Raphis

Your scenario (especially with elusive silver halfs) has happened to me numerous occasions over the years. Just recently, I was detecting a very small park that has produced countless silver dimes, a few silver quarters, and hundreds of wheat pennies over the years. My buddies and I have zig zagged over the same ground at this small park many dozens of times, and on this one recent hunt, I hadn’t found but a few wheats, until I ended up finding a walker half, which was the first silver half dollar we have found at this little park after hundreds of previous hours of hunts...you just never know! Congrats on your barber Half!!

Congrats on your hard earned oldies, Joe! 👍🏼Do you feel confident there’s gotta be more elusive oldies at that park? I always go back to a spot I found oldies from a previous hunt....embrace the challenge!! Good Luck! Raphis - Dan

That’s true because Park/Field 1 modes on the Nox are internally lower frequency weighted, which is better suited to higher conductive targets (pennies, dimes, etc). Park/Field 2 modes are internally higher frequency weighted, and are better suited for fine jewelry and other low conductors, such as nickels. I still find deep nickels in Park/Field 1, but I’ve always wondered how much deeper I could hit a nickel in Park/Field 2. Congrats on another great day of hunting!! 👍🏼

Fantastic hot spot! 👍🏼👍🏼 Those road trips of yours are ultra productive!! Congrats!

The barber dime weighs 2.15 grams. Here’s my best closeup I can get..

GB, The park I hunted is one of the oldest in LA. Not sure it’s “The oldest”, but it has produced more barbers/injuns than any other park in LA for me. Thanks for the help on the barber date! I’m still not real sure of the date after looking at the coin countless times..🤔

Thanks for the replies, guys! 👍🏼

Hello Friends, Last Thursday, I had a couple hrs of free time to go on a hunt. I decided to try my luck at one of the older parks in my locale. This park has been hunted so many times by the locals over the years, not to mention I have hunted this park over 100 times in the past 13 years (but only about 10 times with my Nox). This park has a plethora of non-ferrous trash, iron, and a good bit of EMI, which obviously can mask an older, deeper find. I love the challenge this park poses to the old coin TH’er. It’s not a very large park, either, but the old coins/tokens/jewelry (7-9+”) were numerous here. I have over 300 silver from this park, over 1500 wheat pennies, and close to 100 indian pennies. However, a decent half day hunt from this park today would be 5-6 wheats, and maybe an injun if you’re lucky. Finding silver from this park today is a real challenge. So, for a couple hrs last week, I took my Nox to this park, with the hopes of digging a few oldies. I noise cancelled and ground balance my machine in the area I was gonna hunt. My machine was still jumpy from EMI, but that’s the norm at this park. I wasn’t willing to drop my sensitivity below 23 because the deeper targets are quite faint/obscure with respect to audio. If you swing your coil too fast or too slow you’ll go home empty handed. I saw some older plugs just a few feet from where I was hunting from a couple months back (I remember finding a few silver/wheats on that short hunt back then). My first target I located sounded like a deep injun, but it turned out to be the enameled copper/brass Star Of David pin. My next target was so obscure and deep, that I had to swing/wiggle my coil from every direction possible for over a minute just to tell myself that I should dig this target. The ID numbers were bouncing all over the place (from deeper iron and nearby shallow trash), but I narrowed my coil wiggles over the spot that was repeating mid 20’s ID’s. At 6”, my pinpointer was still silent at the bottom of the hole. It was hard to say if I had to dig deeper or widen my hole. There’s a mod I made to my Propointer that increases the depth by almost 2” (you can find the mod on a number of YT vids, so with the mod engaged on my propointer, I started to hear the target off to one side at the bottom of my plug. After a couple more inches of hard-packed dirt removed from my plug, I saw a flash of silver. It was dime sized and well worn. After reading the date, I couldn’t initially tell if it was 1892 or 1902....What do you guys think the date is??? It’s a Philly mint. I was so pumped after finding that coin!! I rechecked the bottom of the plug with my pinpointer and there was another target next to the dime, but it was only a small, rusty nail. I only dug some deeper pieces of aluminum and a couple bullets in the immediate area to the barber dime over the next 30 min, so I decided to finish my short hunt at an adjacent section to my parked car. That’s where I found the Rosie and all the wheats, along with the Bally’s Aladdins Castle token. It was a very successful, short hunt for me that produced some elusive oldies. With deep, elusive, partially masked targets in the ground, one can never give up hunting a site with that criteria. Let it “rest” for a while if you get skunked on a hunt at a site like this, but never say “I’m never going back there again because there’s nothing left to find!”....the most elusive keeper finds are also the most rewarding to find! HH, Raphis - Dan

A wartime Jefferson nickel no doubt. If Dan soaks that in lemon juice for a few hrs (or more), it should look a lot more like a nickel.

Congrats on your best silver day ever! 👍🏼 Your hunt brings back quite a few great memories for me...I’ve hunted parks in my locale for years that produced silver days from the low teens to the mid twenties...even one park nearly 150 miles from me that produced a 31 silver day (my PB). All of these parks were just regular, old parks from the ‘20’s-40’s era, without any ground movement. Those days around me are long gone, unfortunately. I wish I could go on extended road trips like you do, but that’s not possible for me at the moment...maybe someday! Anyway, I’m rambling......Congrats again on your memorable hunt! HH, Dan - Raphis

I’ve hunted hundreds of older baseball field (outfields and infields) in parks and schoolyards over the years. Sometimes, only the outfield produces old coins; sometimes only the infield (under the Decomposed Granite layer) will produce. Each baseball diamond is different in how it was built, with respect to the DG infield. Sometimes, 6” of original dirt is removed before laying the DG down. If that is the case, it’s possible to detect the “oldies” in under the DG. Ground balance over the DG before detecting. Depending on the level of moisture, digging thru DG could be a formidable task, but there’s nothing like getting thru the DG, and seeing dark, original dirt and the sight of silver peeking thru the dark dirt!! If, the original dirt was dug out deeper, the oldies will probably have been removed with the dirt before laying the DG. Of course there’s more variables than what I described. Older baseball diamonds could have been resurfaced/rebuilt many decades after they were built, so each one you come across in an older spot needs to be detected (infields and outfields). Also, any picnic areas in an old park with DG laid on the ground should always be inspected to figure out how deep the original dirt strata layer is.

That’s fantastic beach hunting! Looks like those targets had been lost for quite some time too! You said you hunted the beach in the evening? During the receding tide? High tide was around 6 pm around the LA beaches...when I used to hunt the beaches, I’d wait for the tide to recede before hitting the wet slope. Trying to detect the slope at high tide is no fun....however, you obviously know your machines and your beach conditions....that’s for sure. Congrats!! 👍🏼

Great finds and photos! Here in So California, I’ve found just a small handful of Aussie sixpences, three pences, and pennies, along with a couple of WW2 era Florins and some three pences struck at San Francisco mint. One Aussie coin I found was at a park near downtown Los Angeles..it was an Australian Shilling, with a ram’s head on the reverse. I don’t know of anyone else down here in So Cal that has ever found one. Good luck on your next hunt!! 👍🏼

Good report on the use of your machines at the beach, and congrats on your finds! I’m sure it must have felt great to be back on your beaches again! So, what size coil and design (DD, mono) were you using on your 5000? Something just doesn’t sound right if your 5000 wasn’t falsing on the wet sand while your 6000 was. I’ve only use a mono coil on my PI at the beaches, even in the blackest of sand with only minor falsing...but I have to swing my coil very level and slow (coil control), while also walking perpendicular to the water swinging the coil instead of walking parallel to the water. I also can’t lower my pulse delay below 15 uS or I will false more on wet/salt sand. Keep us informed how you fare next week with the 6000 and the mono coil. Good luck!

I’m still getting the “is your liver dying” ads as some others are also. I’m also getting getting Tempur-pedic mattress ads from the Ashley Home Store.

Congrats on all your digs, and the 1800’s penny!! If you want to dig deeper, swap your 10x5 for your stock 11”....I will guarantee you more depth!! But you’re doing the right thing in strip mining a home site like that. I know you’ve had old coin success with your 10x5, but If I used a 5” width DD coil in my parks, I wouldn’t find a single silver coin. I must not be that experienced, because I don’t dig that much trash in 10 hunts 😹. Rosies ID around 27’ish, but a really deep one can ID higher (30’s), due to the up-averaging of the target by the Nox at near max depth limits of the machine. Good luck!

My passion is high in the hobby, Tom. It has been since I first held a detector in my hands when I was 15 yrs old. The hobby has given back to me waay more than what my detectors have found in the ground!! 🤓🤔☺️

A metal detector is only a facilitator of a successful hunt; just like a set of golf clubs is to a professional golfer or a guitar is to a seasoned guitarist. Depending on your quality of golf clubs, you could drive a ball 25-30 yards further with one than another. A guitar may sound better to one’s ears than another also. However, when you have two different guitars or two sets of gold clubs that are all high quality items, the greatest factor to extract the most fidelity and highest performance out of those items is the “operator/player”. The analogy holds very true for comparing two or more high quality metal detectors by similar hunters who possess equal skill sets. For over 10 years in my locale I have hunted, I was typically finding 2-3 times the yearly silver and wheat pennies of my hunt buddies, and we all had similar Minelab machines. Sure, we all hunted the same parks, but I did hunt them longer...I put more hrs into detecting than the avg hunter did, I notice I can dig deep plugs faster than avg, I mostly cherry pick my targets, concentrating on the deeper, older, higher conductive targets, and in return for my long, hard work and hunt style, I amassed a bigger collection of old coinage and silver jewelry year after year than my buddies did. There’s too many other factors/parameters besides a metal detector that makes a person avg 2-3 times more old coins than other th’ers hunting your same sites. I’m still finding/recovering deep targets with my Nox at the same sites I found them with my Explorer, but, because park patrons don’t lose silver coins or wheat pennies anymore, I won’t be finding them at the rates I was finding them with my Explorer. My Nox can unmask colocated targets better than my Explorer can, and it seems to detect a very deep target in mineralized ground better than my Explorer ever could, so I hope to continue to find those obscure targets still hiding at the many parks I have hunted over the years....just not at the crazy rates I was finding them with my Explorer.

There was a saying here about old parks being detected....they may have been White’d (Whites) out, but have they ever been Explorer’d? 😹🤣

I totally understand Chase’s remarks above. I have the same reasonings as he does about comparing two “highly capable” machines built by the same company, in the hands of two highly capable hunters who have used those machines for a particular style of detecting for many thousands of hrs...read on... Tom, there will be no “evolution-bending”, “eye-opening” results between similar, VLF style, state of the art machines within the same company...What you witnessed over 15 years ago between your trusty/loyal Whites machine and a new Minelab Explorer hunting deepies in a trashy, old park is not gonna happen between any of the Minelab FBS/multi-IQ machines with regards to turf hunting. My E-Trac buddy and I compared signals with each other for the past 8-9 years. In that time, we have flagged/compared well over 1000 deep signals. The verdict?? Neither of us ended up wanting to change/swap our detectors for another one. Actually, every time we flagged/located a deep target for the other hunter to hear, that last thing on our minds was that we were gonna end up wanting a new machine at the end of our hunt...🤣. No way, shape, or form! We just wanted to let each other hear an obscure/deep target in hopes that the other person would agree with your conclusions (I.e. it was a deep silver coin, or it wasn’t iron falsing, etc) before they had to put a shovel to the dirt and dig to China ☺️. When two people are near the top of mastering a machine for a specific style of hunting, and are confident/successful/comfortable with their hunting style and machine selection, you just don’t ask yourself if your buddy’s machine would produce more keepers than your current machine which you’ve been so comfortable/successful using for so many years. That’s not what a confident, successful hunter would say to themselves. We continued on using our same machines for years, and we were very successful, averaging a combined 700-800 turf silver a year between us. You’re still using an Explorer, right? Why haven’t you bought the ML successors to your Explorer (E-Trac/CTX)? Its probably for the same reasons my buddy and I didn’t feel the need to get a different or successor machine (because of little to no benefit of operational performance). So, I can understand why there’s little chance you’d swap your Explorer for an Equinox because there’s not going to be any evolutionary-bending, eye opening differences between those machines with respect to detecting deep coins in the turf. The performance differences are very subtle, but the physical characteristics between the machines are “evolutionarily” different. As I aged, I grew tired of swinging my boat anchor Explorer with inline probe. I typically would have a sore shoulder after a day’s hunt, and was hoping/praying that Minelab would design a super lightweight, highly capable turf hunting machine that operated/performed every bit as good as my Explorer does for deep, masked turf targets....The verdict? The Equinox does a fine job, and definitely meets my standards as a highly capable deep, partially masked target, turf hunting machine!! I haven’t felt the need (not even for a second) to pull my Explorer out of the garage and use it again.

Thanks Brian, for the reply!! Only a few individuals don’t want to believe it’s true about the Nox, but the the old saying, “the proof is in the pudding“, is reverberating off the walls!! 🤗☺️

What a fantastic Summer you had! Lots of gold and a decent amount of silver toast! Thanks for sharing! 👍🏼

Amen to your above statements, Steve! 👍🏼 You and I have been recent recipients of Toms “post reply protocols”! 🤣 The only way Tom could be convinced to change his current machines is he has to be spanked on a hunt with him! No amount of deep coin or gold nuggets photos will suffice...he has to be spanked/beaten to a pulp in a one on one hunt for him to be “a believer”. I’m with you on not being at all interested in trying to convince someone to dump their current machines for a different one.

I agree. I’ve been provoked by Tom on this subject matter of Nox vs Explorer/Etrac/CTX, etc too many times now....it seems like every time I create a post, his replies are always trying to stir the pot. I never go on any hunt to try to spank/crush my hunt partners‘ psyche, and I have hunted with over a hundred different th’ers over the years. If they feel intimidated by my finds compared to theirs, that’s their problem 😂. I’m not going leave finds in the ground to make them feel less intimidated. 😂. They could seek out other hunting partners with equal abilities to theirs. I’m always in a challenge with myself to try and eek out the remaining oldies from a site. I just grew tired of posting all my finds across 4 different forums for 8-9 years straight. I used the forums back then as a means to blog all my hunts/finds, and to gain insight into new electronics and meet other passionate hobbyists and see what everyone else was finding across the country and other continents. Today, I post my finds a lot less, but still enjoy seeing what others are finding, in addition to the many interesting topics/articles/threads on this site....

Thanks. It (fibro) has been quite the battle...it changed my whole life. I ended up retiring early from my engineering job, along with other big, life decisions I had to defer. Detecting, however, became the benefactor, and really helped to offset/qualm the many symptoms I have been feeling (mental/physical). I remember Tom choosing the motel...it may have been El Capitan off of Mission St. Name sounds familiar, but Tom probably knows for sure..☺️🤔