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What Was Your 1st Detector?


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Built my own BFO detector from scrap ham radio parts in 1967.  It was very sensitive, but lacked ground balance and discrimination.  We did find lots of coins, Civil War and Colonial artifacts, but no gold.  In fact we were looking for lost treasures and never even considered hunting for gold.  Wished we had.  Gerry M. has one of our early experimental models.  Next detector was a U. S. Army mine detector.  It was sensitive, extremely stable and had a beautiful sound and weighed about forty pounds.

Then a Compass followed by an early Fisher.  Now a Troy Shadow X5, two Minelabs and a Gold Bug 2.

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J1962 Detectron then a Metrotech then a step backward with a Whites BFO Goldmaster..

I also build several Little Monster BFOs from the plans in KVMs book The Treasure Hunters Manual # 2.

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First detector (not bought) was one I built in summer of '69 before my junior year in high school -- from scratch based on a design in an electronics magazine.  I wound the coil onto a plywood disc.  The rod was literally a broom handle.  I think it might have detected a manhole cover at 6 inches -- I did say "might have."  A couple years ago I was cleaning out a cabinet and found the control box (still loaded) and stripped out the guts.  Control box is shown in the pic below.  Today whenever I think about noisy response, falsing, drift, EMI, etc. I just have to remind myself of the performance of that one!

A year later I got smarter ("less dumb" is probably more descriptive) and bought and assembled a Heathkit GD-48.  Put a diode in backward, and after little or no debugging, sent it to Michigan to get it repaired.  Likely it took them all of about 15 seconds to troubleshoot.  :laugh:  Found some Wheaties from the teens (probably 1919 and 1910, but didn't take good notes).  My memory says 8 inches deep in mild soil (and ~100 kHz detector!) for one of those, but you know how fish stories increase in exaggeration with the passing of time (45+ years...).  The Northern Indiana football field I found them in is still a municipal property and I have dreams of returning some day with a modern detector.  Only silver was a WWII nickel (aka 'Warnick').  The scaffolding hammer head in the pic below was rusted and badly pitted when dug up at my parents' farmhouse, likely in the ground 30-35 years from when the house was built.  My uncle wire brushed it and put a handle on it.  My mom had it in her toolbox and I inherited in when she passed away.  Yes, I use it.  Brings back a lot of good memories of my mom and her brother.100_0292.thumb.JPG.84315ca389c25c6ed1513b0e95a7755c.JPG

Picture has the broken GD-48 (the plastic in those was really bad -- seen some for sale on e-bay with broken control boxes).  The coil is 10 inches.  Note there is only one knob (sensitivity) -- a true turn-on-and-go detector!

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When I was about 10 I used my Dad's compass TR. and found a few silver coins. So I saved up and bought a whites 6DB vlf and went door to door in Durango Colorado and found mass coinage. A guy by the name of Ron Driscol saw me and took me detecting a bit. Ron moved to Arizona for the gold. I lost touch with him for about 20 years. I got back in touch a few years before he passed. 

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Whites Eagle Spectrum.  25 year old technology and still can run circles around a lot of newer detectors. Stock programs and custom program slots.  VDI display, ferrious and non-ferrious signal graph display, Just about every adjustment can be made.  SAT, SAT speed, Audio discrimination, Mixed mode audio, AC/DC sensitivity, backlighting, auto/manual ground balance, VCO, recovery speed adjust, Iron rejection settings and lots more.  Also, one of the few detectors that can notch out (accept/reject) any individual VDI number from -95 to +95.

Check out my custom display for my detector.

 

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My first was a Garret TR MoneyHunter back in the Mid 70's I believe.  At that time my dad had the Garret BFO

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Bounty Hunter for me ,cost 90 bucks, a lot of money for a poor high school boy in 1972.I seem to recall it could barely sound off on a coin roll at 2 inches. When they invented discrimination and ground balance, a Tek Mark 1 was somehow acquired, best machine I ever owned as a silver producer.

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A detector I built using plans in a popular science magazine. It used a transistor radio as the receiver and the coil was hand wound and connected to a single transistor transmitter. It actually worked. Then I bought a Heath Kit GD-48 metal detector kit. This was in 1968.

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1974 or 75, Jetco Goldstar TR. Then a White's 6000/d when I realized how lousy the Jetco was. I get a chuckle from the irony that I ended up at White's for a while, and now I work at Jetco. Or, what used to be Jetco.

 

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