I know, been there. ID machines are great up to a point, especially if you just want pennies, nickles, dimes and quarters.
But, if you want gold and small silver, ditch the meter.
Not that there is anything wrong with small change... it can add up fast. My annual total is waaaaay down this time, due to far less detecting than in 2008 than in previous years. I've only hit hard the last 3 months.
But once the tumbler is done and all is rolled, I'll break $100 easily.
Had I detected regularly and other facets of life not gotten in the way, that would have doubled... maybe tripled. My best year, I nearly broke $400 - just in small change!
Now it is true that gold and silver can be all over the discrimination scale, so you must dig everything. You are dead right on that, Sven. So along those lines, I'll give a little personal comment, here:
Lately I've been detecting in two phases - cherry picking AND mid range recovery. I don't stop to dig everything all at once.
I know this sounds a little controversial, but hang in there.
What I have started doing is setting my DISC controls to knock out all but nickels, cents and the payola's (.$10, $.25, $.50 and $1 coins). Then I dig those hits, IGNORING all others.
I can move along pretty quickly this way, efficiently scooping the coin targets. Large silver targets will invariably come through in this step.
Next I switch to accept all targets, from foil to coins and retrace my steps. Whats is left is a ton of foil, pull tabs, screw caps and so on - along with whatever gold jewelry or small silver which may be there. You will also recover the occasional coin that was masked by trash in the first pass.
Now, to make this work, there needs to be easy diggings and a 'clad crowd' which has been present in large numbers. But if those two conditions are met, segregating out the two regimes like this makes it possible to cover each target grouping with more focus and efficiency. Think of it like this:
Imagine you were a machinist, given the task of turning out a large lot of like, individually made pieces. You could either do each one by hand, painstakingly performing each manufacturing step to each part. Or, you could set up a production line, and do each step quickly to each piece as part of a group of parts.
In the first method, it takes forever to get done, switching tools, fiddling with and resetting pieces, etc. The second way is much more efficient and is what put Henry Ford on the map.
Treating our detecting the same way, offers the same benefits. You actually spend a little less time doing it in this tiered fashion, while gaining a huge amount of focus. If you are REEEEAAAALLLY interested in gold jewelry, you can knuckle down and eliminate all coin signals but nickels and only dig the mid range.
Now this is disciplined hunting, and you need a taste for trash. Also, some particular equipment is needed to pull it off.
It works best if you have a machine with a notching function and selectable DISC features. Then you can avoid all the knob twiddling and target evaluation hoo-haw that tends to bog you down with lesser machines. This nearly always means a mid, to high price, TID machine with a meter, since only a few detectors with such features lack a meter. The Tesoro Golden is one example of a non-metered machine that is perfect for this sort of hunting. There a few others, but you'll have to go the used market to find them.
So, as much as I want to say, "Be a purist and Dig It All" I have to change that a bit. In the past I would have smugly said that, but now I'll say,
"Dig It All - But Do It In Phases."
