gordy5m

Thanks everyone for the replies! I really appreciate it. Lots of great ideas to try here. There seems to be a consensus about "cherry picking" the higher conductors, but close to the house it's literally carpeted w/ old aluminum Budweiser cans and pop-tops (I think maybe they were collecting them to recycle? God help their livers if they werent!). The cans are shallow, crushed, and mostly whole, and ring in sometimes in the 50's on my Legend (reminder, the TID on the Legend goes up to 60). "Cherry picking" all those signals could literally take days to clear a few hundred square feet. I do like the idea of chipping away at the area, and I'm definitely going to give my new 6" coil (got here today, but it's raining 😞 ) a try with a faster recovery speed and lowered sensitivity. Really useful tip about raising the coil to see if the signal changes for ID. I'll definitely be using that one, although I think I'll end up digging a lot of stuff anyway to clear it out (the digging is pretty easy). I've been studying the historic areal photos, and I think I've mapped out the position of the house, barn, and pump house(?), so will be focusing hard on those in-between areas as well. Thanks again everyone for the warm welcome and great tips! Will hopefully be back w/ pics of my finds!

Hey all, New to the forum, and the hobby, and need some advice. I've "discovered" an old farmstead near my house here in East TX that was on some of our oldest maps (since 1916!), and was occupied through the 1960's before it was bulldozed in the '70's and the land purchased by one of our school districts. The area of the house and barn are now an open field behind a school. I have secured permission to detect there, and as far as I can tell it has not been touched since it was leveled. It certainly hasn't been detected, as I've already found one coin spill that was mostly older clad ('60s-'70s), but did find one 1945 P War nickel that makes me hopeful there's older stuff there. Anyway, I've been preferring (for my sanity) to work the open areas away from the old house foundation due to the overwhelming amount of trash. There is literally both ferrous and non-ferrous trash carpeting the area. My Nokta Legend (I'm running the stock 11", but just ordered the 6" coil) has actually been doing an amazing job of discriminating (I use a custom 6-tone program based on my reading and youtubing), and I've been able to find clad pennies and nickels deep amongst aluminum slaw and rusted iron galore. But, if I get too close to the old house there are just too many signals to deal with and it's overwhelming. I could literally spend hours in a 100 sq ft area investigating every potentially good signal (soooo many old Budweiser cans and TV trays, lol) and scraping slaw out of the top 1" of the ground. So, my question to y'all is, how do you approach a site like this? Would you "clean it up"? Or do you think that is not worth the time and effort, and I should just stick to the areas I can sanely cover the most ground in the few hours I have available on the weekends? Are there any areas around an old house you would focus on if you had time? What would your approach be? I realize this is a good problem to have, and I am looking forward to hearing your advice!

Newbie here. Looking forward to absorbing lots of wisdom here!