Dig Less Trash By Digging More Of It

One nice thing about this hobby is that not everyone on the face of the planet does it. It’s a unique diversion, and it’s actually a good thing everyone doesn’t do it, because there would be nothing left to dig up. Our parks and relic fields would be filled with people looking like those tiny creeks where a jillion guys stand packed shoulder to shoulder for the first salmon run of the season. This is a good day for the salmon, since the guys with the poles spend more time digging someone else's hooks out of the back of their necks than they do fishing.

The downside to this is a lot of us get into detecting without the benefit of having veteran detectorists show us the tricks of the trade. This means we spend a lot of time bumping around in the dark like the blind people we are at first. So a lot of bad habits begin forming and a lot of frustrations begin festering because we end up spending more time digging pulltabs and screwcaps than we do digging the good stuff.

Before I took up metal detecting, my hobby was golf. I played almost every weekend, and as far as golf games go, I wasn’t that bad. I was really bad. I still play golf from time to time, and I’m still pretty bad. But I take comfort in the fact that you can be bad at golf and still have a good time provided you don’t walk up to the first tee with the notion you’re going to have a good game. It’s not like, say, fishing, where if you’re bad at it, you just spend the whole day being bored out of your mind. Which probably explains the amount of beer consumed by the guys down at my local lake.

I mention golf because there’s an interesting parallel between golf and coinshooting. There are quite a few beginners who try to become better detectorists the same way a lot of duffers try to become better golfers. Driving range owners all over the country make a comfortable living year in, year out on guys with bad technique who think if they whack enough balls, they’ll eventually stumble across the way to correct their problem. Turns out, they’d be much better golfers and enjoy the game more if they got some personal instruction in the beginning from a professional and then polished their skills at the range by practicing with a purpose.

If you want to dig less trash, practice with a purpose by training your ear for the trash. A gold ring and a pull tab have separate, discernable signals. There isn’t an old timer alive who, depending on nothing but his ears or some individual quirk of his detector, can’t tell the difference between the two. Old timers got as good as they did because discrimination circuitry wasn't yet invented, so they had a choice: Memorize what a pulltab sounds like or wreck your back and knees digging the damn things.

Like the duffers who simply spend their time mindlessly whacking range balls, a lot of us spend a lot of time digging up pulltabs and other trash because we’re not listening to what their detector is telling us. We’re hearing the trash signals, but we’re not really listening to – and learning from – those signals. In fact, I’d venture to say that a lot of beginners with metered machines are relying more on their meters than their ears. There's a lot to be said for meters, but they're not very useful when their displays turn to slop in cold weather or it just plain dies in the field. When that happens, your ears are all you have.

Because gold jewelry and pulltabs register at roughly the same conductivity range, we dig anyway, and nine times out of ten we’re digging pulltabs. This scenario is even more common among those of us who don’t have detectors with visual displays and rely a lot on either thumbing the discrimination dial to see where the object signal drops out, or simply digging everything that falls within that wide conductivity chasm separating foil and pulltab. We get a signal that discriminates out at 5 and we stand there wondering whether we’re standing over a pulltab, a gold ring, a screwcap or a nickel.

When I bought my non-metered Tesoro, I spent a lot of time digging those midrange signals because I didn’t want to pass up any gold rings. Consequently, I spent a ton of hours digging pullatbs, since the places I hunted were pulltab gardens more than they were ring or nickel gardens. As you might guess, I ended up digging my own personal Mount Rushmore-size pile of junk. By the middle of that summer, my wife was convinced I got into this hobby with the specific goal of becoming the most successful trash hunter on two legs.

When I first started detecting I felt the same frustration that almost all beginners feel at one time or another. But at some point, the little cartoon light bulb over my head went on. If I was going to dig all that junk anyway, I might as well learn something from it. So I set sail on what turned out to be a personal two-month course to learn what the signal for every junk and good target sounds like in the ground, and commit it to memory. I listened to – and dug – every single signal I came across until I began to learn the difference between each one. Some are really obvious, while some are separated only by a subtle wisp of static at the outer edge of the signal.

Let me tell you, it paid off. These days, I can usually identify a pulltab before I dig it. And just so I don’t get too big for my britches, I often dig what I think is a pulltab or piece of foil just to make sure I’m keeping my mental library on track. Sometimes I get fooled or come across the signal of an object I’ve never encountered before, but these days I very rarely dig a pulltab. (This ability disappears during the winter, so once spring rolls around, I spend an outing or two doing the trash tango to reacquaint myself with the junk signals. Within a few outings, I’m more or less back up to speed.). On the occasions when I am surprised by a pulltab or similar piece of junk, I stick it back in the hole and cover it back up, make several coil passes of varying speed and carefully study the signal. Usually, it turns out that I didn’t get fooled by my detector at all. I just wasn’t listening close enough because I was in a hurry or started getting sloppy.

Getting to this point wasn’t easy, by any means. I spent four months in some of the most God-awful trash sites known to the urban hunter. On purpose. Trust me when I say this was the most tedious four months of my life. Of course, I found enough good stuff on occasion to keep my interest up, but for the most part, my box o’ treasures was pretty sparse because I spent most of my time intentionally digging crap. Sure, the big attraction to this hobby is amassing a collection of coins and relics to make the next guy slobber with envy, but unless you know what to avoid, you waste a lot of time digging unproductive signals. The way I see it, spending 100 hours digging junk at junk sites this year – and really letting the signatures of those junk signals sink in – is the best way to keep you from wasting 100 hours digging junk at productive sites next year.

How does anyone get to this point? Simple (which in this case, "simple" shouldn’t be confused with "easy," because it ain’t): Practice with a purpose, and plenty of it. The best way to do this is to earmark a few hours a week or month to intentionally locate only one specific kind of target, relying on nothing more than what’s coming through your headphones. (You people with meters, eliminate the urge to cheat or second-guess yourself or your meter by sticking a piece of electrical tape over the display.) Find a site that has a healthy mix of clads and pulltabs and set aside one hunt to finding nothing but dimes. The next hunt, pulltabs. The next, quarters, nickels, Snapple caps or screw caps. Eventually, work yourself up to the really flashy stuff, like guessing whether that penny signal belongs to a copper or a zinc.

© 1999 Scott Buckner