How to Hunt for Rings With a Metal Detector

Concentrate your metal detecting in places that people are most likely to lose a ring. The best location is the beach, where hands are slippery with sunscreen, fingers shrink in contact with cold water and people are playing games. All lead to lost rings. Schools, sports fields and parks are also good locations for finding lost gold and silver rings which slip off fingers during activities.

Test rings of different types under your metal detector's coil so you will recognize their signals. Metal detectors react differently depending on metal conductivity. Gold is a low conductive metal, so gold rings give a low signal similar to an aluminum pulltab. Silver has higher conductivity, so silver rings give a signal like a large silver coin.

The detector's discrimination control tunes out metals with low conductivity. This is useful in a manicured lawn area like a ballfield where you may not want to dig low-conductive iron nails and pieces of aluminum foil. Using discrimination to eliminate aluminum trash could eliminate some small gold targets, so use it carefully when hunting for rings.

Purchase a metal detector that works in water if you intend to hunt beaches or lakes. Rings are found in the dry beach sand, but the most productive area is in shallow water. When your ring comes off in cold water, you don't realize it until later. By then the ring is under a few feet of water and may have already disappeared under the sand. Use minimum discrimination when hunting at the beach since digging all targets is easy in sand, and there is a good chance to find gold and silver rings.