I posted this on the Metal Detecting Forum back in July.
I find rings on a regular basis in parks, schools, playgrounds and athletic fields. I am very good at it. I'll share a secret or two.
First secret....understand why you find what you find where you found it.
A good inland jewelry hunter starts out a clad hunter. Why? Because clad tells you the story of activity in the area. Clad tells you when folks pull their keys out of their pockets as they approach the parking lots. Clad coin spills tell you where people are sitting and laying around and what type of areas are the most popular. What parks are the most popular, what parks are not. Clad hunting also puts a number of accidental rings in your possession so that you can start trending their loss characteristics. Trending only requires two things.
1st.. Ask yourself this question, "Why was this lost where I found it?" Remember, the object is to understand why you find what you find where you found it.
2nd.. Look for and hunt locations that mimic those same conditions. If there is nothing there, then ask yourself a new question, "what makes this location different from the other locations?" If you do find something, validate your reasoning by asking the 1st question again. Remember, the object is to understand why you find what you find where you find it so that you can find the same type stuff again.
2nd secret....you have to cover a lot of ground.
This isn't old coin hunting where you spend hours in a 10 foot square area trying to paint every inch of the ground with a brush the size of a quarter, twice. Jewelry hunting requires that you cover as much ground as possible in the time you have to hunt it. That means that your machine has to be able to talk to you and tell you whats in the ground without you having to stop and examine every signal. You need to hear it. You need tone id. You need to hear what your coil passes over and be able to call it's conductive range without having to stop and spend a lot of time over a it or look at a meter or thumb a disc dial. When you hear a target you need to be able to call it on the fly. Iron, alum, zinc, high coin.
3rd secret...you play the odds.
You don't dig every signal. You focus. If you trend a location type to girls small gold, you focus on recovering those type of signals. If you trend a area to mens jewelry, you focus on recovering that range of targets. Those people who say you got to dig it all to find gold are the accidental ring finders. You want to be a on purpose ring finder, and you find rings on purpose because you trend and focus and cover the ground where they are most likely to be found.
4th secret...you return to these trended locations over and over again (not on the original post)
The situations that facilitate the loss of the jewelry items are often static. They don't change. Which means that often jewelry is lost there again and again and again. These site renew themselves. I take my trends and put them into routes. I run them just like paper routes. You are always looking to validate your trends, so you also rate your routes. A, B, C. The A routes are the proven ones. You've validated them over and over. They may not produce every time you hit them but they are consistent enough that you know if you don't find a nice jewelry item this time there will be something there next time. You always come home with nice jewelry when you hit several A route sites. The B routes are more hit and miss. The characteristics that put it on that particular trend list exists but there is something missing that causes a lack of consistency. Doesn't get the right traffic or isn't in the right neighborhood, doesn't have the right medium to hide the losses, etc. But the occasional items shows up if you go there often enough. I'm always hoping to find that right characteristic that can move a B site up into a A route. Everything starts out as a C site/C route. C sites may just be places I haven't trended yet. Or they may be places that only produce clad that I rehunt occasionally to see if anything has changed, or just un-validated trends.
It works for me.
HH
Mike
