It seems that every time I zero in on an old home site it turns out different than I expected. I had asked for and received permission from the historical society in our little town. There seemed to be some hesitation in that permission so I decided to get with the program and check it out quickly. Today I hunted a 1903 home(the oldest I think in my town) and moved in patterns around the yard seeking out that "tink" sound as my detector picked out a deep coin. There was the old problems of nails and squashed tin cans. And lots of little trash showing up on the pulltab scale and it was salted all over the yard!

To make matters worse we have been getting waves of monsoon rains of about 8 to 10 inches every time a new cloud shows up lately. The yard was really wet and digging was your worst nightmare. Great goo gobs of sticky black stuff that reminded me of that old "Uncle Remus" story about the Tarbaby. It stuck on the digging trowel, me and about everything else. I never knew if a coin was stuck to the trowel until I took my fingers and peeled down all that sticky mud. Yuk!

There were lots of coin signals but they were all too loud and the coil profile was too large to mess with. I knew what I had to do and this is what I am trying to get across to you. When you have something like this to hunt it can be quite a job and more than a little overpowering. Even if the very best old coin was hidden in that yard I had to take my time with every coin signal or should I say "deep small signals" too. I was using a small coil but it did very little to help. I would have had to use a one incher to cut around the junk.

In the entire yard I found three signals that qualified as coin probable. One was a zinc penny near the curb. The other two were the early kind of aluminum twist-offs that they introduced around the early '60's. The twist-offs gave the problem away and then I knew without a doubt that this century old yard was filled in sometime in the late 50's or 60's. Sometimes it is very hard to tell when you look at a yard but nevertheless study the finds.

The twist-offs were each six inches deep and of course coins that had fallen in that yard shortly after the turn of the century would be a foot deep at least by now and maybe on edge! The problem was one of masking by the shallower sprinkling of light trash. A mixture of iron(nails) and other small metal trash. The foot deep coins might be recoverable if not for the masking problem.

Point number two is analyze the area as quickly as possible so as not to waste any time on impossible yards. I have seen folks waste all day doggedly trying to pull something out of trash like that. The best site will have very little trash, that is for sure. You have to date the area quickly by finding the first deep coin signal and digging it up and checking the date to begin to size up the property.

If there are good old coins among the nails and metal trash then it is another matter. Using a small coil and lots of time move very slowly and train yourself to discriminate out the shallow targets and listen for the older weaker deeper ones. Certain detectors will have the edge over others in such conditions.

Some might say that perhaps I walked away and didn't even dig the gold coins that were there but if I had to count all of the pulltab(gold) signals it would have been in the hundreds of thousands. The task of detection and recovery has to be achievable to start with and even if one of those many signals was a gold coin and I knew that, I would have walked away and would not care. I didn't have that much time to dedicate to the project.