Several of you know I've had an E Trac for almost two years. I've gotten pretty dang efficient with it, I thought. You can hunt like most do and seperate out the good easy targets and a few of the harder to get ones. I've hunted a bunch of places and found a lot of good targets since that ML box arrived. I got very comfortable doing that and well just knew I was good with the machine myself. Comfortable being the key word here. I started hunting different places more and more expanding out from home. (I really should have looked closer to home) more on that later. My comfortable self was very happy and excited to get all those perfect hits, classic hits might I say that kept me very satisfied. Now, I falsely claimed, from what I knew that evidently there just wasn't near the older coins in these parts as up north I guess. After all I was wearing em out and they still seemed to elude me except the occasional silver or wheat. I was using an E Trac so they had to be jumping up and surrendering as the magnetic field passed over them. As the months have passed by I've been back to quite a few of the spots I hunted and still dug good targets. Lots of them! Lets back up 1 day to yesterday and our seeded club hunt. Good turnout and looked like 2500 or more targets in the ground. I had to cook lunch for all of us so I was cooking while the hunt was taking place and watching. At least 90% of the people who hunt are very comfortable with the way they hunt even if there is a known amount of stuff in the ground. There's still at least 1500 pieces still in the ground today I'll guess. Back to the analogy somewhat. Let's say most are very comfortable from what I've seen in the three years I've been enjoying this great lifestyle., metal detecting. Somewhere about a year or so with the E Trac I allowed the machine to teach me more, like that huh! I was comfortable...... I ran across some pretty deep stuff that did not sound like my good stuff I dig but did get me a decent at times TID. Puzzle falling together but still missing a couple hundred pieces lets say to complete it. I dug them and had some great finds. They weren't what I thought they should be but never the less good. When I could along the way of digging those good signals, they are overwhelming you know, stumble across an older target laying flat without any other metal within a half mile I'd say there's another one! I'm getting good! What I really didn't realize is that there's a lot of coins in places I and my hunting clan have pounded! We all hunt with Minelabs so there just cannot be anything between here and 180 degrees the other side of the earth, I again allowed my machine to teach me a little more. Along came a book by Andy, The Treasure Hunters Guide that I have read over and over. It opened my eye's a good bit, we can say it's all about location location location. I had been driving away from the oldest part of my area in search of the greatest place in the world to detect! Well with my new found ideas in my head started hunting about 10 minutes or so from the house. Location location, the quality of the finds soared. However there were a lot of good classic signals showing me the older coins. Three Minelabs and quite a bit of hours with my hunting buddies and myself. We found a good bit. I had still yet to conquer the machine and allow it teach me. As the older places in town dried up somewhat we were hunting and I asked one of my buddies to check this target. She ran over it quite a few times and said trash. I moved the coil very slowly across it and the machine said no, a quarter. I dug about two inches and hit something metal feeling and out popped a piece of metal about 3X4, about half inch above it was a quarter. I knew it was supposed to be able to do that but you know I hadn't allowed it to by sweeping a little faster than I should I guess. Now we know the E Trac is supposed to work a lot better ran slower across the ground. Several days later I decided to run it slooooooowwww in a place I had pounded with it and my buddies had been all over it too. I allowed the machine to work at it's fullest capabilities let's say. A very small spot I had got a lot of wheats and some silver out of. As I was sweeping this same little area actually yesterday afternoon standstill slow. I discovered, and imagined, letting the machine do the work, an ant could outrun the coil movement no joke. I allowed the machine to detect the silver and wheats that had iron laying on them or all over them. I had missed 14 coins! Only one was deep, all the rest were within two inches of the surface. A Rosie was within half and inch of the surface with a small piece of metal covering half of it. I had not allowed the machine to teach me what it could do. Now enough of my rambling and I hope this is of some use to someone. To me there are some very key points here that I know will help increase your finds in number and quality. I'm headed out right now to let some ants win the race. HH
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