jordanmills
Senior Member
So I'm not finding anything but recent clad. No old coins, no silver (except a very shallow ring), etc. Can anyone offer advice on what I might be doing wrong or where I should go instead of where I've been going? Here's the long story:
I haven't been doing this for too long, but I think I've been giving it a good shot. I got an "advanced entry level" detector when a landscaper guy lost his truck keys in my yard and it was on sale.
With this Bounty Hunter Land Star, I went over almost all of my yard (except over buried electrical and around the metal fences with overhead power lines). At first, I dug pretty much every signal, and I found some interesting stuff (a chromed plastic pendant, a couple of matchbox cars, a fishing weight, a few dollars in clad - the only coin worth mentioning was a 1968 half dollar). As I got a better feel for it, I tried messing with discrimination and being more selective about targets. I got to where I could reliably identify and pull out quarters and dimes and ignore almost everything else. But the MD does have the limitations you'd expect from an entry level model at its price point and I believe I hit them.
After asking for some advice (and not being able to buy an Equinox 800 on a whim) I bought a Nokta Makro Simplex+. It's pretty different from the BH LS, but I gave it some time and I feel like I have a good handle on it now. It seems to be FAR more capable, and can find targets with better identification (and better indication resolution than ten LCD segments, duh), more depth, and more ways to tune it to particular scenarios and environmental conditions. I've found even less with it, but I'm sure that's mostly because I've made a point of going over the same places with it and pulled most of the targets out with the first detector. I also made sure to dig a variety of targets across the identification spectrum just to experience what it sees first-hand (but I also familiarized myself with posted lists of what IDs it gives for common targets, air-tested, and made sure to keep the ID in mind when digging a target - and everyone else's list is pretty much exactly what I see too).
I'm in Houston, Texas, and live in a house that was built in about 1930, along with most of the neighborhood. I've gone over my entire yard, and my next door neighbor's yard (with permission of course), about an acre of surface area detected between the two. To the knowledge of them and the previous owners of my house, nobody has ever detected their yards (that goes back to the late 1970s or so).
I've also detected a most of one neighborhood park, boy scout house, church yard, elementary school, and part of the other neighborhood park. The swing sets at the parks had plenty of clad, and clad (and lots of can slaw) are scattered around the rest of the parks (including some whole buried old cans). The church yard (built in the 1930s, used for church until about five years ago and now a high school campus) was FULL of modern clad, but nothing at all old (which probably just means that high schoolers play as fast and loose with their pocket change nowadays as I did when I was in high school). Between all of them, the oldest coin I found was a late 1950s penny and everything else is 1965 and later.
After a while, I made sure to research to focusing detecting efforts on places that seemed more likely to have high traffic. For example, I verified which church buildings were present in the 1950s (earliest aerial photos I have) and spent extra time around them and likely paths to them. In one park, the baseball diamond has been in the same place for 90 years, so I gave greater scrutiny to the places with more likely drops (home plate, deck, spectator areas, and outfield). At the other park, the diamond moved some time in the 1960s, so I focused efforts on where those places would have been then. I'm sure some spots have been re-graded (the old whole cans buried eight inches deep would seem to indicate that), but others have not (evidenced by older buildings having ground levels as expected around their foundations).
One site of interest is not near my house, and I don't have a chance to go there often. A family member has a ranch that had a farm on it some time in the 1800s (possibly earlier). We have practically no information on the history of it, but it has rock walls of various ages, and a targeted archaeological dig got lots of artefacts of an indian village that likely traded with earlier settlers (apparently they've found lots of arrowheads, and I've found tons of flint knapping fragments but no arrowheads). I was able to spend a few hours detecting that with the BH LS detector, and found one square nail and a whole lot of rusted barb wire and metal panel trash, but not much else. Identifying building/habitation areas was a higher priority than detecting, but I think I have a few spots to focus on next time I'm there. But the point is that I spent hours detecting one of those spots and found nothing but trash.
So all told, I have a few hundred hours in on this. My finds are a bunch of can slaw, a couple of pieces of iron farm implements, a fishing weight, matchbox cars, one sterling silver ring, and a dozen dollars in modern/clad coins.
So am I doing something wrong that I should be doing differently? Do the detecting gods hate me, and how can I repent for offending them? Should I be looking at other kinds of places (yeah curb strips are on the list)? I'd really like to find some silver coins. I mean a huge cache of gold coins would be nice too, but one or two silvers would be just great if I want to keep to what seems realistic.
I haven't been doing this for too long, but I think I've been giving it a good shot. I got an "advanced entry level" detector when a landscaper guy lost his truck keys in my yard and it was on sale.
With this Bounty Hunter Land Star, I went over almost all of my yard (except over buried electrical and around the metal fences with overhead power lines). At first, I dug pretty much every signal, and I found some interesting stuff (a chromed plastic pendant, a couple of matchbox cars, a fishing weight, a few dollars in clad - the only coin worth mentioning was a 1968 half dollar). As I got a better feel for it, I tried messing with discrimination and being more selective about targets. I got to where I could reliably identify and pull out quarters and dimes and ignore almost everything else. But the MD does have the limitations you'd expect from an entry level model at its price point and I believe I hit them.
After asking for some advice (and not being able to buy an Equinox 800 on a whim) I bought a Nokta Makro Simplex+. It's pretty different from the BH LS, but I gave it some time and I feel like I have a good handle on it now. It seems to be FAR more capable, and can find targets with better identification (and better indication resolution than ten LCD segments, duh), more depth, and more ways to tune it to particular scenarios and environmental conditions. I've found even less with it, but I'm sure that's mostly because I've made a point of going over the same places with it and pulled most of the targets out with the first detector. I also made sure to dig a variety of targets across the identification spectrum just to experience what it sees first-hand (but I also familiarized myself with posted lists of what IDs it gives for common targets, air-tested, and made sure to keep the ID in mind when digging a target - and everyone else's list is pretty much exactly what I see too).
I'm in Houston, Texas, and live in a house that was built in about 1930, along with most of the neighborhood. I've gone over my entire yard, and my next door neighbor's yard (with permission of course), about an acre of surface area detected between the two. To the knowledge of them and the previous owners of my house, nobody has ever detected their yards (that goes back to the late 1970s or so).
I've also detected a most of one neighborhood park, boy scout house, church yard, elementary school, and part of the other neighborhood park. The swing sets at the parks had plenty of clad, and clad (and lots of can slaw) are scattered around the rest of the parks (including some whole buried old cans). The church yard (built in the 1930s, used for church until about five years ago and now a high school campus) was FULL of modern clad, but nothing at all old (which probably just means that high schoolers play as fast and loose with their pocket change nowadays as I did when I was in high school). Between all of them, the oldest coin I found was a late 1950s penny and everything else is 1965 and later.
After a while, I made sure to research to focusing detecting efforts on places that seemed more likely to have high traffic. For example, I verified which church buildings were present in the 1950s (earliest aerial photos I have) and spent extra time around them and likely paths to them. In one park, the baseball diamond has been in the same place for 90 years, so I gave greater scrutiny to the places with more likely drops (home plate, deck, spectator areas, and outfield). At the other park, the diamond moved some time in the 1960s, so I focused efforts on where those places would have been then. I'm sure some spots have been re-graded (the old whole cans buried eight inches deep would seem to indicate that), but others have not (evidenced by older buildings having ground levels as expected around their foundations).
One site of interest is not near my house, and I don't have a chance to go there often. A family member has a ranch that had a farm on it some time in the 1800s (possibly earlier). We have practically no information on the history of it, but it has rock walls of various ages, and a targeted archaeological dig got lots of artefacts of an indian village that likely traded with earlier settlers (apparently they've found lots of arrowheads, and I've found tons of flint knapping fragments but no arrowheads). I was able to spend a few hours detecting that with the BH LS detector, and found one square nail and a whole lot of rusted barb wire and metal panel trash, but not much else. Identifying building/habitation areas was a higher priority than detecting, but I think I have a few spots to focus on next time I'm there. But the point is that I spent hours detecting one of those spots and found nothing but trash.
So all told, I have a few hundred hours in on this. My finds are a bunch of can slaw, a couple of pieces of iron farm implements, a fishing weight, matchbox cars, one sterling silver ring, and a dozen dollars in modern/clad coins.
So am I doing something wrong that I should be doing differently? Do the detecting gods hate me, and how can I repent for offending them? Should I be looking at other kinds of places (yeah curb strips are on the list)? I'd really like to find some silver coins. I mean a huge cache of gold coins would be nice too, but one or two silvers would be just great if I want to keep to what seems realistic.