False Tones

[Tabfry]

Hello all,

I'm as new as a noobie can get in the field of detecting, so, please forgive me if this is a stupid question.

A little background first...

I live in the Skykomish River valley in western Washington. I'm about 30 miles from the summit of Stevens Pass on HWY 2 in the Cascade Mountains. I moved there a couple years back into a new home. That spring as I was tilling the soil to seed a new lawn, I came upon an old horseshoe. Since I know that my area was used during the towns logging, mining, and railroad building days, I knew that it must have dated back to the early 1900's. This made me pretty interested about what other finds may be in my backyard. This last Christmas My wife's grandmother gave me a Bounty Hunter Quick Silver. I know that it's certainly not top of the line, but it was free to me. I recently swung it around my yard just to mess around with it a little and I seemed to get alot of iron tones with nothing more than an empty hole when I was finished. After I dug a little, I would wave over it again this time with no tone.

My question is this... May the composition of my soil result in a false tone? After the soil is disturbed would the tone go away if it were iron in the soil? I'm sure that higher quality detectors would eliminate this, but I would like to learn how to effectively use this one for the time being.

Any thoughts or advice would be useful.

Thank you.

[Tennessee]

Ok first off there are several reasons for the false signals. The detector you are using now doesn’t handle high mineral soil. From the your post high mineral sounds like what you have. My suggestion is create a test garden something that is controlled by you. Then run the detector over items you will see the difference. I’m not and expert ,but please don’t let the machine you are running now make you walk away from detecting. This hobby is one of the best and with a little time and patience it will pay off

Thanks Will