Omega 8000: How to hunt 500 abandonded homes built in the 1940s

[imi_wakaranai]

My Omega with 3 coils will be arriving in about a week. I have been out of the hobby for about 3 or 4 years. My entry back into the hobby was sparked by the closing of several neighborhoods of US military houses overseas on base. I estimate there to be about 500 homes with front & back lawns. The neighborhoods are abandoned, with not even cars driving through the streets. It is all mine. My main mission is to collect silver coins, and I know there must be more than a few pocketfuls in those yards. These houses were built up after WWII and have been occupied up until a few months ago. For the past 60 years, each house has been lived in on average of at least 20 families. Talk about history! These houses were cleared because there are plans to flatten them and put up large family towers (military apartments). I don't know when construction will start, but it isn't too soon, I don't think, because the roads are still open, and they haven't started gutting the houses and removing the AC units.

When I was hunting 4 years ago I was mainly a beach guy, hunting in all metal with the CZ-20. I have done some land detecting with a DFX around this time-frame, but have much more beach experience. What I wonder is should I even waste time digging clad, or should I just crank up the disc up and cherry pick for silver? If you think this is wise to cover ground quickly by cherry picking, how high would you crank the disc & what settings do you think will work best? I am open to suggestions, even those that tell me to dig all good signals with disc set on 16. I heard disc 16 is a good starting point for coin shooting with the Omega.

There are other detectorist, but 99% of these guys are out at the various beaches, and that is obviously a good thing for me. Honestly, on all of the bases I have never seen anyone detecting, and I have been here going on 2 decades.

Other areas that I can hit are miles of open fields that are always freshly mowed as well as dozens of ball fields. Honestly, if I don't report back here & brag about my finds, then you will know that I am a lousy hunter.

To assist with retrieval, I have a Garrett brass probe, a new Lesche digger, and a Garrett pro pin-pointer. Thanks for any tips and comments in advance.

 

[BH_Landstar_]

Congrats on the choice.

Cherry pick each item, Collect the clad too. If you are the only one there doing it there is no rush. Take your time and learn the unit and you will be on cloud nine with the things that it will find for you. the key is to be slow.

Settings should not matter too much as I am sure there will be a fair amount of trash, you just have to work round that. If the unit falses alot, turn down the sens. Hunting the beach is the same as land really, only diff is there is no water / salt to screw it up too much.

Good luck.

 

[jim tn]

Are there any plans to tear down the houses? Is any portion of the housing older then other parts? Or, was it all built at the same time? Knowing these couple of things could be a determining factor for how quickly you need to hunt and where to start. A site that large even under the best of circumstances would take a long time to hunt. If time is not of the essence, I would dig every coin target and many targets in the nickel range. On the military housing site I've been hunting, which is much smaller then yours, I've recovered 7 gold rings and all but one fell in the nickel range. Fortunately, you won't have to deal with nails, copper pipes, plumbing parts and fixtures, door hinges and knobs, and so forth, but there will be tons of tabs, screw and bottle caps, foil and such. In addition to coins and jewelry, you will find a good bit of silverware, all kinds of metal toys, including pounds of match box types of cars. Consequently, many, many good old coins are going to be masked and modern coins will mask some of the older ones. That is why I say to dig every coin signal. There just might be a nice old Merc. lurking under a newer Memorial cent. i wish I was there to help you, as those kind of sites are pretty amazing spots to hunt. Good luck! HH jim tn

 

[nikandr23]

any chances that "other wise guys" set meth lab in that area? be careful

 

[RandyNorthridgeca]

Sounds like you have a gold mine. E-mail me. You don't seem to be set up for private messages. randynorthridgeca@msn.com

 

[imi_wakaranai]

There is very little chance that there were meth labs, but thanks for the word of caution. Where I live, possession of one marijuana joint will land you behind bars for a year....no kidding.

 

[imi_wakaranai]

Randy, email sent.

 

[RandyNorthridgeca]

Got it! I'll e-mail you in a few.

 

[imi_wakaranai]

Jim TN,

I have no clue as to when they will start knocking down the buildings, and there is no way of really knowing. It will be nice to dig as much from the site as possible, but honestly there are about a dozen more bases that have 1000s of acres of virgin land at my disposal. There are dozens of ball fields, picnic areas, wide open fields, obstacle courses for military training, etc etc. Likely, I will dig all of the good coin signals for the first couple of weeks just so I can learn what the machine is telling me. I didn't consider that old coins could be masked by new coins so that is good to know. I'm looking forward to getting started. The Omega should be here in about 5 or 6 days. Thanks Jim for all of the advice.

 

[marcomo]

Meth labs on a military base? I guess stranger things have happened, but I wouldn't be too worried about that either.

My best advice would be to get hunting as soon as possible, and have fun!

Even if you don't think construction will start soon, there are good reasons for getting going ASAP.

First of all, you've got 500 homes to detect. That's a lot of ground to cover. I'm assuming you have your full-time military job, I'll also assume you have other things to do with family and friends besides detecting when not working. If that's the case, you would need years to cover it all. So the quicker you get started, the higher percentage of ground you can cover before the building starts.

It'll be a lot easier for you to detect while the houses are still standing. You'll know exactly where to hunt, and you won't have tear-down debris in the yard.

I've found good stuff in backyards, but the amount of keepers as a rule is better in the front yard. And the percentage of good stuff to trash is generally better in front yards. It's not a hard and fast rule, and backyards are definitely worth detecting, but if it comes down to the wire and you know you can't get it all done before the building starts...I'd concentrate on the fronts.

I'd also suggest using a GPS or in some other way keeping a record of some kind showing where you've detected. You may think you'll remember, but when you're doing a lot of homes it's easy to lose track.

Also be at least fairly neat in your digging and don't leave any trash. The homes are empty, and obviously neatness isn't as critical as in a well-manicured occupied yard. But if the yards are still being cut and otherwise maintained, holes and dug-up trash lying around won't be appreciated by the maintenance crew and could cause you problems if someone reports it.

With an O8, Pro-Pointer, Lesche and probe, it sounds like you're set up well.

Good luck Jason, keep us posted, and post pictures if you're inclined to do so. I'd love to see what you find, and I'm sure a lot of others here would too.

 

[otlew]

Well since you have all three coils you should be fine shape no matter what conditions you encounter. If you start hitting large numbers of silver coins, it will be payday for the crew. As we know 64 and older us coins are 90% silver and the melt value is fantastic. Right now the melt value for a silver dollar is at little over $14 in paper/clad. Two Halves, four silver quarters, or ten dimes melt for $13.11.

U.S. Silver coins are selling on Ebay at about 10 to 13 times the face value depending on quantity you purchase.

Have you read the posts that Monte made here on the Omega? Lots of tips on use of all three coils from a master detectorist who really likes the Omega 8000.

HH and keep us informed of your finds please.

 

[Ed in SoDak]

Setting a high disc to block out targets so you can cherry pick may not be a good plan to start. I'd rather hear all signals and I'll do the deciding to dig or not. When signals are disced out, you never hear them, and masking can take place of things you might otherwise hear. There's also the chance of trash and good targets merging their detected ID. If a high and low signal are close to one another, and the detector cannot separate them as individual targets, you may get just one "combined" ID that is somewhere between the two. If the resultant combined signal happens to be in a segment you have disced out, you'll hear nothing. I'd prefer to know what's under there after hunting for awhile, and only then dial in some specific level of disc once I know the predominant type of trash that's in that area, and set it only high enough to eliminate just that specific junk target.

If you have a large area where you have the place to yourself for an extended number of days or months, an effective plan might be to find and map targets as a separate step from digging them up. Keep an assortment of color-coded flags in your pouch. Anytime you hit some worthwhile sounding signals, plant a flag of whatever color you choose to denote that type of ID and move on. After covering a yard, you can look back and see the concentrations of flag colors marking trash, coins, silver or gold IDs. Now you can see any hot spots where it may pay to go back and spend time digging up the potentials to see how you fared.

You don't waste time digging every signal, yet your detector is set to reveal them to you. Once you see a pattern by looking back on your flags, you can more efficiently divide your time between searching and digging.

Since this is a new machine and area to you, spend enough time locating and digging all targets till you get familiar with things, then proceed with the flagging first, dig later plan. You'll cover more ground and keep your concentrated digging efforts to the higher-yielding spots.

My wife was an Air Force brat. She was raised at housing east of Ellsworth AFB. Those have all been leveled now and mostly reclaimed, but we can still find the foundation of the house she lived in. Oddly, one house was left standing, unoccupied out there in the middle of nowhere, and it still had electrical service, as the doorbell rang when I tried it! Too bad we didn't think to bring the detectors with us! I think we'll have to schedule another visit!



Good Luck!

 

[imi_wakaranai]

Ed in SoDak,

Thanks for the advice about placing flags and then digging later. I may try this eventually, but in the beginning I will want to learn the signals, so I think I will dig after hearing the good signals. If I waited till the end of the hunt to dig, I'm afraid that I may have forgotten what the signals sounded like.

 

[imi_wakaranai]

marcomo,

I never would have imagined that frontyards in general yield better targets than backyards. I imagine that there should be nice targets around the sidewalks and grassy areas near the driveways. For these areas I plan to use the 5" coil. Thanks for the awesome advice.

 

[imi_wakaranai]

otlew,

Yes, I have read many of Monte's excellent posts concerning the Omega on this forum. He is a wonderful resource to us all. Thanks Monte.

Thanks for listing the melt value for US silver coins. Al though I plan to keep all of the silver, I was wondering about that.

 

[otlew]

otlew,

Yes, I have read many of Monte's excellent posts concerning the Omega on this forum. He is a wonderful resource to us all. Thanks Monte.

Thanks for listing the melt value for US silver coins. Al though I plan to keep all of the silver, I was wondering about that.

I try to dig silver, and I buy some off of E-bay and elsewhere. They call it the poor man's gold. I pray that the day never comes when a dime is worth $50 in paper, but if it does or does not my silver will still be worth having. Keep it, you are thinking right in my opinion.

 

[jbow]

Earlier today I saw your post on the "F" forum asking about this hunt... I didn't realize you had already ordered but IMO... you made the right choice by a mile. The others will work too but why pay more. You are going to be moving fast and hunting long hours if you plan to cover a fraction of that size area. The O8K is the perfect machine for this.

I'd forget trying to unmask stuff and run the disc on about 30, sens high, 4 tones and dig 'em up. You should be able to run the sens maxed out with the disc that high. The iron range runs all the way up to 40 so you shouldn't miss much.

Have fun and post pics of both the place and the finds, i'd love to see it all.

HH,

Julien in GA

 

[jbow]

I didn't realize that the houses are still standing... that is outstanding. Hunt around the back porch and under the clothes line and between the door and clothes line. I'd swing between the front door and the driveway too, Along the both sides of the driveway and then maybe along the roadway then move to the next house.

Mom dropped things going to hang the clothes, people sit around the back porch, things get left in pockets and fall out under the clothes line, people drop things getting the car keys out of the pocket and when they get out of the car and kids sell lemonade and play along the roadway which was early on probably a dirt road with a ditch... I loved to play in the ditch when I was a kid in the 50s. I'd take my soldiers and my dinky toys and build roads etc. I recently found a Hartford insurance ring out in the front yard near where the ditch was at my parents home where I grew up.

Have fun...

Julien

 

[jbow]

It could be worse. In the UAE they will throw you in jail for having stepped in some MJ. there was a case there a couple of years ago where a guy flew into Abu Dhabi (sp?) and had a fleck of bud in the tread of one of his shoes. He was still in prison there the last I heard. Of course they are so very tolerant there...

Be careful in Okinawa. Where the penalties are steep the criminals are more dangerous. Can you carry heat there or would that just make things worse? Maybe you should always let someone know where you will be hunting. A cellphone may interfere but you could leave it by a house if you plan on hunting say five of them... leave it under a shrub or something near the middle of where you plan to be so you can maybe get to it but don't have to carry it. Then again if you are close enough to a tower it probably wont be a problem to carry it. Another thing is some two way radios, some of them will transmit/receive for miles. A GPS will be another good idea. If you use the GPS you can mark every house as you hunt it. I'd get confused after a while as to which I had hunted and which I had not and trying to remember the hot sopts... the GPS will be really handy for marking hot spots to re-work after you give the place a run through.

I can't wait for some good pics... I see you are a photographer so I expect some good pics!

My uncle was the town photographer and my next door neighbor when I was growing up. He did the weddings, the HS football games, the yearbook photos, the crime photos, and all the family portraits... it was a different time, a more simple time.. in some ways a better time. Wehad little neighborhood grocery stores who would deliver. Suzie would call in her order and they would bring it on over. The milk was on the porch in the morning. The keys were in the car and most people didn't lock the door to the house... we'd just hook the screen door... I still remember how that door would slam. You're going back to those times. There should be some great finds there. Heck you may even find some war booty that someone buried or some kid lost. I used to play with my dads WWII combat knife all the time... I don't know where it ended up. He was a paratrooper. He went in to Luzon right befor the end. He sent home three Samurai swords, a Japanese version of the Tommy Gun, an 8mm Nambu, and a Jap battle flag. Any of these sort of items could easily be stashed in one of those attics. You should check them if you can... a lot of abandoned houses have stuff left in the attic that people just forgot about.

I am excited for you... can you tell? It isn't often that someonne gets such a great opportunity as this... well, maybe those who live in or around Detroit...

I hope you have a great time and stay safe. Keep some pennies and a few nickels in a pocket in case anyone wants to see what you are finding... don't ever show them the good stuff. Stay safe!

Julien