REVIER
Well-known member
More lessons learned in my difficult soil....slowly getting there, thrilled about my results.
Never found this many wheaties in one day before, and I found them in areas I hunted before.
They ranged from the 20's to the 30's, 40's and the 50's , a few from each decade, all were at the 5-6.5" level.
Another in a series of what I am learning about hunting here in the south in case some of you can gleam something that might help you out in similar circumstances.
Yesterday I took a trip through 3 small front lawns in my neighborhood.
I live near a college and a bunch of students rent these old homes so they don't care what I do and all say just go for it...so I do.
I have hit all three before a few times and found a few old wheaties and some other stuff, even an old pocket watch in one, but I was using the F70 and small sniper coil every time and tried to go slow and really overlap but evidently missed some things.
Two changes on this hunt...I switched to the big DD F75 coil and started digging some of the more jumpy signals I passed over before.
Many know this soil I hunt in here in the city is extra specially difficult.
Nothing past 3" is ever a solid signal, actually 2" is more common.
Several reasons, heavy mineralization in the red clay and even the black dirt, tiny bits of naturally occurring iron infused into most of the soil and not only the normal little bits of rusty iron nails and such but as the city was being built the large local iron and steel industry got rid of a lot of their garbage and slag by mixing it into the dirt used for landfill just about everywhere in both commercial and most residential areas.
I know many of you hunt in heavy iron sites but here the whole city is like that and has frustrated many right out of the hobby because if it.
Me, I'm stubborn and have worked for the last 6 months to break this code figure out and ID what is really going on down there and dig the deeper great targets that nobody knew existed and have done well.
I can reach the 6" level easily now, a perfect place to find all kinds of great targets but I have even gone past and dug a few great things in the 7-8" area and in this soil that is saying something.
Awhile ago I figured out several good settings and techniques to avoid the iron and dig the good stuff by looking for blocks of numbers that seem to repeat...again there are never any solid stable non jumping signals here like I had back in the good soil in Kansas and there are drops to iron on most every movement of the coil.
At first I dug a lot if iron but I eventually got better and way less iron started coming up from the depths and instead more great old coins popped up instead by watching for signals that stay within a range with few if any drops to the lower areas.
They were few and far between but that worked well and old wheaties, IH's and silver coins were usually down there plus some gold and silver jewelry.
Yesterday I started digging more of the signals that did drop down to iron more than before but still seemed to stay within blocks in the higher ranges.
The numbers really don't matter, it is how big and repeating those blocks of numbers were and usually from at least two directions.
A cool thing about the high end F series is they are designed to up average all signals around iron which is a great thing for me.
Just about everything comes in crazy high if it is deeper because if all this iron, even nickels can come in at the 80's-low 90's if they are deep, but that is part of the new language I had to learn and even though a bunch of rusted iron does too I have noticed behavior that lets me avoid most of that.
Yesterday I started out digging more rusty iron bits than I wanted to but as the day went on I dug less and less of that and more and more of those heavily masked wheats instead.
By the end if the day it got to the point I would open a hole and a coin would be in that 5-6" hole just about every time.
This is how I learn...trial and error and tons of practice.
This was a great lesson learned and I now need to get back to a few of the different older parks around here and see what happens.
I really don't know what helped me out more, using the bigger DD coil with the longer scanning field or something I noticed that made me dig those up and down bouncy signals more than I have in the past.
I wish I could tell you exactly what it was in those jumpy signals that made me decide to dig them but at this point I don't really know...but I will figure it out and report back when I do.
All I know is I dug a lot of iron and then eventually hardly any and found a bunch of hidden high tone good targets instead.
By the way there were some really weird things going on around a few of these wheats but right now I don't know why.
I had some really low numbers on some deeper stuff not really normal but not up averaged either, I had one or two one way hits from all angles and some other strange things.
Again, don't ask me why I dug them, these are signals I usually avoided in the past and I quit digging all signals I come across long ago...still no longer have the patience to do that.
Evidently I did learn something new through all of this so now I need to keep practicing and get it all down to an instinctual level.
Man I love learning new things using my detectors and in this crazy soil it seems like if you want to be successful you need to do that on every hunt.
No silver on my trip through these lawns but that's fine...I love the wheats, I can and will go back and I learned some new skills to find any if they are there in the future.
For you Fisher guys these were my settings...
Disc at 23, I just didn't feel like listening to those iron grunts all day and this knocked out a lot of that and most other small trash.
I got fleeting 80's and low 90's numbers as I moved the coil all day so I knew I was swinging over iron but I just didn't hear the low grunts.
Sense was moved up and down between 70 and 90....didn't seem to make a difference on depth but I kept it higher when I could.
Thresh was at -4...kept the F70 pretty quiet and still picked up some small targets, anyway.
Tones were at 1F all day...I could tell the shallow stuff from the VCO modulation and the single tone did not mentally fatigue me.
If I was using my usual coin shooting 4H that would have driven me crazy fairly quickly with all the high tone iron jumping.
My wheat pic below pluses all the other stuff I found.
A Tex-A-Toy play nickel curiously the size of a dime but marked 1954...some kind of lapel pin that is not solid but appears to be gold plated...a sticker off a bottle of whisky bought straight from the brewery, several keys, a part of a toy gun and a bunch of more modern clad.
I had a great day.
Never found this many wheaties in one day before, and I found them in areas I hunted before.
They ranged from the 20's to the 30's, 40's and the 50's , a few from each decade, all were at the 5-6.5" level.
Another in a series of what I am learning about hunting here in the south in case some of you can gleam something that might help you out in similar circumstances.
Yesterday I took a trip through 3 small front lawns in my neighborhood.
I live near a college and a bunch of students rent these old homes so they don't care what I do and all say just go for it...so I do.
I have hit all three before a few times and found a few old wheaties and some other stuff, even an old pocket watch in one, but I was using the F70 and small sniper coil every time and tried to go slow and really overlap but evidently missed some things.
Two changes on this hunt...I switched to the big DD F75 coil and started digging some of the more jumpy signals I passed over before.
Many know this soil I hunt in here in the city is extra specially difficult.
Nothing past 3" is ever a solid signal, actually 2" is more common.
Several reasons, heavy mineralization in the red clay and even the black dirt, tiny bits of naturally occurring iron infused into most of the soil and not only the normal little bits of rusty iron nails and such but as the city was being built the large local iron and steel industry got rid of a lot of their garbage and slag by mixing it into the dirt used for landfill just about everywhere in both commercial and most residential areas.
I know many of you hunt in heavy iron sites but here the whole city is like that and has frustrated many right out of the hobby because if it.
Me, I'm stubborn and have worked for the last 6 months to break this code figure out and ID what is really going on down there and dig the deeper great targets that nobody knew existed and have done well.
I can reach the 6" level easily now, a perfect place to find all kinds of great targets but I have even gone past and dug a few great things in the 7-8" area and in this soil that is saying something.
Awhile ago I figured out several good settings and techniques to avoid the iron and dig the good stuff by looking for blocks of numbers that seem to repeat...again there are never any solid stable non jumping signals here like I had back in the good soil in Kansas and there are drops to iron on most every movement of the coil.
At first I dug a lot if iron but I eventually got better and way less iron started coming up from the depths and instead more great old coins popped up instead by watching for signals that stay within a range with few if any drops to the lower areas.
They were few and far between but that worked well and old wheaties, IH's and silver coins were usually down there plus some gold and silver jewelry.
Yesterday I started digging more of the signals that did drop down to iron more than before but still seemed to stay within blocks in the higher ranges.
The numbers really don't matter, it is how big and repeating those blocks of numbers were and usually from at least two directions.
A cool thing about the high end F series is they are designed to up average all signals around iron which is a great thing for me.
Just about everything comes in crazy high if it is deeper because if all this iron, even nickels can come in at the 80's-low 90's if they are deep, but that is part of the new language I had to learn and even though a bunch of rusted iron does too I have noticed behavior that lets me avoid most of that.
Yesterday I started out digging more rusty iron bits than I wanted to but as the day went on I dug less and less of that and more and more of those heavily masked wheats instead.
By the end if the day it got to the point I would open a hole and a coin would be in that 5-6" hole just about every time.
This is how I learn...trial and error and tons of practice.
This was a great lesson learned and I now need to get back to a few of the different older parks around here and see what happens.
I really don't know what helped me out more, using the bigger DD coil with the longer scanning field or something I noticed that made me dig those up and down bouncy signals more than I have in the past.
I wish I could tell you exactly what it was in those jumpy signals that made me decide to dig them but at this point I don't really know...but I will figure it out and report back when I do.
All I know is I dug a lot of iron and then eventually hardly any and found a bunch of hidden high tone good targets instead.
By the way there were some really weird things going on around a few of these wheats but right now I don't know why.
I had some really low numbers on some deeper stuff not really normal but not up averaged either, I had one or two one way hits from all angles and some other strange things.
Again, don't ask me why I dug them, these are signals I usually avoided in the past and I quit digging all signals I come across long ago...still no longer have the patience to do that.
Evidently I did learn something new through all of this so now I need to keep practicing and get it all down to an instinctual level.
Man I love learning new things using my detectors and in this crazy soil it seems like if you want to be successful you need to do that on every hunt.
No silver on my trip through these lawns but that's fine...I love the wheats, I can and will go back and I learned some new skills to find any if they are there in the future.
For you Fisher guys these were my settings...
Disc at 23, I just didn't feel like listening to those iron grunts all day and this knocked out a lot of that and most other small trash.
I got fleeting 80's and low 90's numbers as I moved the coil all day so I knew I was swinging over iron but I just didn't hear the low grunts.
Sense was moved up and down between 70 and 90....didn't seem to make a difference on depth but I kept it higher when I could.
Thresh was at -4...kept the F70 pretty quiet and still picked up some small targets, anyway.
Tones were at 1F all day...I could tell the shallow stuff from the VCO modulation and the single tone did not mentally fatigue me.
If I was using my usual coin shooting 4H that would have driven me crazy fairly quickly with all the high tone iron jumping.
My wheat pic below pluses all the other stuff I found.
A Tex-A-Toy play nickel curiously the size of a dime but marked 1954...some kind of lapel pin that is not solid but appears to be gold plated...a sticker off a bottle of whisky bought straight from the brewery, several keys, a part of a toy gun and a bunch of more modern clad.
I had a great day.
