Critterhunter
New member
Somebody brought up a good point in another thread. How much depth is too much depth to be useful for coin hunting? I mean, there comes a point in depth where you'd no longer want to dig targets, unless of course you are beach hunting where it's easy to do, or cache hunting where it might be several feet down. For old coin hunting on land what would your limit be? For me I'd say about 14 or 15". Don't want to dig any deeper than that, and really wouldn't even want to dig that deep on a regular basis.
I bet the vast majority of coins still out there to be found are less than 14" deep, unless of course fill was placed over the ground or something. There probably aren't too many natural soil conditions out there in most states that would cause a coin to sink further than that in 100 years or more.
It's hard for even the best of detectors that can handle rough ground such as Minelabs to get good classic coin signals past say about 8 or 9" in many soils. Sure, you read about deeper ones dug (I've dug a few real deep ones myself at about 11"), but much of that depends on just how good (neutral) the ground is your hunting in.
So what's the max depth ability you'd want on coins? Curious to hear people's opinions on this. As said, for me with about 14 or 15" of depth ability in somewhat mineralized ground I'd be fairly confident that I'm not missing anything when it comes to coins. Besides the real deep ones like this, the rest are shallower (even real shallow) but masked by trash or iron to the point that they haven't been discovered yet.
So there still is room for improvement to meet my criteria (14 or 15"), at least in your typical soil with moderate to heavy mineralization where it's rare to be able to reach that deep in those types of soils with even the best that technology has to offer today. Neutral good black soil is rare. Most people are probably hunting ground that contains some degree of mineralization and they don't even realize it. I have read stories of people with my machine reaching around 14" or so on a coin on land, but I would bet that's in really good neutral soil and probably under ideal wet conditions. My 11" coins I've dug hit so hard and ID'd well that I feel they could have been deeper and I still would have got a good signal on them, but that was under good wet soil conditions.
I bet the vast majority of coins still out there to be found are less than 14" deep, unless of course fill was placed over the ground or something. There probably aren't too many natural soil conditions out there in most states that would cause a coin to sink further than that in 100 years or more.
It's hard for even the best of detectors that can handle rough ground such as Minelabs to get good classic coin signals past say about 8 or 9" in many soils. Sure, you read about deeper ones dug (I've dug a few real deep ones myself at about 11"), but much of that depends on just how good (neutral) the ground is your hunting in.
So what's the max depth ability you'd want on coins? Curious to hear people's opinions on this. As said, for me with about 14 or 15" of depth ability in somewhat mineralized ground I'd be fairly confident that I'm not missing anything when it comes to coins. Besides the real deep ones like this, the rest are shallower (even real shallow) but masked by trash or iron to the point that they haven't been discovered yet.
So there still is room for improvement to meet my criteria (14 or 15"), at least in your typical soil with moderate to heavy mineralization where it's rare to be able to reach that deep in those types of soils with even the best that technology has to offer today. Neutral good black soil is rare. Most people are probably hunting ground that contains some degree of mineralization and they don't even realize it. I have read stories of people with my machine reaching around 14" or so on a coin on land, but I would bet that's in really good neutral soil and probably under ideal wet conditions. My 11" coins I've dug hit so hard and ID'd well that I feel they could have been deeper and I still would have got a good signal on them, but that was under good wet soil conditions.
