135 Yr Old Park Continues To Produce....5 Silver And An Old Button In A 3 Hr Hunt!

[Raphis]

Hello Friends,

Since joining this forum last year, I really haven’t posted any of my finds, aside from a few pics here and there.   I’ve lost a lot of my free time this year due to taking care of family members, so a 3 hr hunt is my upper limit.  When I’m able to hunt with my Nox 800, I’ve been pleased with my results.  For the past few weekends, I have met up with some buddies to hunt one of our old (135 yr old) parks in our locale.  This park has been pillaged for so many years by so many hunters, it’s amazing that we can continue to find older targets at the 7-9+” range.  This park is loaded with non-ferrous (and ferrous) trash targets; it’s your typical, century plus, blighted inner city park that poses additional EMI challenges that can really impede your ability to hear targets.  The EMI at this park has worsened since I started hunting it back in 2007.  Over this time, I have dug well over 200 silver, close to 1000 wheat pennies (at least 50 of these wheats were the early teen “S” mint semi-keys) , a large handful of Indians (3 of these were 1908 S mint), some V’s/Buffaloes, tokens, and other interesting relics from this park alone.

 A few weeks ago was my first hunt at this park in quite some time.  I ended up finding 7 wheats and an 1892 Indian penny for a 2 hr hunt.  Last week I returned to a different section of the park and dug a pocket spill of 2 Rosies and a wheat penny, a 3rd Rosie, and 13 more wheat pennies.  This morning, I met a couple of my buddies at the same park and had more success.  My first dug target turned out to be a pocket spill of 3 mercs. I couldn’t believe it...out of a thousand plugs over a 14 year period of detecting this park, I can’t ever recall digging 3 mercs in one hole...the mercs were down about 7 inches, but my Nox produced only a tiny “high chirp” sound due to the EMI messing with the signal.  I could only hear this chirp from one direction too. The ID of the chirp was in the high 30’s.

After finding just a couple wheats over the next hr, I then dug the sterling bracelet at 7”, which also produced a short/choppy high chirp.  The ground at this park is like digging thru bricks this time of year (we are in a drought here and many of our blighted parks are not getting watered). I decided to start walking to my car (while keeping my machine on) to say goodbye to my other buddy, who ended up with a goose egg for oldies today.  About 30 ft from my car, I dug two faint signals (jumpy ID’s between 21-31) that the EMI was really messing with.  I circled these targets so many times while wiggling my coil over the signals with different cadences, and finally decided to dig both of them to see what I was hearing...the first signal turned out to be a Rosie, my 5th silver of the 3 hr hunt. The 2nd signal was the button, which after a quick google search seems to be a WW1 German Imperial Prussian Crown Tunic button.  (If this button is something different, please don’t hesitate to share any of your expertise).

I really don’t think I could have hunted any longer today, even if I had more time.  The heat/humidity paired with the hard ground wiped me out.

Pictured are my finds from this morning’s hunt.

HH,

Raphis

[Chase Goldman]

Bet that Merc pocket spill happened in '44 or '45 based on the similar great condition of those '44 Mercs and because there were two of them in the spill.

Great finds and thanks for sharing the detailed back story.  Good stuff!

[Valens Legacy]

Very nice hunt and glad you found some nice items. Good luck on your next outing.

[schoolofhardNox]

Awesome hunts. Parks like that are a challenge for sure. Same here on this coast. I had a guy that lived near me that was an expert with the E trac which was just released at the time. He showed me that every old park I ever hunted in our area still had deeper coins and silver. I didn't believe it until I hunted with him. It was an eye opener. As machines get better, it's good to know that your park is still hiding many silvers below the 7" range. Just think of what key and semi key date coins are waiting to get unearth. An '09 S Indian wouldn't hurt 😄 Good luck on your next hunt there.

 

 

 

 

[GB_Amateur]

You continue to amaze with your finds in 'hunted out' parks.  Beautiful Mercs!

Were you running your usual Recovery Speed = 4?  I ask because of the chirps since I associate shorter tones with higher recovery speeds for desirable targets.  Yes, I get chirps with lower (4&5) recovery speeds but not (AFAIK) for desirable targets.  Or was it the EMI that altered the quality of your hit tones?  Listenting through EMI is painful, but apparently worth it.

[Raphis]

12 hours ago, Chase Goldman said:

Bet that Merc pocket spill happened in '44 or '45 based on the similar great condition of those '44 Mercs and because there were two of them in the spill.

Great finds and thanks for sharing the detailed back story.  Good stuff!

I’m certain you’re right (this time 😂).  Thanks for all you do on this forum, and stepping up to help Steve out...much appreciated!! 👍🏼

10 hours ago, Valens Legacy said:

Very nice hunt and glad you found some nice items. Good luck on your next outing.

Thank you!  Good luck to you too!

5 hours ago, schoolofhardNox said:

He showed me that every old park I ever hunted in our area still had deeper coins and silver. I didn't believe it until I hunted with him. It was an eye opener. Just think of what key and semi key date coins are waiting to get unearth. An '09 S Indian wouldn't hurt 😄 Good luck on your next hunt there.

 

 

 

 

I used to keep a database of all the parks I found silver at in my area (cataloging all my silver finds) for the past 14 years.  The list is quite extensive, and is over one hundred. Having the Nox 800 to use in my old parks has brought to the surface many elusive, deep oldies that I never would have found with my Explorer SE.  The recovery speed of the Explorer is a bit too slow to be able to get the deeper targets when they’re mixed with trash targets.  Plus, I can’t lower volume/tone on the lowest of conductors with my SE like I can on the Nox.  That’s a key feature to help enhance the deeper higher conductors while squelching the tone/volume of the lower targets in super trashy parks.  Funny you should mention an ‘09 S Indian...I have found one, and it’s in pretty good condition.  I didn’t  find it from the park I hunted yesterday...but it was a nearby park in the city. Thanks for the reply!

[Raphis]

4 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

You continue to amaze with your finds in 'hunted out' parks.  Beautiful Mercs!

Were you running your usual Recovery Speed = 4?  I ask because of the chirps since I associate shorter tones with higher recovery speeds for desirable targets.  Yes, I get chirps with lower (4&5) recovery speeds but not (AFAIK) for desirable targets.  Or was it the EMI that altered the quality of your hit tones?  Listenting through EMI is painful, but apparently worth it.

Thanks, GB! Yes, Recovery speed of 4 all the time for every park I hunt. Most every keeper, old target yesterday that I unearthed was very elusive (8-9 out of 10, with 1 being the easiest target to hear).  I went out with two buddies yesterday, who both swing Nox 800’s.  One of my buddies likes to stick close to me like glue, in hopes I can locate an elusive target, and I can tell him to come over to listen to it.  My other buddy mostly goes off on his own and hunts at his own pace and settings he prefers.  Well the buddy that sticks to me like glue heard only 2 out of the 5 or 6 targets I called him over to hear.  I didn’t have a lot of time to look at his Nox settings to see what the differences were between our machines.  The EMI at this park has a profound effect at signal clarity and duration.  I was noise cancelling and ground balancing often.  Most every time I noise cancelled, the machine would go to a different channel, and likewise with the ground balance...I saw ground balance numbers from 3 to 53 yesterday.  I was constantly re-listening to all my elusive targets after doing a NC and GB....and some of the times doing this helped give the faint/chirpy signal more clarity.  My “glue” buddy was really scratching his head yesterday after not being able to hear one of my targets and showing him a deep, green patina wheat penny in my hand a couple minutes later.

[Tom_in_CA]

Raphis Dan :   It's not fair to compare your finds to anyone else's here.   Since you're not human.  You're a robot.   So it's not fair to compare our finds with you .  Tsk tsk.

 

If you ever want to get north to central coast, I've got some spots where I am perpetually kicking the butts of nox 800 users.  But .... they're not robots like you.  Would love to duel with a proficient robot user !   🤣

[GB_Amateur]

1 hour ago, Raphis said:

Most every time I noise cancelled, the machine would go to a different channel,...

Have you tried consecutive noise cancels?  My experience is that when I do this I get a different channel most of the time, anyway.  Yes, sometimes the noise cancel procedure will take me from a noisy channel to a quiet one, but that ideal situation is rare.  Most of the time it takes me from a noisy channel to an equally noisy channel or a quiet channel to an equally quiet channel.  I think it's due to narrow band sources being easy for the detector to notice and avoid but broad band -- well, that's why they call it 'broad'.

Somewhere along the line in this forum I posted a histogram of channels created from about 50 consecutive noise cancel steps in my back yard (which is EMI noisy due to being close to my house and its wifi, etc.)  There was a rather broad peak in that experiment so it was working, but not like many people think it does.

If I'm really being persnickity I will manually go through all 19 channels and choose the one I find the quietest, but that may not be any better than just letting the detector 'brain' do it for me.

BTW, for those who use notch discrimination, I think it's best to noise cancel with all TID channels notched 'in' (by toggling the Horseshoe button to show all TID channels dark boxed) and then switching to your favorite notch pattern.  I don't know for sure that this leads to a 'better' noise cancel, though.  Just kinda seems to make sense.  Personally the only time I don't have all TID channels 'on' is when I'm detecting for native gold and the ground has lots of -9, -8,... hot rocks on the surface.

[Raphis]

2 hours ago, Tom_in_CA said:

Raphis Dan :   It's not fair to compare your finds to anyone else's here.   Since you're not human.  You're a robot.   So it's not fair to compare our finds with you .  Tsk tsk.

If you ever want to get north to central coast, I've got some spots where I am perpetually kicking the butts of nox 800 users.  But .... they're not robots like you.  Would love to duel with a proficient robot user !   🤣

Thanks for the reply, Salinas Tom (I think 🤣).  I was posting my finds for so many years across 4 different forums, and forumites expected to see 10-30 silvers on each post I created.  When I posted 2 or 3 silvers, guys thought I had a terrible hunt.

The Nox is very proficient at finding those hard to decipher, deep, masked targets, even in areas riddled with EMI....but you have to be immune/extremely comfortable with extraneous background noise caused by EMI...this doesn’t come very easy to many hunters. Some of the settings available to Nox hunters help to a certain degree, but then it’s all up to the user and his tolerances/capabilities.

My Explorer is collecting dust...haven’t even turned it on since purchasing the Nox last year.  My confidence with the machine is sky high...no matter where or whoever I hunt with. 💪🏼😆