Today I did something that I have never done before and I learned something new. Generally I hurry along especially when I am hunting miles and miles of beach but today the tide was high and the beach had been pounded by everyone so I slowed down and just played around to look for deep gold rings. You have to do something better than everyone else at the beach to find anything. Today I was using my Fisher CZ20 detector hip mounted and I was strolling along the wet sand in autotune just looking for a beep to signal something was there. I got the faintest signal you could imagine and when I switched to discriminate I picked up a iron tone. Well, generally I am off at 40 mph down the beach at the first iron tone but today was sunny and warm and I was just enjoying myself.
After I got the iron tone then I did a target profile which means that I held down pinpoint and moved the coil back and forth to get an idea of how large the target was. It was very small and weak so I moved the coil back and forth with the coil down on the sand and then I picked up something different than iron. It would sometimes give a tone id as pulltab and then coin but about 85 percent of the time it would still give an iron tone. I guess the pulltab sound would be about 5 percent and the coin tone about 10 percent of the time.
I am sure everyone knows that when a detector is out of range of the target identification then it begins to indicate the next lower ID on the range until the last identification it will signal before it goes silent is iron.
I then knew that it was about 75 percent likely to be a coin even though it only signaled coin only about 10 percent of the time. I knew that it was deep and I had a shovel for the purpose of digging the deep ones.
I dug down about a foot deep and still had not reached the coin. I made very sure that when I dug deeper that the hole was clean and no loose sand fell back into the hole. I then started digging only a little so as to shovel out an inch every time I dug. I was beginning to think that this was one of those UFO coins and that it had disappeared on me but it was still there even deeper. Finally out it came at a measured FOURTEEN AND A HALF INCHES and of all coins that I do not expect to find deep it was a 1996 Jefferson nickle!
This was certainly the deepest I had every found a nickle at and I had learned something that might add some gold to my box too. If that had been a mans gold ring then I would have found it that deep I am sure.
If you discover a target that signals as iron and coin then it could be an iron object that has a coin spike. You will be able to tell if it is iron by simply moving the coil back and forth across the target and noticing exactly where the center of the coil was when the coin signal occurred. If it occurs in exactly the same place and signals iron and coin then it is a coin and if it shifts slightly as the coin signal beeps then you have a iron target. Experience is the key to metal detecting and no detector can make up for an inexperienced hunter.
I had thought that the CZ20 was fairly sensitive but I need to let you know that I was using an old trick on it to boost the sensitivity to the max. I had cut out sponges to fill the headphones so the loud sound would not hurt my ears. The reason that I did this was so I could run the volume ALL THE WAY UP. You might ask why would I want to do a crazy thing like that and the reason is that the CZ20 has a receiver boost feature that works the best at full volume and so I always set my detector for the maximum sensitivity possible.
Summary: When I had detected a faint iron signal I determined that it was not iron and then I ran target profile analysis on it and then pressed the coil right on the sand and moved it back and forth a number of times and in different directions to get the utmost information possible from the object. Next I needed to decide if the object was worth digging and I considered that it was very likely a coin. Of course you should maximize your sensitivity for your hunting conditions to gather the most information on the object.
When there are goodies everywhere even the cheapest detector will work and anyone can scoop up a pocket full of goodies but in the winter when the sand still has not eroded enough you have to be tricky if you are going to find the goodies and anything that will give you an edge over the competition will improve your finds.
