do not have enough collected data about quarters (or half dollars).......as they are rare to find. Yes, I have plenty of them.