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JUST CURIOUS HOW YOU GUYS GOT STARTED IN METAL DETECTING
- Thread starter asiandigger
- Start date
ChicagoJohn
New member
In 1970's I fish a pond in park almost everyday near my home in Chicago. I see an old man metal detecting almost everyday so I came to see what he find anything. I like it but I cant because I am deaf. About 5 years ago that I found out about metal detector have digtal numbers plus vibration phone so I am hooked. I first use Bounty Hunter Alone Star for first year and don't do well then I upgrade to Garette 1500 then Minelab Safari and now I use Minelab Etrac! Love to find old coins! My personal best..... 1825 Large Cent, 1864 Two Cent, 1868 Sheild Nickel, 1899 Barber Dime, 1942 Walker Half Dollar. I found 5 indian head cents this year. Not bad for deaf!
WV62
Well-known member
Well there are 3 of us brothers and I am the oldest, and I was kind of the first to have any interest in detecting. But my dad beat me to the draw.
When I came home from Vietnam in 1971, my dad was gone from our family and started another so we didn’t have a lot of contact.
I was at a local gun store and noticed the detectors on the wall and I didn’t know one thing about them but they caught my eye. I think the brand was Jedco (not sure of the spelling) but I bought one. I took it home and studied the small manual and it stated that the coil was water proof. So off to the creek I went, turned it on and checked it out all is okay, put it in the water and in a few seconds it quit working. So I took it back to the store and exchanged it for another. Same thing the coil was not water proof. I went through all 5 of the machines he had in his store and when I took the last one back I said just give me that bicycle.
So I was done with detecting, until some time later for some reason I ran into my dad. Here he came out with this White’s 5000D detector and started telling me all about it. Now the fire was light and it wasn’t going out this time. I bought a 5000D, then a 5000Di series 2, then a 6000 and on and on.
Then came the day that work started interfering with my detecting and again I had to put them down until 2010 when I retired. I can’t remember when I bought a CZ-5 but at the time I retired I had one in the closet still like new. So after I retired I dug it out and fired it up and headed for the park. Right off I got a silver dime. I had to have a better machine, so I order a Fisher F75Ltd.
So now I am 67 and I am on my last round of detecting.
Ron in WV
When I came home from Vietnam in 1971, my dad was gone from our family and started another so we didn’t have a lot of contact.
I was at a local gun store and noticed the detectors on the wall and I didn’t know one thing about them but they caught my eye. I think the brand was Jedco (not sure of the spelling) but I bought one. I took it home and studied the small manual and it stated that the coil was water proof. So off to the creek I went, turned it on and checked it out all is okay, put it in the water and in a few seconds it quit working. So I took it back to the store and exchanged it for another. Same thing the coil was not water proof. I went through all 5 of the machines he had in his store and when I took the last one back I said just give me that bicycle.
So I was done with detecting, until some time later for some reason I ran into my dad. Here he came out with this White’s 5000D detector and started telling me all about it. Now the fire was light and it wasn’t going out this time. I bought a 5000D, then a 5000Di series 2, then a 6000 and on and on.
Then came the day that work started interfering with my detecting and again I had to put them down until 2010 when I retired. I can’t remember when I bought a CZ-5 but at the time I retired I had one in the closet still like new. So after I retired I dug it out and fired it up and headed for the park. Right off I got a silver dime. I had to have a better machine, so I order a Fisher F75Ltd.
So now I am 67 and I am on my last round of detecting.
Ron in WV
silverseeker 2
Well-known member
When I was a sophomore in high school me and my buds would sit on the school roof
and hang out having discovered the taste of Beer. Across the street was an old,old park
and we would see these "Ol timers" swingin their gieger counters we used to say. These
guys were always around swingin. The year is 1973. Never knew what they were into.
So years later I bought my first and only house right on the corner.So one day the wife,
kids(4), and I were in Walmart and they had a Pioneer 101 (bounty hunter's cheapest)
on sale and we took a vote and bought one. When we got home we started searching and
the Items found just amazed me. (silver coins, clad, jewelry,tokens junk, etc. etc.).
Well I now know those "Ol timers" were pulling out massive amounts of silver coins
and many other goodies. So with the finds from the Bounty hunter I was HOOKED. The
kids also had a ball using it and digging up cool targets.So after a month of getting out
with the BH 101 I decided to upgrade to a ML EX xs and after some finds with that
machine I became a LIFER and this is now my Passion. Have even started a Collection of
Detectors. (Modern, Vintage) Now looking to Water Hunt here in Chicago... Have made
many friends along the way and have attended many seeded hunts and a couple Relic outings.
Detecting isn't an every day thing for me but when I am out I can't "GET ENOUGH OF IT"
silverseeker 2
and hang out having discovered the taste of Beer. Across the street was an old,old park
and we would see these "Ol timers" swingin their gieger counters we used to say. These
guys were always around swingin. The year is 1973. Never knew what they were into.
So years later I bought my first and only house right on the corner.So one day the wife,
kids(4), and I were in Walmart and they had a Pioneer 101 (bounty hunter's cheapest)
on sale and we took a vote and bought one. When we got home we started searching and
the Items found just amazed me. (silver coins, clad, jewelry,tokens junk, etc. etc.).
Well I now know those "Ol timers" were pulling out massive amounts of silver coins
and many other goodies. So with the finds from the Bounty hunter I was HOOKED. The
kids also had a ball using it and digging up cool targets.So after a month of getting out
with the BH 101 I decided to upgrade to a ML EX xs and after some finds with that
machine I became a LIFER and this is now my Passion. Have even started a Collection of
Detectors. (Modern, Vintage) Now looking to Water Hunt here in Chicago... Have made
many friends along the way and have attended many seeded hunts and a couple Relic outings.
Detecting isn't an every day thing for me but when I am out I can't "GET ENOUGH OF IT"
silverseeker 2
Late 1960's I was working for CALTRANS (then Calif Dept of Transportation) in the Bay Area doing traffic census. A lot of that work involved taking data from roadway loops. The detectors ran (as I recall) about 70 kHz and worked by an off-resonance principle. And, were designed to be powered by AC for use in traffic signal cabinets. For locations where there was no electric power, we hauled around a box with about 200 pounds of lead-acid batteries. Battery maintenance was a basic part of our operation.
I decided screw this, I'm gonna design and build a low power unit from scratch, operating on different principles. I didn't know anything about commercial hand-held units other than (obviously) BFO and no way that principle was going to work on a traffic loop. What I came up with ran off a zinc-carbon 9 volt "transistor battery", frequency about 15-20 kHz, detection principle was strictly phase shift using a CMOS XOR gate. Took it out to the Brisbane Curve 101 freeway traffic census loops and hooked it up.
Well, it worked, but not quite the way I expected. First off, it was so drifty as to be virtually unusable: back then I didn't know anything about flicker noise, and metal gate CMOS is extremely noisy in the flicker region. And because it was so low power, vehicles with noisy ignition systems made it horribly nervous. But, it did detect vehicles.
The surprise was that the response was positive on cars, and negative on trucks. Totally unexpected. I'd inadvertently built a discriminator and it took a lot of head-scratching to figure out how it worked. Answer: cars have body pans, trucks have frame rails. .......About that time I changed jobs and that was the end of playing around with metal detectors until 1981 when I went to work for Fisher.
Meanwhile, that same discrimination principle I discovered in 1970 is something you can see with most metal detectors nowadays. Flat steel tends to look nonferrous, whereas nails etc. usually register ferrous.
--Dave J.
I decided screw this, I'm gonna design and build a low power unit from scratch, operating on different principles. I didn't know anything about commercial hand-held units other than (obviously) BFO and no way that principle was going to work on a traffic loop. What I came up with ran off a zinc-carbon 9 volt "transistor battery", frequency about 15-20 kHz, detection principle was strictly phase shift using a CMOS XOR gate. Took it out to the Brisbane Curve 101 freeway traffic census loops and hooked it up.
Well, it worked, but not quite the way I expected. First off, it was so drifty as to be virtually unusable: back then I didn't know anything about flicker noise, and metal gate CMOS is extremely noisy in the flicker region. And because it was so low power, vehicles with noisy ignition systems made it horribly nervous. But, it did detect vehicles.
The surprise was that the response was positive on cars, and negative on trucks. Totally unexpected. I'd inadvertently built a discriminator and it took a lot of head-scratching to figure out how it worked. Answer: cars have body pans, trucks have frame rails. .......About that time I changed jobs and that was the end of playing around with metal detectors until 1981 when I went to work for Fisher.
Meanwhile, that same discrimination principle I discovered in 1970 is something you can see with most metal detectors nowadays. Flat steel tends to look nonferrous, whereas nails etc. usually register ferrous.
--Dave J.
I was in Jr. High school (7th & 8th grade) in about 1975-76-ish. A fellow student there had a couple of brothers who were 18 to 20 yrs. older than him (they were old enough to be his father! He had nephews that were almost his age, etc....). His older brothers had already served in the military, come home and started families, etc..... The oldest of the brothers had, in about 1962 or so, been leafing through the pages of one of those "Arizona Deserts" or "True West" type of magazines. And in the classified ads in the back, had spotted a little line ad that said "Find Buried Treasure". He sent off for a catalog. And soon, a Whites Co. catalog was in his mail-box. From that he chose a big BFO whites Detector. And by 1963 or so was plying the local school yards around here for loose change. Soon his other brother got into it. At the time, I think they were amongst the first ever to be doing that around here (to anyone's knowledge). They never really found super old stuff, nor expanded to anything very exotic. Just run-of-mill schools was their normal spots. And go figure: Silver was still in circulation. That plus , go figure, minimum wage was probably still only .75c per hour or whatever, so to get a buck an hour in modern change was fun I suppose 
By the early 1970s, their youngest brother (my school chum) wanted in on the action. So they got him a Compass 77b (or it might have been a 94b auto), to "keep him occupied". While the older brother swung their big box 66tr's, etc.... Imagine their surprise when that little green box machine out-hunted the older brothers! This was a time when I suppose that the mind-set must have been "the bigger the better", haha
So one day, in about '75 or '76, the school friend invites me along. Went with him to a school built in 1921. I was his "digger boy". I distinctly remember we dug some clad, some wheaties, a buffalo, etc.... I was hooked! I gathered up my entire summer job savings that I'd made picking apples, and plunked down $100 on a used Whites 66TR. That was about the summer of '76. And even by then, that machine was already a dinasour. Guys with discriminators were "kicking our b#tts". So I graduated up to a Garret Groundhog in about 1979 or 1980-ish. But again, that too was, by then, a dinasour, as guys with 6000D's were "kicking my b#tt". And so on and so forth throughout the evolution of the different machines.
I even saw a few BFO's still in use in the mid 1970s. One in particular still in use, the other just more of a curiosity piece. So I can almost say that I "saw the entire" evolution, as those were ground-breaking years to be evolving through the different incarnations.
By the early 1970s, their youngest brother (my school chum) wanted in on the action. So they got him a Compass 77b (or it might have been a 94b auto), to "keep him occupied". While the older brother swung their big box 66tr's, etc.... Imagine their surprise when that little green box machine out-hunted the older brothers! This was a time when I suppose that the mind-set must have been "the bigger the better", haha
So one day, in about '75 or '76, the school friend invites me along. Went with him to a school built in 1921. I was his "digger boy". I distinctly remember we dug some clad, some wheaties, a buffalo, etc.... I was hooked! I gathered up my entire summer job savings that I'd made picking apples, and plunked down $100 on a used Whites 66TR. That was about the summer of '76. And even by then, that machine was already a dinasour. Guys with discriminators were "kicking our b#tts". So I graduated up to a Garret Groundhog in about 1979 or 1980-ish. But again, that too was, by then, a dinasour, as guys with 6000D's were "kicking my b#tt". And so on and so forth throughout the evolution of the different machines.
I even saw a few BFO's still in use in the mid 1970s. One in particular still in use, the other just more of a curiosity piece. So I can almost say that I "saw the entire" evolution, as those were ground-breaking years to be evolving through the different incarnations.
Ever since I was maybe 8-10yrs old I've always loved old coins and every time I'd scrape up a buck or two I'd head down to the coin shop and buy a coin. First coin I bought was a Columbian Exposition commemorative half and paid $2 for it. Dabbled in and out of coin collecting for years and soon realized it's a loser game financially on the collector side unless you deal with really high grade RARE coins. The love of old coins is still inside me although I don't play the collector price/dealer price game anymore. In '91 or '92(?) I'd just got out of jail after doing a year and I bought the Tesoro Golden Sabre II in my sig below and started coin shooting to kinda keep me off the streets....lol. My goal was to pay for the machine asap ($429) so I spent almost every single day banging out coins in all the usual spots for 6-9hrs per hunt. Paid for the GSII in 7-8 months. Once I paid for the machine I started to seek out the older coins and happened to come upon a tearout in a popular North Idaho park. The 25' x 25' area gave me my first seated dime, my first V, my first Buffie, a nice Merc, and some IH's! I was hooked then! I had just got done gridding that tearout and here comes some other guy with a tector. He's late tho as I've already cleaned it out good! We are talking and I show him my coins and he asks me if I searched under the one Pepsi can laying in the tearout? I tell him no...so he kicks the can away and searches where the can was and the sob finds a 1900 Barbie quarter....!!!!! Lesson learned. I used that GSII for around 22yrs and dug a lot of nice coins. I used to be in the beep & dig "the more you dig- the more you find" camp but I'm older now, had some health issues, cancer, bad back, etc. and have slowed down. Currently swing an etrac for almost 2 years now and wished I would have had it 20 years ago..... Anyways, it is the love of old coins that got me into tecting. Funny thing is that I have some graded old gold double eagles and also gold bullion coins but they mean nothing to me compared to a worn Barbie dime THAT I FOUND & DUG UP? I have never sold any of my older coins I've dug......and never will.
good story. Like the part about accidentally stumbling on to, and "wising up" to old-town urban tearouts. Such was the story around here, where ..... some guys "wised up" back in the 1970s and started following tractors at an old-town urban demolitions.
I remember thinking, at the time: "That's silly ! How can anyone loose coins UNDER a sidewalk??" Or if I'd seen the grass scraped out at an old-town park, I'd have thought "sheesk, they're ruining the metal detecting", without thinking for a moment that THAT'S the time to dive in ! doh!
I remember thinking, at the time: "That's silly ! How can anyone loose coins UNDER a sidewalk??" Or if I'd seen the grass scraped out at an old-town park, I'd have thought "sheesk, they're ruining the metal detecting", without thinking for a moment that THAT'S the time to dive in ! doh!
HanoverDigger
Well-known member
My brother got me started. He had a buddy that got him started. My brother and I rented an old fisher detector and we were lucky enough to have relatives who lived in Chancellorsville,Va. We were taking turns (he was first of course) and the first find was a complete Schenkle shell. After that, the bug had bit me good. We've been hunting buddies now for 30 years. We hunted at my aunt and uncle's up until they passed away.
asiandigger
New member
Wow everyone has a different story to tell. I'll tell you guys how I got started. When I was a kid there was always a guy metal detecting the park where I play. I don't know what detector he was using but I remember he didn't have a pin pointer he was probing everything with a screw driver. Always been fascinated since then but didn't get into about 3 years ago.
Some where back in the early 60s. I mowed yards for $2.00 a yard. Tell the kids today to do that. I had money saved up for something. One day I went to an auction with my dad. I have heard of metal detectors before. Any way, at the auction there was a metal detector coming up. I rememder it said on the side BFO metal detector. I begged my dad to get it for me. Only one other person was bidding on it. Well, we got it for $15.00. No batteries to check it out. I paid dad back as soon as we got home. Road my bike to the hardwear, got batteries. That thing had a funny hum. It humed loud over a target. Back than, you dug a lot of iron and hand fulls of silver coins. The rest is history... KEN from Ind.
wvrick
Active member
I spent summer vacation at my Uncle in Florida in the mid-60's he was big into treasure hunting with a vintage modified mine detector (vacuum tube type). I still remember going hunting on the beach in Florida near Vero Beach. That old detector had this homemade coil he hunted with, I seen a lot of silver and a little gold come out of the sand. We took his old jeep up the coast and hunted for hours daily. First detector ever used was a Whites Goldmaster S63 (also vac tube) mid-60's. Then in 70' my Father started hunting as well, and I hunted until the end of high school when I was involved in other things. After working a couple years out of school around 79' ~ 80 I bought a detector off MarkCZ... if I remember right it was a Tesoro T/R machine and it's been on since then.
I befriended what later became my best friend for life and he took me outside on our lunch break and showed me a Whites TR. If you held a coin in the center of the coil, it would pick it up.
Then he showed me some treasure mags and I was hooked for life. My first detector was a $59 Tiny Tex bfo made by Dtex mfg.
Then he showed me some treasure mags and I was hooked for life. My first detector was a $59 Tiny Tex bfo made by Dtex mfg.LOL that good ole whites commercial that use to come on. late at night ! more I saw it the more I dreamed about getting a detector. Back then it was the Quantum machines and XLT rainbow was new to the scene. Well I had my heart set on QXT dealer talked me into a brand new Spectrum XLT with that purty rainbow coil. Made me a deal I couldn't refuse LOL I still got the original sales receipt to this day kicking around somewhere . Ps I just picked up a nice QXT Pro a couple of weeks ago. That's how I got into detecting
always diggin 2
Member
BOUGHT A BOUNTY HUNTER TRACKER 4 IN 2005 TO TRY AND FIND MY PROPERTY MARKERS DID FIND 2 OF THEM ALSO FOUND 84 CENTS IN CHANGE IN THE DRIVEWAY A BUNCH OF CANS PULLTABS ECT. ENDED UP IN THE CLOSET. IN OCT 2010 I WAS SITTING IN MY CHAIR WATCHING T V WENT TO CHANGE CHANNELS AND THE BATTERIES IN THE REMOTE WENT DEAD I THOUGHT MAN NOW I HAVE TO GET UP TO CHANGE THE CHANNEL, THEN IT HIT ME ; HOW DID I GET SO LAZY! I THOUGHT ABOUT THE METAL DETECTOR IN THE CLOSET SO I HAD TO GO GET BATTERIES FOR THE REMOTE SO WHY NOT GET SOME FOR THE DETECTOR TOO, GOT HOME PUT BATTERIES IN THE TRACKER 4 WASN'T OUTSIDE IN YARD 15 MINUTES AND FOUND A 1929 MERCURY DIME! BEEN GOING EVER SINCE! LOL!
woodchiphustler
New member
In 1969 with a metro tech. Hunting old D.C. Parks.