Metal Detecting - Here in the Future

As one who has lived through a good portion of the metal detecting hobby, about 60-years of scanning terra firma from the golden summer of 1965. I was armed with an unstable BFO (Beat Frequency Oscillator) metal detector built from plans laid out in Popular Electronics magazine and cobbled together from old television and radio parts, including a search coil made from the antenna windings on fiberboard, torn from  back of an extremely old AM radio. the handle off a push-broom and a birdhouse as a control box. My very first find was a severely flattened FALSTAFF BEER can in the front yard of our South Florida home. It was 2" deep, and my father was extremely surprised when my home-grown instrument indicated it was there! Flagstaff quit distilling beer in 2005, founded in 1845.

But now, I am metal detecting here in the future, with instruments we could never have imagined in our wildest dreams! Metal detecting has long-since come to the masses which has been a double-edged sword in many respects. And like people who are enamored by Star Wars or The Matrix, sometimes have to be reminded, it's just a movie!  Well in the same regard, metal detecting is just a hobby! 

One that will become extinct in the long term if the practitioners don't start using a little sense of purpose and reduce the drama. 

There is no crying in baseball and there is no drama in metal detecting. And one of the best/worst things to happen to the hobby is social media where newbies can get either fantastic assistance or amazingly poor advice or a little of both. The time of year is here where thousands of newbies will be excitedly waiting to hit the beach or park with their shiny new metal detectors and swinging the search coil 3-feet off the ground in an exaggerated golf swing. There are no schools for metal detecting, only word of mouth and the good Samaritan detectorist who will help when they see this sort of thing. People of all stripes in the hobby will be offering as much information and disinformation as they always do. And they will be either protecting their interests in the hobby or welcoming the newcomers with open arms. There are two theories here. The first one, as long as I have been in the hobby, has been that the more responsible people involved in the hobby, the more voices we will have in defense of the pastime, which is ALWAYS under attack by officials. And sometimes with good reason. 

The second is to ignore them and their questions and pleadings, amounting to the normal range of errors and mistakes from digging where they shouldn't to leaving gaping holes in a manicured park. Not good for the hobby at all, and an all too often occurrence. I think the basic solution to this is to join a local metal detecting club. Don't have one nearby? Start one! Grab your buddies and find a cheap meeting place, review established club practices from other groups and get organized. Offer your services to local law enforcement evidence hunts and do good whenever you can! I belong to the Central Florida Metal Detecting Club, just now passed its 50th anniversary here in the middle of Florida. It is a SERVICE oriented club, with an extremely competent and dedicated group of people, striving to help others learn the technical and ETHICAL side of the hobby. And, in this way, keep it out of the trash bin of history. One of the main reasons we join a club is for the camaraderie and that oh-so-hard-to-find treasure, FUN! So, when you run into a fledgling detectorist on-line, in a group, or on a beach, offer to take them on a detecting adventure and show them the ropes. Most of all, remember to pay it forward!

Video Advice - Detecting Opinions

 I was surfing the net the other day when I decided to go tubing amid the video rapids of YouTube. Now, this is the usual place recommended on social media metal detecting groups when someone has taken possession of a new or used metal detector and is just starting out in the hobby. It is an established fact, that humans find watching a video a lot less taxing than reading bland, boring operating instructions and even harder to park it in memory. And metal detectors, being a bit technical in nature, can have a big learning curve if you bought a top-grade machine. And again, usually one does not start out in this rather expensive pursuit with the purchase of an expensive top-of-the-line detector. But some do and then

dump the hobby as too difficult, too complicated or become a mud-covered treasure wizard! Absorbing a bit of the knowledge required to operate these advanced 21st Century top-of-the-line devices is not particularly easy and can require quite a bit of reading; going over manuals as well as reviewing factory updates to its little computer brain to endow it with more and more varied functions and abilities. All this being said leads me to an issue hiding behind even the clearest 4k screen. ANYONE can put out a YouTube video. So be very careful what you base your decisions on after viewing.

This topic was pretty much brought on after watching a YouTube channel with the detectorist comparing two closely matched, high-end detectors. Problem was the host didn't really know what he was doing, and he kept making errors in the comparison with the other equipment that he obviously had more experience with. He never once ground-balanced the competing machine, complaining how unstable it was, and did not select the correct operating mode for the conditions. I have seen similar YouTube detector scenarios with numerous variations on this theme. Just because you have flashy intro graphics and music, does not mean you are an expert in anything. I once saw a post on a Facebook Metal Detecting group belittling a particular brand of metal detector as "worthless" and poor operating functions. I happened to know this person personally, and that they had an accumulated time of about 4-hours on this equipment and had owned it for 3-weeks and had NOT read the manual or received any assistance from a more experienced hunter. 

Someone looking to purchase a detector would recoil in horror and cross off a very, very capable and reasonably priced piece of gear! This is almost always the response to someone asking a valid question about a detector they either own or planning to purchase "Watch YouTube!!" There actually ARE quite a few excellent and well-seasoned detectorists running YouTube channels, with good information with well stocked facts about detector operations and other aspects of the hobby. My advice is to READ the manuals carefully and SELECT metal detecting channels on the Tube carefully and just be aware that video advice is not always good advice. Happy Hunting and Good Luck in the field! 

Cherry-Picking - Turn Up That Discrimination

Metal detecting can go from being a fun, relaxing hobby, to a sweat-laced competition and obsession played out on social media, thoroughly peppered with drama. Most people who "always wanted a metal detector" here in the 1st quarter of the 21st Century are about 50-years too late. More and more regulations, usually brought on by the blatant misbehavior of those that came before you, are limiting areas to detect, as well as the blatant mistake Florida made inviting the great throngs of the unwashed to invade our state after they broke their own. This has created sort of a land-rush in Florida, with historic and non-historic buildings, land, communities and nature areas being overrun by developers, bulldozing those same areas into submission and removing them from the sphere of our casual pastime and enjoyment, as concrete is poured into every nook and cranny.

In kind of a round-about way, this gets me to my point. As areas to hunt decrease, the quality of hunt areas decrease, i.e. more and more trashy areas are becoming the only places left to hunt. When you start metal detecting, a great hush will fall everywhere as the gods of metal detecting tell you, in no uncertain terms, that it's a technical sin to use any more than a smidgen (if even that!) of discrimination on your machine. Others in the hobby will tell you in a loud voice, you may (you may) MISS a small, teensy, shrimpy little gold band if you use too much discrimination!!!! (OMG!!!) But, as usual, time is not on your side and digging railway-carloads of junk and trash so you don't miss ANYTHING is a losing proposition. Metal detecting is not called "cleaning parks" for a reason, and that's not what you signed up for. Practicing this sort of thing is sure to frustrate you and bore you to tears, and usually results in you taking up golf again, using your metal detector as a putter.

Cherry-picking is the term used in the hobby when you crank the discrimination control up a bit more than usual, maybe even more than that. And you may not find that skinny gold ring, but that's not to say there are no other rewards for this kind of behavior. You will start finding relics and antiques that were masked at lower discrimination by the layers of bottlecaps, pull-tabs, foil and other junk like a metal overcast. Sure you are going to miss some stuff, but you are going to find some GOOD stuff for a while, the stuff that makes metal detecting the fun thing it was supposed to be. Now there are those that will disagree with me, but they also cherry-pick when the junk get's thick! Hey, that rhymes! As always, do what YOU think is best, and most important have FUN doing it!