"Jon Anderson" wrote

Cheap detectors are find for finding lost rings and coins at the local
playground, but really are next to useless for anything approaching
serious work.

Jon

You got that mostly right. Doing homework and establishing the age of a
site is a good practice. Setting search grids is good. Doing a site
examination for purple glass, square nails, potsherds, etc, is good, too.
Digging up everything is good. Learning how to use the discriminator
feature is good. Learning how to use the ground balance is good.

Just learning how to use the detector you have is good. Most people do not
spend enough time to learn their detector, have their controls set
improperly, move through an area too fast, get discouraged too easily, and
give up too soon. Whenever I am in an area of purple glass, I search
thoroughly in grids, and dig up most everything. If I am in a hurry, I turn
up the discriminator, and silver, copper, and gold coins will stay. But you
will lose nickels and 14k gold.At high discriminator settings, lead, brass,
and a few other unwanted things will stay. Most big chunks of iron will
give a loud but slightly broken signal. You just have to know your machine
intimately from using it for about 500 hours or so.

But, generally, when searching in a 100+ year old area, it is good to take
time and dig everything with low settings, as even some small buttons,
jewelry, tokens, coins, jewelry, gold nuggets, and other things can be quite
valuable, or just historically interesting. Deep items like the jar of
dollars will not appear at all with settings that are too high. I'd rather
search all day in a 100+ year old area and find nothing than go to the park
and find a hundred coins. But I did find an English two penny coin once at
a park that was worth $200. Some kid brought it to the park and lost it
under the swing set.

Metal detectors are cool, don't take up much room, and you will always pass
lots of abandoned sites where you always wonder what you might find. Lots
of people are very agreeable to letting you look on their land, and will
even direct you to places where buildings once stood.

Steve

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