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It has been a while since posting a find as work has kept me busy. I was out today to a local baseball field where I have found a few other silver dimes on the outfield in left field. These two came out along the outfield fence line on the first base side about 8 feet from the fence. I was using the 10x5 trying to pick through after cleaning the area with the Deus II a month or so back. They were about a foot deep with bouncing TIDs down to around 24 and up to about 35. I knew the second one was silver dime as it sound and acted just like the other one. The large iron in the pics came out of the same area during the previous cleaning process. I recall someone on this forum found a weight on the beach a while back. Well, this is about as strange to find one on a ballfield. Equinox, Park 1, all metal, 5 recovery, 50 tones

20 on the deep ones, 26 0n the shallow and 22 to 24 mid-range. But I went to the closet and pulled out my Mystery Master Classic. Who will reign supreme? Well, the "Iron Chef" of course. Bon apatite.

I haven’t posted much of anything for the past month or so. However I did take a trip to upstate NY last month to visit my sister. I found out her old farmhouse was built in 1785. I had detected it about 5 years ago while I still had my very first detector, a FisherF70. Back then I found a good bit of clad, a few wheaties, but no silver or anything really old. This time I took the D2 and got a few decent finds, but nothing really exciting. Since that time with the f70, they’ve moved a lot of ground around as they are remodeling the house and yard. This time a did get a silver though, a really nice 1945 war nickel. I also got a big copper that’s devoid of any markings because it’s so toasted. I’m pretty sure though that it’s a large cent because it’s the exact same size as the only other large cent that I’ve found. In the pic it’s the one without the hole in it. I also found a nice musket ball that must have been dropped before it was fired because of its intact sprue. It measures around .630 in diameter, so maybe that’s a .69 caliber with the patch? I’ll have to get a pic of it. After coming back to NC after the NY trip I hit three mercs at two different sites. One was a park that’s about 25 minutes away that I had yet to detect with the deus. I’ve pounded that place with the nox and have pulled over 30 silvers out of there. On my first trip there with the deus I got two mercs. The other merc came from a site that I had been to two previous times with the deus. These silvers bring me to 27 for the year.

Been home a month already, and as you all know things don't stop happening just because you're away. Besides catching up from falling behind domestic tasks, it also takes a while to get back in the habit of reading and posting. But I need to write my experiences down before I forget even more of what happened. I'll break it into a few posts to hopefully minimize the yawns (yours and mine). In summary I spent 27 days (26 nights) away from home, leaving on the 31st of May. Here's the Outline of the trip (not including days spent merely driving): 0) 3 days in Colorado at my sister's home, with one day spent hunting an early 20th Century homestead permission of hers (unfortunately my nemesis -- regraded/backfilled property -- led to zero finds), and one morning with Denver's Eureka Treasure Hunting Club in a city park (that was already reported by Jeff McClendon and me here). 1) 4.5 days in NW Nevada, first 3 with Steve (the one person here I don't need to specify last name nor site username 😄) and Steve (Condor). For those familiar with that area we were near the Stone House and Sawtooth. After they left I spent one night alone and then was surprised when another DP member poster drove up in his VW Beetle(!) -- Andy (Abenson) for the last day or so. 2) 7 days in NE Nevada at Monte Berry's "Welcome to the Hunt Outing" (WTHO) #14 ghost town detecting get-together with 12-14 like-minded people. 3) 3.5 days at 10.5 kft (3.2 km) altitude in the Colorado Rockies at an 1860's ghost town site with my sister and her partner. I don't know which is more satisfying -- actual detecting or spending the evenings around the fire discussing our pasttime with such great people whose company I was fortunate enough to share. No less than four of my comrades has 45 or more years of detecting experience (and accompanying stories) and you can count on me to ask questions on that until the fire was low and we needed to get some shuteye for the next day's efforts. Several more had their silver anniversary (25 year) pins as well. A few stats for those who may be curious: 4325 miles (29.9 mpg and $658 of petrol), 13 nights sleeping in my vehicle and 7 nights in motels (other 6 at my sister's house), ~$1600 for the entire trip, including food and lodging (but not counting cost of batteries 😁). Only needed to put the Jeep Compass Trailhawk into 4WD twice and one of those was following Condor's pickup through a deep gully/wash. (Was he trying to lose me? ) I should say how many hours I spent actually swinging a detector but I haven't added it up. Mostly because of my age but also dependent upon the heat, 8 hours is a long day and sometimes (when I'm arriving or packing up to leave) it's less than half that. BTW, on the way home I stopped at a couple roadside rest areas (the old kind on 2 lane roads, not the modern Interstate kind) to finish of the detecting time fix for the trip. I'm really bad at remembering to take photos, but here are a couple. The first is in NW Nevada which was meant as a joke to a friend who predicted I would be abducted by aliens (you know, Skinwalker Ranch, Blind Flog Ranch,... although those are in NE Utah). Second one some of you will recognize because of the aspen trees, tree line,... from high in the Rockies. You may notice I try not to show enough detail that you'll figure out our secret locations. I'll stop for now and go into more detail on the detecting sites (and finds) in the next installment.

Spent three hours at an 1875 property in eastern Mass. Apparently virgin ground. I, (well, "we", as the home owner was with me every step of the way 🙂) found eight silvers, two buffalo nickels, 19 wheats '36 – '57, and assorted odds and ends. I'll be heading back there soon.

Got all my stuff cleaned up today from my camping trip in NC. Found some interesting things. Tumbled all the coins, put away the 3 Hot Wheels style vehicles and musket ball I dug. 168 coins, only keeping 5. $15.73 going in the coin bucket. Only keeping one of the .35 Remington shells and the Brass Fossil key. Brass or gold bead on top, and the silver wave toe ring. Keepers are 2 IHP's, a 1926 wheat and a 1946 wheat, and one Canadian penny. Tumbled the medal with the pennies and it turns out to possibly be a 1607 Jamestown commemorative badge from the Jamestown Exposition of 1907. One of the parts appears to have a ship on it, maybe 3. The top piece clearly reads "1607", it was about the only thing happening in America we know of that year. 🤣 I'll probably contact someone in Jamestown and let them know I found this medal. Can't find one like it on the Internet. Last picture I took there before leaving the next morning. 🙂

I sorta gave up on this park couple years ago. It used to be a Clad Basket, than really started to go down hill. Finished up a site early today and had some time left so slipped in to see what's up. Started at the outdoor basketball court and never left. Coin after coin, so many started Cherry picking. I had the Pro fitted with the 8x5 and it really picked threw the trash. Was hoping for maybe a ring in there but not today. For the day $11.15 for 93 coins. That ole machine should have been smoking. As for me, wife had a dandy meal made, couple of pain pills, and 2 fingers of Rum. I'm out of here.

Dug this find at the old park on Sunday. I.D. at 74, 9-10 inches deep with the Deus 2. Anyone know what it is. What kind of metal is it. Thanks

Returned to one of my beat up sports field. Think I said somewhere it's getting hard to crack 20 coins (Clad) out of there. Started real slow ,couple of trash tickets a dime than. I got a 28-29 signal using 18 frec. Dug the plug and like a deck of cards 4 quarters 3 dimes sandwiched together. That's 7 coins from a 19 coin day. They been lost for a while, I'm sure I missed them at some time or other. Maybe I just came from a different direction, anyway they been rescued. Using the Mix mode about 90% of the time. Switched to the Big Coil cause lots of ground and it paid off. $2.98 for the hunt, not much but a lot for this site.

It rang up a very strong 99 on the Deus II because it was snuggled into the grass just below the first 1/8" of soil on a baseball field. I live in the Tampa area, so it makes sense to be here. I think it's aluminum, but it seems even too light for that. 🤔 Fun to find, but sure wish it had more density!

I found a 1952 wheat cent today , It was masked by the sod stake, I could not hear the penny until I removed the sod stake , then i heard it loud and clear . today we have many sod stakes that keep us from hearing God , and one of them is the theory of evolution, remove it and you will hear God clearly. if you get my pun.

Hunting’s been slow lately. I don’t mean not being able to get out and detect, but just that the finds have been slow and insignificant. To spice it up a bit I took my daughters to a band concert at the high school on Thursday. While they were watching the concert I detected an area of the school grounds that I hadn’t detected before. (A little background on this school: It was built in 1960 and on a previous hunt I got two silver dimes. However on previous hunts it was the amount of clad that made it fun. On one hunt last year I got $30.03 and on another $18.15 plus the ‘59 and ‘64 rosies mentioned above.) I got on some clad right away and ended up with $7.97 in a little less than two hours. Today I went back to the same school and hit the same area as I did Thursday plus other grassy areas. Today’s total was $14.63 in clad plus a surprise! About halfway through the hunt I dug up what I thought was a dime but on closer examination it was a 1943 Swedish 25 ore coin which is 40% silver. I’m not a big clad hunter like some guys, but when things are slow it sure puts the fun factor back in detecting!

So, I have been MIA to detecting for the past 2 weeks, as I had my second date with Covid. 🙄 She visits me every 2 years and this time was no fun as well. 😄. A buddy of mine wanted to do an E Trac hunt, so I met him at a church built in the 1940’s but on a very old piece of land. I also brought the Equinox 800 and the GPX 5000. I started the hunt with the E Trac and a 13” Ultimate coil (that I just purchased here recently). It took me a bit to remember how to use it in this kind of EMI setting, but it worked very well finding me an 1852 Large cent at around 9”. I ran it for about 2 hours and found some memorials and a couple of wheats. I decided to switch and try the Equinox. Now the selling point of the Equinox is its multi-frequency technology, so I wasn’t interested in hunting with the 20 or 40 Khz frequencies, as I was looking for deep silver. The Equinox didn’t fare well with the EMI, so off to the car trunk it went. I then pulled out the GPX with a Detech 11” DD coil. It was noisy, but bearable as I ran it with very mild settings. The last 2 hours of the hunt were the most fun as I could almost run with the GPX and just bang out coin after coin, all around the 6” mark. This section I was doing had almost no trash or iron, just coins. There wasn’t a pull tab to be found, and besides some modern clad, every cent there was a wheat cent. So, the GPX found both silvers and a lot of wheats including a decent 1921. It was a ton of fun and I was just glad to get out and hunt after sitting home for all those days.

It keeps raining here. Started back to work and then more rain. And snow. And rain. It let up this afternoon so I continued to dig up the yard. It's one big target. Here are a few finds from the last week. I'm digging up just about everything just to eliminate target sounds. And that's why I found the silver button. Corroded iron on the back so it was a goofy signal. I'm surprised that we haven't found any older coins. A penny from 1918 but everything else is 50's up. House was built in 29.

April was a fair month for me. I was able to get access to a private boarding school which operated from 1906 until 1988 and sat on 50 acres. While it wouldn't have seen lots of commerce, and while jewelry wasn't part of the environment, I still had high hopes. I know the student body was quite small until the 20s. In the end, I managed 5 silver dimes, 4 war nickels, a buff, and 20+ wheat pennies. Also found quite a lot of clad (and very few zincolns - yeah!). Lots of keys from the old dorms. It was better than most locations I hunt, and I'm sure still has a few more out there. It became clear that when new facilities were built in the 50s and 60s, lots of dirt was moved around an much of the original turf has been buried under a foot or more of fill. You could easily tell original ground from the fill when cutting plugs. At the start of May, I spent one entire day working tot lots in schools I'd ignored since the start of the pandemic. Found several nice gold items, one of which I have hopes of returning. Also found a small mountain of bling and clad. I used a mix of my Deus with the 9" X35 coil and a derivation of the hot program, and my V3i with the 10" DD coil and my custom deep program at the old school. The class ring was found with my MX Sport and 7"DD. It was a very wet April (and now May) out West. Hoping to get some warmth soon! Zincoln

When I don’t feel like driving anywhere I usually go up the hill in the woods by my house. This property is owned by the company I work for so I have free reign of it. Not too long ago I was up there and besides headstamps and bullets I found a harmonica reed. So yesterday I headed up there and found an area where I was getting a lot of iron signals. First thing I dug was an old rusty handsaw blade. Then I found what I think is an iron stirrup. Not sure if that’s what it is, but maybe someone here can give a positive ID. Then I started finding headstamps including only my second 10 gauge headstamp. As I worked my way up a small branch, I noticed a rock spring well! I was detecting as I walked towards it and got a nice sweet high tone well using sensitive FT. It rang up 91-93 and I just knew it was going to be a silver dime. I was hoping for a barber, but it was a ‘34 merc. I rescanned that hole and got a another exact same signal about a foot away and out pops a ‘24 merc! I’m so happy I found this spot because I have another place close to home to go. BTW, there’s another old spring with similar rock work that is closer to my house. I’ve pounded that one and got I think five silvers. Although the rock work is similar the one close to the house uses mortar but the one up the hill looks to be dry stacked.

Ideally I would love to share all my finds. In 10 years I’ve found a lot of nice things, and even some rare and valuable things. Inevitably once I post rare and valuable historical items I come under local pressure to donate them with the argument that “history belongs to us all.” There’s a part of me that agrees with that statement. There’s another part of me that thinks history belongs to those who seek it. I put in the work to seek it out and retrieve it, and I should be able to be the one to share it until I choose to pass it on how I see fit. We share our finds in part to share history with others in our own way. We become attached to those items and proudly display them. The last thing many of us want are entities laying claim to our finds, guilt tripping us or suggesting that it now belongs to everyone, and keeping it is somehow wrong. Yet this has happened to me enough times (never here) that I feel burned for sharing anything. I just wonder if any of you have had the same experience. It’s a kind of catch 22 where both arguments have merit. Regardless, I follow the law. There’s no crime here in holding on a valuable historical find. If it answers some kind of important question or fills in an important gap, then I’d err more on the side that it belongs to everyone. Either way we should have some time to enjoy the spoils. That’s my thought for the day.

I enjoyed the day detecting today. I didn't find much but it was fine with me. It was great just getting out doing something. We were in a big field behind an elementary school. It was all damp clay. My buddy thought it had city road dirt dropped on it years ago. In the past I have found some Indian Head pennies, Buffalo nickels, V nickels and few wheat pennies. Not a lot and they are spread over a large area. I started today with the Legend and got the buckle and a couple coins and switched to the Gold Kruzer w/ 5x9.5dd coil. I was enjoying the Gold Kruzer relic hunting. I got the square nail with it. The Gold Kruzer hits iron relics very well which I like. Not many detectors can do that well and not many people like there detector hitting iron relics. The Tejon w/ a concentric was also very good hitting iron relics. I thought it was just analog detectors that could hit iron relics well with nails disc'd out. But I'm wrong the Gold Kruzer hits the iron relics. I think it the large range on the Gold Kruzer. Iron disc out at 22 and foil is at 48. That is a large range. I think that's why it works so well for gold nuggets and for iron relics. I enjoy digging iron relics. I suppose it's because I live in northern Michigan and it's a tougher area to find great stuff. That's why I'm really happy with the square nail lol. I consider that a great find for me. I was happy when I dug it up lol.

…over something copper? Now that Spring has arrived, the park fields I hunt are coming alive. My last few excursions, I’ve noticed that when I get a signal under a particularly luxurious weed or tuft of grass, there’s usually a penny or old clad coin tangled up in the roots. I see they sell copper fertilizers. So it makes sense. Now if there was only a weed that needed trace amounts of silver or gold to thrive, I’d be on to something!

Went back to the park on the beach again. It's 2 miles from my house. Today I found a 1943 silver war nickel and a nicely mushroomed 22 lead using the Xp Orx. There is no foil and I only dug 1 pulltab on the beach. It's just a very quiet beach. In the past I have found 2 gold rings on the beach and in the water a gold chain with a gold pendant and 2 silver earrings. For an old boys camp there isn't much there. The campground there is packed all summer. Maybe with covid going down, there will be more swimmers.

It should be getting obvious the GPX 6000 is a great nugget detector. I think it also has great possibilities for beach detecting for jewelry. If somebody was to ask me about relic detecting, I’d tell them the same thing I say about the GPZ 7000 - way too sensitive to tiny ferrous. There is such a thing as too sensitive, and the fact that the GPX 5000 can be set up to miss the tiniest ferrous is actually an advantage. The 6000 will bang hard on the tiniest slivers of ferrous stuff, like almost invisible bits of hair thin wire. However, it might be something those who already have the machine might want to play with, and I have already been learning a few discrimination tricks while beach detecting. Anyone familiar with the Minelab PI detectors knows you get two main tone responses, either a high tone, or a low tone. The simple way to think of what these tones mean is high tone = small or weaker / low conductive targets, and low tone = large or stronger / high conductive targets. The dividing line between the two is not fixed, but varies with the ground balance setting. This means people in lower mineral ground will not get the same results as those in high mineral ground. It’s a complex subject, one I go into great detail at here. The GPX 6000 has one bit of magic for this task. The Normal/Difficult ground setting button. It allows a change in the tone response by simply pressing a button. I do not know the details of Normal vs Difficult, but it changes the timings enough to flip the tone response on many targets. I found I could use it to get four different target classes. Hi tone normal, high tone difficult = Aluminum foil, misc aluminum, wire, most bottle caps, misc small ferrous - low VDI targets. Small gold. Hi tone normal, low tone difficult = Nickel range targets, larger aluminum. Larger gold. Low tone normal, low tone difficult = Zinc penny range targets. Even larger gold. Low tone normal, high tone difficult = Quarters, dimes, copper penny, high VDI targets, nails (larger ferrous). Silver rings. The results closely mimic my coin detecting results with other ground balancing PI detectors, but with a big difference. With all the other machines I had two classes of targets. High tone small stuff, low conductors, and low tone large stuff, high conductors. This new method delivers four target classes, potentially a big step up in discrimination capability with a PI. Ferrous can show up in any of the ranges, just depends on size and type. By digging the fourth category, it’s basically just high conductive coins, and nails. No zinc pennies or aluminum screw caps. Not good if you have lots of nails, but I will be doing this in a park soon, as many parks are not loaded with nails. Others might be, so it’s site specific. The other big caveat I already mentioned. This assumes bad ground, with a ground balance setting to match. The GPX 6000 is automatic and sets its own ground balance. You have no way to set and lock it, unlike a TDI. So I have no idea where the tone shifts will occur in other ground. The good news is that you really don’t need a PI as much in low mineral ground. This might allow people to get more depth on silver coins in really bad ground. The DD coil also skews results, depending on which mode it is in, salt or cancel. In other words folks, I’m looking for people who are willing to experiment, and document. I will be doing more of this and adding new information here as I go. Any adventurous souls, please do the same. There is a definite crude discrimination system included with the GPX 6000, by way of an easy button push. Let’s figure it out, and it may open up some new detecting possibilities. I blew it on my first go at this, as I dropped finds into different pockets of my pouch, to separate them by category for a photo, along with the trash. Then I got home and by habit just dumped it all in my sieve to sort the sand and trash out - oops. So will do better at that next time. Bottom line is I got real good at calling out the coins before digging. There are some real possibilities here for the adventurous types - PI naysayers need not apply! There are also caveats of course, see the following threads for more details. More information in related threads: Minelab GPX 6000 for Coin & Relic Hunting Relic Hunting with the Minelab GPX 6000?

Got out yesterday and today, pictured are both days. Had some fun, tried to say howdy to another coin hunter, but he was having none of that. I won't be sharing my chocolate chip cookie with him I guess.

So, my beach season hunting has officially started. I was going to shoot for two days hunting but a wash out on Thursday made me change some plans. I had reserved Thursday for the GPX 6000 and the 14” DD coil, but had to settle for trying the 6000, 5000 and Equinox on Friday. I changed beach locations too and ended up at the less EMI beach for the day. Started out using the GPX 5000 for clearing out some of the recently deposited junk in an area that has produced silver before. I thought the storms that ripped through the previous day would remove some sand, but it was just the opposite…. sand deposited along 3/4 of the beach (top to bottom). Also, high tide reach to the highest point of the beach, so I could only hunt where the waves did not constantly reach up top. The 5000 did well considering the beach was really sanded in and gave me my first silver of the season – a 1955 Washington quarter. The rest was clad, but for 2 copper pennies. Some junk jewelry, and maybe some iron shot or just a ball bearing, - it measured .75 caliber. The big spoon was found at 20” and I thought I was going to get a beer can or some big iron, so that was a nice surprise. Hunted with the 5000 for 6 hours and decided I cleared enough to try the 6000 in that spot. The EMI was a bit more than usual but not really bad. I’m still not sold on that 14” coil. I tried both ground settings, as well as both Salt mode and EMI mode. I tried auto, auto +, manual (full) and manual (setting 1) and some in between. I just could not get the 6000 to not false on the sand. It was partially damp, as high tide receded a while ago, but with a sensitivity of 1, I would have expected a smooth clean machine. IDK maybe the coil is not good. I did not bring the 11” mono as I really wanted to see if the salt mode would work on the 14” DD. Being a bit disappointed, and after trying all combinations of settings, I called it after around 10 minutes. So, the tide was getting as low as it was going to be, so I hunted for 3 hours with the Equinox and traded my spade for my scoop. I didn’t use the Nox much last season as the 5000 was killing the silver, so the Nox sat idle. But I wanted to see if the heavy waves dropped anything on the beach along with all that sand. There weren’t many targets, so I dug everything to get a feel for all the numbers. The hairpins and tiny wire all read a steady -2, -3. The Nox did well for the short time I used it and if I wasn’t beat from the hunt, I would have stayed in the area that was producing some coins. It was the best machine for the day to give me a chance at some gold. It felt really, really good to get out and just walk the beach. Next week all 3 machines will be at the crazy EMI beach. I will have the mono coin and the DD to see if this beach (dry sand) will be ok for the 14” coil. Can’t wait!!!

Snow mostly melted now, so I took the Whites M6 out to a park field that has been detected a lot. No silver, but these coins have been in the ground for some time. Dimes and copper cents mostly did not favor me today 😞

I was invited to visit a friend out of town and detect on his permission a couple of days ago. This place was a 100 year old boys school which is now privately owned. Since I recently got the Deus II and have only had it out once, I thought this would be a great place to try to learn the language of this machine. Up until now I have only used American and Australian detectors, so this new French one was Greek to me. I loaded up the D2 and took the Equinox as a backup if things went south. The plan was to see how deep the D2 could get in the heavily iron mineralized soil of the sports field that we have pounded for two years. I figured we had cleaned out enough of the shallow coins and trash to possibly hit the silver layer if there is one. I started out in the P1-General program, but quickly swithed over to a modified Park program with 5 Tones and that's when the coins started popping out. I also used the XY screen which I really like as it helped to identify many of the trash targets. Where has this thing been all my detecting life? After a few hours, I was starting to recognize the sounds of quarters, dimes, copper pennies and zinc pennies, most of which were coming from 4-6 inches down and sounding really clear. A few that were in the 7-8 inch range still sounded good, but had more of and iron tone mixed in. I did hear some faint tones deeper down that had 00 TID, but none had any silver tone to them and I passed on those for the time being. The one banging silver tone I did get came from about 7 inches down and turned out to be a belt buckle. Another one I thought was a silver dime for sure at about 4 inches was a 1980 British New Penny. By the end of the day, I was also able to recognize many square tabs, most bottle caps, and many nails with some level of confidence. This is a very trashy field but I was able to skip much of it this time and felt like I wasn't missing something good. So I ended up with a bunch of clad coins (and a 1965 dime... so close!), 19 copper pennies, only one wheatie (1944-S), 17 zincolns, a couple of small buttons of some kind, and a Disney Frozen pendant. And while I didn't reach silver this time out, I feel much more comfortable with the Deus II and I'm starting to learn more of what it is telling me. Here is what I pulled, minus the surface trash.