Philosophical Question

[portraitartist]

Ok, so I was thinking last night... had to take some Tylenol afterwards, but, anyway...

While chatting with Greg, the conversation turned to digging iffy signals vs. not digging them, and it made me think... If you just go out and hunt in all metal and dig every signal, does that necessarily take the intelligence out of hunting for good stuff? I was thinking, even a trained chimp could take a BFO machine out and dig every signal he got...

So, is it necessarily a bad thing to use thought and logic and reasoning to discern what your machine is telling you, and make decisions as to what to dig, or should we all just put 'er in all metal and just go to town?

[Metalman]

Hi Portraitartist

I have considered this before, and here is what my febble mind came up with, it depends on the site and what my research has determined may be there, for instance IE a turn of the century home site or what I may believe to be an old calvary campsite,, i may hunt the first few times in all metals and dig every hit, because I expect to find many things other than coins, after that I will get a little more particular on the program that I use to find specific items,,

for Instance #2 IE and old store front site, I will usually only hunt in a coin program or a coin and jewelry program, I dont want to dig up the whole parking lot ,, I use this same senario for fair gounds and carnival sites,

so you see even all metals mode can require a bit of thought and research its really not a no brainer !!


hope this helps

Rick

[Tom in SWW]

Hi Portraitartist!

The Jury is out here as well... What happens if a treasure is buried in an iron pot, and you have iron notched out?
I've got a DFX, and generally run it to accept just into the negative numbers (i.e., notch out all obvious ferrous items) when I'm out hunting for coins.
Darned right I won't open it up just coin hunting, but if I'm looking for relics, I would want to see everything!
One thing I will say, and this is something i've experienced and heard others say time and time again, is that you need to keep your ears open for less than textbook perfect signals.
Stuff that's been in the ground for a long time behaves differently than stuff just buried.
What may be a good, clean signal when it went into the ground could look "fuzzy", or like junk, but with a tantalizing, promising tone to it.
I've dug that "iffy" stuff time and time again, and a significant percentage of hits are actually good items buried for a while, or right at the detector's limit.
Detect smart! Decide what strategy you need to hunt an area and go for it.

HH! -Tom