Park hunting questions

[AJ Peacock]

OK, newbie questions here.

I've got about 20 hours at local parks and need some sanity checks.

1) Do you guys just ignore the Zinc Pennies? One park I go to must have been the site of a 'Throw your pennies party'. There is a section of that park that must have a zinc penny every 2 feet. I was there last night and must have ignored 200 18-20 signals! I'd dig one every 15 minutes just to prove to myself that I was ignoring the right stuff.

2) What do you do when you find a small area (3'x3' or so) that has several signals that are promising (but don't repeat in 2 directions) and have iron underneath? Is this the famous 'Iron Halo' that I've read about? I don't want to make an excavation in the middle of the park!

3) One of the parks I've been hunting has fill on one end of it, I find only 80's and newer coins up there, but found the Merc yesterday right at the point that the fill stopped.
a) Do you just ignore the filled areas? Or is there a way to get past the layer of zinc pennies down to the buried silver? Perhaps wait until really wet weather?
b) The ground balance is vastly different between the filled areas and the non-filled areas (from 60s in filled area, single digits in non filled areas). Do you use auto ground tracking (I use a Nox), or do you just focus on each section and manually balance?

4) There is a lot of can slaw and pop tops (old style and new) at this park. In addition to all the pennies, I could dig a target every 2-3' ! Currently, I'm only digging targets that ring the same in 4 directions and aren't 18-20 signals (ignore pennies). I also ignore everything under 12 because there are just so damn many aluminum shards. Any hints or corrections to my process?


That's all for now. I found 3 construction stakes under the sod at this park (I think they were used to set depth for fill. On one end, the top of the stake was 12" down! On the other end, the stake was just under the sod. I found my Merc about 10' from the lower stake where I don't believe they filled at all. The Merc was laying about 1" above the clay/gravel layer about 6" below the surface.


Thanks all,
AJ