My grade school was built in the early 1940s. One day, one of the classmate friends of mine (3rd or 4th grade?) had seen a man with a metal detector out in the grass during the weekend. This would have been about 1972 or so. The kid watched the man dig a few coins and got interested. He went home and begged his dad for a metal detector for his birthday. His dad got him some sort of Heathkit type BFO. And believe it or not, it could actually find coins (albeit to perhaps only 3" deep, with no form of discrimination). I followed that kid around one day, saw him dig a few coins, and I was hooked.
I too went home and begged my dad for a detector for Christmas. This would have been about 1973 or '74. When I'd have been about 12 or 13 yr. old. My dad got me a $19.00 toy store cheap plastic piece of junk, which had a red light that came on for metal. It could only get a coin if you pressed the coin to the bottom of the coil. And realistically, could only find stuff that was horseshoe sized or butterknife sized objects.
Needless to say, I lost interest. Flash forward about a year later, 7th or 8th grade (1975-ish), I had a friend in Jr. High school who had a Compass 77b. I followed him around . I immediately realized that the toy store junk I'd had was inferior, because this 77b was effortlessly getting coins 4 and 5" deep. A typical day with this friend in the older school yards of our town might net a buck in clad, a few wheaties, a buffalo, and an occasional merc.
My interest was renewed. Went out and found a used Whites 66TR. Which was circa 1970 to '73-ish. And it was capable of finding individual coins (but not as good as the 77b was). Within a year or two, it became apparent to us that we needed the new-fangled discriminators hitting the market. So I got a Garrett Groundhog. But within a year or so, it became apparent that the 6000D's where kicking our b*tts, so we evolved to motion discriminators (ADS II, Red Baron, 6000 D, etc....). Within a year or two, it became apparent that TID (Teknetics, and 6000D series III) was all the rage. We learned about beach storm erosion, demolition sites, etc....
And so on, and so forth, to the present evolution of tech. So I guess this puts me at about 43-ish years in the hobby.
) order this detector which like about all of them back then was a BFO one. I don't remember what all I found if anything I do know it beep at everything
Now it was many years later since I was in service and all and move around a lot that the bug bit me again this was around 1995 so I started again with a RS detector and since then I have had many detectors buy one sell it buy another on and on the feeling is still there after so many years.
