There is an unexplored territory just below the surface, that you hope to better explore. Today’s detectors are better-able to reach a little further down, but they still are not perfect. The fact remains, that coil has to pass over the target. If the coil is being moved too rapidly there often is not enough time for it to respond. External noises can interfere enough to where you do not hear a feeble signal, and too wide of a search pattern leaves huge gaps in the area you think you are covering.

The deeper a target is, the more complicated the process becomes. A detector responds to almost everything at down to about two or three inches, if you have a good search pattern and don’t try to do the whole forty acres in one afternoon :-)

Less so, at four to five inches. At five to six inches or deeper, one has to be listening for the most feeble of signals. One can almost not go too slowly, and the given area one can cover is quite small. Hastened and careless searching does not produce very good results. At six inches, the area, if graphed on a chart, shows that a search covers only a few isolated points in any square yard.

Think about this -- if you move the loop very carefully, then overlap the next sweep the width of the detector loop, you think you have covered the width of the detector loop. Six, seven, eight inches. Right?

Wrong! The loop covers only an inch or so of area at six inches. Thus, an eight inch coil leaves about seven of those eight inches unexplored. The problem is made worse when the loop is lifted from the ground’s surface at each end of the sweep.

Chart that pattern. You will quickly see that you are missing more unexplored territory than you are exploring. Let’s forget how many feeble signals you fail to hear, or how many signals are too brief for your mind to register. This is but to point out the unexplored seven, of the eight inch sweep, with missing portions of the one inch strip at the end of each sweep.

Does this help explain why you’ve gone back to a good site where you have found old coins, a place you’ve “hunted out”, and found another coin or two?

Then consider items at depths greater than six to eight inches, and try to convince yourself that all the good stuff has already been found. No, it has not. If you can simply improve your hunting techniques, your recoveries will improve. Put that with careful researching of prime potentials in your area, and you are well on track.

To someone nearby you probably seem to be some nut out there in a given area, moving around with a detector in hand. They don’t need to know you are having more fun than a kid with a free pass to a candy store. All that fun, and with none of the tough stuff the movie heroes have to put up with in their adventures!

~ Glenn Carson

• And, our classic book on this topic, is a MUST-READ, for beginners and for those well-experienced with detecting's "Magic Ring" ... Glenn's book, Coinshooting I, How And Where To Do It, is legendary (we're not smug, we simply KNOW how foundational this book is, and how many people it's helped through the years!)

View and purchase Coinshooting I, here:

www.waybilltoadventure.com/SuccessToolkit/Coinshooting_I/