Some early game changers

[woodchiphustler]

I started in the late 60's using a Metrotech and Fisher T series. My first game changer was a Whites 6db with motion disc. What a relief. No more reverse discrimination. Many years pass and many detectors later comes the Minelab Sovereign. Multi frequency at its finest. Then I follow up with the Explorer. Great for coin hunting but to slow in the colonial field full of nails. Eric Fosters Goldscan 5 was the detector that I used to solve the mineralized bed rock of central Va. I watched all day at an early DIV Hunt folks having to dig every signal with there VLF detectors. The hill looked like the moon. I went in with the Goldscan and dug over 80 sharps carbine bullets behind more then 50 people. The age for me using ground balance pulse detectors had begun. Later the next year Bob B and I were hunting side by side and I was popping buttons left and right. He asked me to check a target that read iron on his MXT. The bedrock here was shallow. I said good target no doubt. He said noway.Iron. Even in the clump the MXT said iron. Very pretty silver cuff link. Some iron. Well we had a conference call with Whites, introduced them to the contact Eric Foster and the TDI project was off and running. Recently I got an XP Deus. All I can say is wow. So many useful features , light weight, wireless. It is a perfect machine in the relic fields of America. What will the future hold? Hybrid Technology? Hope I live a few more years to see it. It will come. But at what price point. OEM's will not shoot themselves in the foot by creating a hybrid at the risk of sales loss. I remember two guys I passed at a DIV Hunt who said to me man you must be digging a ton of nails with that PI. I laughed to myself saying if they only knew what was in my pouch. To me the greatest challenge now will be a PI detector that can disc. out Iron at depth. Regards, Tex

 

[Tom_in_CA]

Hey tex, good post. Nice nostalgic look back.

Having started in the mid 1970s, with a used early '70s machine (66TR with no disc), I can relate to the light-years advancements we saw every few years, back then. It was as if ....from about 1970 to 1985, if you had a machine that was a mere few years old, you had a dinasour! Yes, when the 6db and first 6000d came out, guys went into seemingly petered out parks, and effortlessly pulled a bunch of silver But now, it seems the laws of physics have reached their peaks. Heck, the explorer is over 10 yrs. old now, for instance.

As for a pulse that can disc. iron at depth, you're right: once a person fiddles with the TDI enough to knock out iron, he's reduced himself to the level of depth, where he may as well just have used a standard VLF discriminator. You simply loose the fabled depth of pulse machines, the minute you try to use a pulse where you're going to need to knock out iron. And your ID's are .... at best .... going to merely be highs vs lows. Seems that pulse machines are just way too "squirrely" sensitive to use for junky land sites. Perhaps open field searching (where targets are spread out and you can assess individually), but no.... not a ghost town or junky urban turfed park, etc....

Tex: can you give us a comparison between the Fisher T, and the metrotech, as far as their comparative abilities, depth-wise, on coin-sized targets. Who got you in to detecting, and how early did detecting start in your part of the USA? The Metrotech first came out in about 1964 or so. I heard of some guys who were amongst the first to use them on the beaches of So. CA (probably only dry sand, as perhaps it didn't work on the wet salt), and got oodles of targets as fast as they cared to dig, d/t the beaches (around snack stands, etc...) were virgin back then.

 

[woodchiphustler]

The metro tech loved low conductive gold rings at a depth of maybe 4 inches. The T Fisher could reach better depths and was preferred in ground of low minerals for finding artillery shells. Relic hunting with old mine detectors has been going on in Virginia for many years . I grew up in Washington DC and as a young boy I went to Nativity school. It was built on the grounds of Fort Stevens. I can remember scraping up minnie balls just playing.