FFJA
Free Member
Anyone else?….
I decided to embrace my inner nerd as it’s my 40th this week and buy a metal detector.
I was hugely into it for a fair few years. I had a 250 at one stage. It’s all about efficiency at one level, the more holes you dig the higher the chances are of finding something good. Outs a never ending scratch card. Its amazing how much faster you get at retrieving finds as time goes on. That said you can go for months at a time finding nothing of note at all. Dont be afraid to dig poor signals whilst learning the machine either. Burying some items in your garden will let you practice at “getting your ear in.” Buy a few cheap hammered coins /Roman off ebay for the purpose. Pull tabs give the same signal as silver hammered coins, you will dig many of them.😁 The screen is never as important as the audio is, trust your ears not your eyes.
My best recommendation is to join a local club if you can. You’ll get loads of helpful advice, access to productive land you won’t get on otherwise and the banter can make a day of digging up junk kind if fun. Most clubs have large waiting lists though… But if you “come with land” that can help.😉 Getting permissions is the single hardest thing in the hobby. I’ve spent full days knocking on every likely land owners door just to get “sorry, we already have someone on it”, or just “sorry, no”. Land is gold in itself. Lack of permissions is the single biggest reason people give up the hobby.
Oh, always take your junk off the field and fill the holes of course. Leaving junk in holes is stupid anyway… You could end up digging it up year after year. Get a waist pouch to hold finds/junk, small spade, pointer etc (you’ll need a nice full size/sharpened spade too!)
Remember, all fields aren’t equal, some will hardly have a signal in some parts of the country, research them if you have plenty of access to look for potential hotspots. You’ll get used to reading the land and looking for even slight unusual features. If you aren’t even getting iron signals that’s a sure sign there have been much activity on the field. Where humans have been, there will be iron.
I was on a club dig when a small board of Anglo saxon items came up worth over £40k in Kent. Amazing hobby I’ll return to one day.
Be patient, it took me aboutt a year before I started finding Roman and hammered silver coins even remotely regularly. Lord knows how many hundreds of hours and thousands of holes dug too…
@FFJA, What part of the country are you based in? East Anglia in the real gold mine of the UK for quantity of finds.