It's like everything else in life...it takes money to play and those with more of it, can have the better toys. It can be frustrating but that's just part of it. In bass fishing there are these new high tech sonar units that can cover huge swaths of the bottom of the lake in one pass with the boat....they can show you in picture like detail what is on the bottom, off to the left side of the boat, directly under neath the boat, and off to the right of the boat. It's so detailed you can pick out individual cement blocks and tires on the bottom of the lake. In addition to that, you can pause the screen while you're still idling around and put a cursor on top of whatever it is you've found, and mark it with GPS...and be able to go right back to that exact spot. As a fisherman, marking brushpiles or sunken trees was something that took HOURS to do, because a few yrs ago technology was only so far as to being able to see vague sonar readings of things DIRECTLY under the boat....meaning you had to basically grid search with the boat to find things like that...and hope you passed directly over top of it to be able to find it...and then had to mark it with a floating buoy. Now there's no buoys to fool with....GPS took that away...and now you can make one or two passes through an entire cove, and see every piece of structure on the bottom....mark all of it, and go sit right on top of it. It is a very advanced technology and can be had in any boat by anybody....as long as you pay the $2,500 for the unit...and additional $600 for the tranducer to be able to do it with. That is a big chunk of change. I would love to have one of them in the boat....sure would be a huge advantage to have. I know people that have them and they do extremely well tournament fishing by being able to fish certain spots they have found and marked that would take somebody like me with traditional sonar, several hours/days/weeks of gridding to be able to find. That's just one example of people having better toys. More and more people are getting it....but it don't mean the fish are disappearing at an alarming rate.
The same will be with detectors man. I go to the Diggin in VA hunts. Just a few years ago, everybody was on the same playing field as far as machines go....everybody was using VLF machines and trying to learn how their machines read targets in the dirt. Targets were always found and it was fun for all. Then somebody decided to try a pulse machine there....and set the world on fire doing it. I think one person started it with a GPX 3500 series...and filled like 3 huge display cases full of relics...he had one per each day of the hunt. That put everybody in shock. This guy was going to find ALL the relics. So the next hunt, a few people had brought what they could afford in a pulse machine....a Garrett Infinium and lo and behold...they started finding more than the VLF people. By this time, Whites had came out with the TDI and a few people got those and did better than the VLFs and Infiniums. Then a few people decided they would try for the GPX 4000 and 4500....since the original guy with the GPX seemed to always find way more than everybody else. Well suddenly they have found twice as much with the GPXs as everybody else. Now everybody has a TDI or GPX and people that can't afford to buy those kind of units are sitting on the outside looking in. It's a little discouraging when your buddy has one and you don't....and you've hunted along side of him for all day and have found one bullet....and at lunch he's already had to go to the truck to empty his pouch from all the weight of the bullets and relics he has found....and every time you want to hear one of his signals, you can't get even a break in the threshold on your machine and stand there to watch him dig another bullet or something out. That very thing happened to me and a friend of mine on one of the hunts....I had a pulse machine and he did not....he stuck around the rest of the day when I had over 60 bullets, a plate, and several buttons....he had one bullet for all day. He went home the next day...didn't even hunt the other two days, and hasn't been back and vows to not return til he has a pulse machine of his own. I wish I could afford another GPX....for relic hunting there is nothing better...and for those with them, there is no competition for bad dirt and getting relics out of the ground. But it would be selfish of me to not wish for something better than GPX to come along...or for others to not be able to get one because the sites will eventually run out, just because I can't get one.
