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Another tip for in town. Go aluminum detecting. Gold and aluminum read the same also. Go to anywhere it is easy to dig, like the sand or wood chips around playground equipment, swimming beaches, volleyball courts, etc. Go nugget detecting and by that I mean set it up just like you intend to hunt nuggets, and be sure and use a scoop. You can dig everything (I do) or use a little discrimination and try to dig all non-ferrous. It does not matter really what you find. You are getting practice. Try and find the smallest aluminum you can and as deep as you can. Foil is good. Aluminum pull tabs are held on cans by tiny aluminum rivets. Evil people like to tear the tab off and toss it for people like me to dig up. The little aluminum rivet also gets lost. I actually can find that tiny rivet with a hot detector. If you can do that, you are a nugget hunting pro. If you chose to use a little discrimination to eliminate small steel wire, paper clips, staples and such, try this. Use as little discrimination as possible to reject these items. You can set the Gold Bug Pro to give a low tone on the ferrous and a higher tone on the non-ferrous. For an experiment, still go ahead and dig everything. If you concentrate on faint targets, you will get some low tone ferrous readings that turn out to be foil or other small aluminum items. This happens also when nugget detecting. Tiny non-ferrous items in iron mineralized ground will fool the detector because the amount of iron in the ground overwhelms the tiny non-ferrous signal. This happens on deeper, larger items also. You do this enough and it will teach you that A. discrimination can be helpful in really trashy places but B. never get too dependent on it. It will leave gold in the ground. I was out hunting a "tot lot" just yesterday. Those are playground areas where moms take the tots to play. I dug lots of tiny wire and aluminum. Did this for two hours, nothing "good" except some coins. Had a great time though; detecting just relaxes me. I enjoy the process more than anything and enjoy doing something well. The finds are a bonus. And the tot lots will surprise at times with a ring or an earring. I really believe detectors are like musical instruments. It takes practice to get good with one, and it takes practice to stay good with one. I never stop metal detecting. It is a rare week I do not go detecting at least a couple times, if not more.

Despite all the noise about pulse induction (PI) metal detectors these days I firmly believe that in the United States most beginning and many professional nugget hunters are often better served with a good mid-frequency VLF. For beginners I think it is more important to master the real skills involved in prospecting before investing a ton of money in a metal detector. If you can't find gold with a $700 detector there is little point in investing thousands of dollars in a detector that still probably will not find the person any gold. Perhaps a PI is required in most of Australia but I have seen very few places in the United States where a good VLF will not work very well or at least well enough. Certainly in Alaska that is the case, where low mineral ground and smallish gold is the norm. Even locations where large gold lurks are so loaded with iron junk a PI detector has a hard go of it. It is nearly impossible to convince die-hard PI users to accept this until they experience it for themselves. One of the best detectorists I know has found hundreds of ounces of gold including two nuggets each weighing over a pound, all with a White's MXT. He also has a Minelab GPX 5000 and is very good with it. This last summer we hunted a lot together in junk infested tailing piles. I tended to use my GPX 5000 and he tended to use his MXT. We ran neck and neck for finds, and he detected less and dug way less junk than I. When all the shallow stuff is gone a PI shows its value with extra depth. But in target rich environments, especially ones filled with junk, a good VLF is a worthy choice. Let's set the VLF versus PI thing aside though and accept for the purposes of this article that VLF detectors are still a good choice for many people in the United States. I know for a fact I could own nothing but a VLF and do very well indeed. So what VLF to own? Two detectors stand out in their high operating frequency as dedicated nugget detectors, the Fisher Gold Bug 2 and White's GMT. I could make a great argument for why either of these detectors will eke out gold where other detectors fail and do it consistently enough that a skilled operator would be wise to own either one. However, I think overall a better case can be made that if a person had to own just one VLF detector, a mid-frequency model would be a better choice. There is much more versatility offered plus a better balance of performance on all ground types and all gold sizes than the hot high frequency models. The contenders from the "Big Five" brands? The Fisher Gold Bug Pro (also sold as Teknetics G2), Garrett AT Gold, Minelab X-Terra 705 Gold, Tesoro Lobo SuperTRAQ, and White's MXT. All available for around $700 more or less. This is the choice I personally faced, and the decision took several years of use to settle. What follows is purely personal but I will explain why I ended up where I did. Fisher Gold Bug Pro, Garrett AT Gold, Minelab X-Terra 705 Gold, Tesoro Lobo, White's MXT First up, the White's MXT. Simply a superb detector, and one that has found me pounds of gold. Yet I am just going to go ahead and blow White's off at this point! Why? The weight. I am sorry White's, but at 4.3 pounds the MXT is the heaviest detector in this slug-fest. I love what the detector does, but I am no longer willing to forgive detectors with poor ergonomic factors, weight being the most obvious. In the 21st century, the day and age of the iPhone, poor ergonomics is not acceptable. The MXT needs to lose a pound, plain and simple. So I sold my MXT after one particularly arm wearing day. Now the Tesoro Lobo SuperTRAQ is a great beginners detector in that it is very easy to operate, but it also gets put aside. The detector is locked in ground tracking at all times while in all metal nugget mode. This is great for beginners but I personally find it unacceptable. I almost never use ground tracking systems as they mess with the signals from weak targets. If there was a locked or fixed mode it would be fine. Worse yet, the alternative discriminate mode has a factory pre-set ground balance. Sorry, fail. Just my opinion, but the Lobo is way overdue for an update after 16 years on the market. Garrett is to be commended for finally producing a waterproof detector that does not penalize the owner by weighing a ton and removing all the features. The AT Gold is a miracle in being waterproof and yet fully featured, with even the speaker being waterproof. And only three pounds with batteries! This detector is so wonderful I really do feel bad about taking a pass on it here also. Why? Sadly, the waterproof design also means special o-ring connectors for the coils and headphones. If you do not need the detector to be waterproof they are delicate connectors that collect dirt and require quite a bit of care to not mess up. The coil connection in particular is in a maddening location making it almost impossible to connect coils with bare fingers alone. A special adapter must be purchased if you want to have a choice in headphones. If you want waterproof the AT Gold is an obvious choice but I do not need waterproof for most of my nugget detecting. So down to two models, the Fisher Gold Bug Pro and Minelab X-Terra 705 Gold. Both under the magic 3 pound mark! Both with extremely powerful all metal modes. So powerful that in all metal mode these detectors give the PI units a run for depth in most ground on most gold in the US. This was tough for me as the X-Terra has a far richer feature set than the Gold Bug Pro and for many all around users would be the better choice. But I looked at both from strictly a nugget hunting perspective where those extra features are extraneous to the task at hand. It came down to this. In all metal mode the Gold Bug Pro is simultaneously and separately running in discriminate mode. The audio response is pure all metal, but you also get the probable target id, when possible, displayed on the screen. Very deep targets will have no target id, which is why we are using all metal prospect mode in the first place. The X-Terra 705 you can run in Prospect Mode or Discriminate Mode, but not both at once. This one thing leads to more efficient detecting with all the information you need on screen at once. The Gold Bug Pro gives you the target id, ground phase, and magnetic susceptibility reading all on screen at once while in all metal mode. ads by Amazon... That is how I settled on the Fisher Gold Bug Pro as my all around do everything nugget hunting model. It is not a coincidence it is also the lightest of the bunch at only 2.5 lbs with battery and 5” round DD coil and 2.7 lbs with the 5” x 10” DD coil. It is a basic unit that gets the job done, and that appeals to me. Plus, it does just fine for coins, relics, and jewelry if I wish. if I could improve only one thing it would be to swap the position of the target id and phase readout on the meter. I have to wrap this up by pointing out that these are all fine detectors. I can actually find gold about as well with all of them. The engineers have mid-frequency all metal detectors figured out, and in all metal mode these models are practically equivalent. Small nuances that help one model in certain ground cost it in another and it all evens out. So from a straight up all metal nugget hunting perspective I think a person can use any one of these detectors and be just fine. What differences there are show up far more when comparing discrimination features which are of little use to the nugget hunter. With that said, the final lesson in this article is that it is all the other factors a person should be looking at when making a choice. For me it was just lightweight basic operation. But if waterproof is important, the AT Gold is a no-brainer. The Lobo is very forgiving for beginners simply because it is locked in ground tracking mode. The MXT is a superior all-arounder, and the X-Terra has various tone schemes and notch discrimination features common on top-end detectors. You can make the case for any of them depending on your own particular needs and desires in a detector, and know you will be well served for basic all metal nugget hunting capability. We are lucky to have so many fine choices, all at very affordable prices.

Hi Steve, Funny you should ask. I plan on doing a series of posts Prospectors Guide to Jewelry Detecting, Prospectors Guide to Coin Detecting, and Prospectors Guise to Relic Detecting, etc. The idea being basic info for people who may have done a lot of detecting but only for gold nuggets. I really enjoy my detecting so never quit just because there is no prospecting close at hand. I was out just yesterday looking for gold - in a playground tot lot! No, no gold yesterday. Just like nugget detecting you do not always come home with the goods. But I had a great couple hours detecting close to home, and it does not get much better than that. Any of the multi-purpose mid-frequency gold detectors work well for what you are talking about. The key is ability to work in lots of iron trash, which these detectors excel at. Small coils are also a very good option in trashy sites. There are so many detectors that might work it is ridiculous. The MXT, Gold Bug Pro (or G2), and AT Gold are three common inexpensive detectors that get mentioned a lot when talking about hunting trashy sites. Depth is usually not the big factor as targets are usually plentiful, in fact, too plentiful. It is that ability to handle thick trash that matters and the mid-frequency machines excel at that task. I should mention Tesoro makes detectors noted as being particularly good in this regard. More expensive options include the Fisher F75, Teknetics T2, and Minelab E-TRAC or CTX 3030. If money is no object and you want something really different the XP DEUS is a killer trash machine. The Minelab multifrequency detectors like the E-Trac or CTX do very well at suppressing iron signals. That can be good and bad. Too much suppression can hide or "mask" good items sitting next to the junk. But they are more pleasant to use (less chatter) and easier for novices. They make poor nugget machines however so fewer prospectors are interested in them. But still an option for those looking to step up for a high performance coin and jewelry detector. So now that I have danced around a bit I will tell you I have two detectors personally that I would possibly grab if heading for an old mining townsite. It would be either my Gold Bug Pro or my CTX 3030. Knowing me I would take both but if you are going to force me to take one it will probably be the Gold Bug Pro. It is a sweet little detector in very trashy sites with the little 5" coil. The CTX with small coil is formidable also though so it would depend on my mood and the exact situation. There are two ways to go. In disc mode dial in just enough disc to knock out small nails. You can do this by either having small nails and such go low tone, and good stuff higher tone. Or if too noisy for you set small stuff to not beep at all, and good stuff to signal audibly. Good stuff in this case means all non-ferrous targets and large iron, with large iron being the relics. Remember, an old pistol is large iron, etc. If this is still too noisy you can run even higher levels of discrimination. Use a US nickel as a test item and turn the disc up until it is rejected, then back off until it is just accepted. By doing this you are doing what I mentioned earlier - using more suppression and so more good targets might get suppressed, but it is easier for novices, less noisy. Tom Dankowski has a forum where the main subject tends to be getting finds out of old cabin sites and such where trash abounds. The basic theory being the more human habitation, the more ferrous junk, so these guys actually go looking for the heavy ferrous sites. It is job one in Europe. Find the trash and in it will be the good stuff. A gentleman name of Keith Southern posts there and reviews lots of detectors for this use. He probably is THE expert on the subject. You can read page after page of posts there on the subject but it will all biol down to what I have posted here. Mid-frequency detector, small coil, minimum discrimination, go slow, be patient. Do not get frustrated as you will dig trash. Many ferrous targets trick all the best machines and if a detector tunes those tricky items out, you lose the good stuff also. Just the way it is. So if you want to wade into vast detail check out the Tom Dankowski Forum It is one of the few forums I follow as it delves into lots of technical detail. Look for anything by Keith Southern in particular. Like most things detecting though it really is not rocket science. A decent detector and patience is all you need. Subject for another post but relic hunting can get one afoul of the antiquity laws so a bit of caution is in order. Coins are legal tender so no issues there as long as the area is open to detecting. Digging items over 100 years old or in some cases over 50 years old on public land can land you in hot water so before you go wild and crazy with relics learn about that. As I say, a topic for another post.

Hi Mike, Welcome to the forum! You made a great choice. All you need now if a lot of patience and location, location, location. My best tip is pay attention to bullets. Do not get discouraged by them. The smaller they are, and the deeper you dig them, the better your detecting skills. Lead and gold read the same and so if you are digging small lead you are doing everything right. You just need to get over a nugget. In fact we really should call it bullet detecting. The nuggets just happen along the way. I dig so many bullets and shell casings I save them and toss them in a couple buckets. The pounds add up and are eventually worth something themselves.