Being rather new with my VX3, and living in the country, I have a lot of old farms, and fields where farms used to be, that I'm allowed to hunt on. If any of you can at least find one place like this, I highly recommend that you give it a try. This will give you a great idea on how your machine reacts to lots of different junk and maybe some good stuff if your lucky enough. I have also taken different kinds of gold rings and coins with me, to plant them at different depths and I also take some pull tabs from previous hunts (obviously you could do this also if you have a garden). The great thing about the fields are that you can dig like crazy and not have to worry about hurting anything, the farmer could care less. I've come to know my machine much better as I dug almost everything that was junk or good, just to see what the machine was really saying. Can't remember who said this earlier in this forum, but when you are reading something much deeper than usual, that might be a time to dig. Now on an old farm homestead that is gone, it's usually junk as they have possibly bull dozed when the old place was leveled, or years of plowing and tilling have caused junk to go deep, but like I said, it's a field, dig away and see what the machine is saying.