Dug One Coin Today.... Turned Out To Be..

[maxxkatt]

On 12/6/2021 at 11:49 AM, Steve Herschbach said:

It’s just good hunting skills and a little luck. I’ve done it, and everyone that detects long enough does it. I can go into a park that’s been detected by thousands of people for decades, and bang, make a nice find. It usually gets ascribed to some latest new detector, and the “found good stuff in hunted out ground with new detector” theme is so old and repetitive now as to be a bit of a joke.

I can grab a 20 year old Fisher CZ-5 and go do the same thing. I might put the 5” coil on and head to the trashiest part of a park. Then get down and dirty, hunting hard and careful, the real secret being approach and coil control. Countless targets are masked by adjacent trash if swept from all but a single magic angle, and large coils contribute to this. Careful hunting in trashy areas with small coils and just getting lucky with the right angle and sweep, can almost always pull up another good find in so-called hunted out locations.

An old rule is to hit a good location from eight directions. North to south. South  to north. East to west, west to east. Then same deal with the diagonals, southwest to northeast. This entire concept is about the fact that a coin next to a couple pieces of trash will be masked unless hit with exactly the right sweep from the right direction. By definition these are “iffy” signals, as they will only respond from one direction.

My specialty is hunting hunted out ground. As a nugget hunter, I clean up pulling gold out of ground others walk away from because “there is no gold left.” Frankly, most detectorists are not very good at detecting. Most people simply don’t have the patience for extremely slow, methodical detecting. Coils used and coil control matters more than almost any other single factor in detecting, and is the main reason why coil selection is a number one factor for me in choosing detectors.

This is a rare sport where we give the credit to the tools instead of the players. In almost any sport the person gets the credit. Is a fisherman great because of the pole he uses? Is a skier great because of the skis, or a golfer because of their clubs? Does a great violin make a great musician? Sure, good tools help, but in any endeavor it’s the operator skills that make the tools work, not the other way around. I can make great finds with countless detectors, and people make the mistake of thinking the detector I am using must be what is making it happen. The actuality is detector companies send me detectors to use because I can make even a mediocre machine look good. What is really needed is more focus on detecting skills, and less focus on detectors, to reach the top of the game in metal detecting, just like anything else.

I find what Steve said to be true. But in addition:  “found good stuff in hunted out ground with new detector”

sure sells a lot of new detectors. Just maybe the detector manufacturer's PR machine keeps this theory alive.

 

 

[phrunt]

I think most of us are guilty of saying it at some time, sometimes it is probably just to justify our expensive purchase 🙂

Like everything metal detecting there are variables that make the statement valid though.  A detector more sensitive to small gold will find gold a detector less sensitive to small gold missed no matter how well the ground was hunted out with it.