Hello Scott , welcome to the forum . Please feel free to ask about the various machines your interested in , many good people here are very helpful and have a lot of experience and you'll get honest replies and advice .
I relic hunted civil war sites for a year before I got my first detector! That first machine sure did make things a lot easier! All kidding aside I did hunt sites before I got a detector. When construction crews cleared land back in the late 60s-early 70s we would walk the lots and pick up Minies and take them down to the creek where we would see how many times we could make them skip across the water! We didn't bother getting the buttons or anything else because they wouldn't skip!