If you metal detect, you’ve been there. Maybe it’s an old  home site, maybe a beach, maybe a civil war campsite. Could be the site of a former village or even a cellar hole.  Everything seems perfect for a day of great digs. Then you get there, swing for several hours, and have nothing to show for it.

I’ve been thinking about why this might happen, and have come up with a list.

Look it over, and let me know if you have anything to add.

• TOO MUCH TARGET MASKING/TRASH

I think this is one of the most likely reasons that goodies aren’t popping out of what should be a banner site.  What happens is that a good target is located too closely to an “undesired” metal object.  The metal detector “sees” the bad target and isn’t able to reset fast enough to indicate the presence of the good object.  You can see the result of masking by placing a coin and an iron nail next to each other on the ground.  Swing the detector over them and see how many “hits” you get.  If they’re close together you’ll likely only get one.  See how far you have to separate them, and how slow you have to swing before you can detect both objects.

Masking can sometimes be reduced by using a “faster” detector, a smaller search coil, reduced sensitivity, and/or different “tones” settings if your detector is capable.

• THE GOODIES ARE TOO DEEP

Sometimes it doesn’t matter how good your machine is, how “hot” you run the sensitivity, how low you have the discrimination, or  how big your coil is,  the good stuff might be down too far.  Just consider how grass, leaves, rain, mud, dirt, and footsteps can push a coin down into the ground as years (or centuries) march on.

• MINERALIZATION

There’s more than just “dirt” in your dirt.  Depending on where you live, there’s variable levels of iron and minerals in your ground as well.  To be effective the detector has to adjust to this ground mineralization and pick the good stuff out of these metallic-like ground conditions.  The higher the mineralization, the tougher it might be for the metal detector to weed out the good stuff, particularly at depth.

To compensate for this, use a detector that has manual or automatic ground balancing rather than a preset ground balance level.  Sometimes using less sensitivity is effective as higher sensitivity can be likened to using our bright-lights in the fog.  It just doesn’t go far.

• THERE’S NEVER BEEN ANYTHING GOOD THERE

I know, we don’t want to think of that. But consider “who” lived, worked, or played at your site in the past.  Are you at an old sharecropper house?  Not likely they dropped many silver dollars.  That would represent a month’s pay, and if a coin like that was discovered missing I’m sure they wouldn’t sleep till it was found.   Same with smaller denominations.  Money meant something to prior generations and it was guarded carefully.   If the folks didn’t have money, they didn’t lose any!

• OPERATOR ERROR

Yes, I had to go there.  Metal detectors are complicated machines and require PRACTICE! If you have a new detector or you are new to the hobby, LEARN your machine.  Read the manual, then read it again.  Set up a test garden and see how your machine responds to different items at different depths with different setting and different sweep speeds.  Reasons such as too fast sweep speed, sweeping too far off the ground, and arcing the coil are all reasons that good targets might be missed, and all can be corrected with practice and learning the machine.  Be sure to check the online forums, such as the ones listed in THIS POST , for help on using your detector.

• IT’S BEEN HUNTED OUT

No one likes to hear this one, and its usually not the case.  For the most part you can assume one or more of the above reasons has PREVENTED the site from being hunted out.  Still, a site that has been pounded to death by everyone with a metal detector is quite possible squeezed dry.

The remedy?  Do what other’s have been unwilling to do.  Go to the overgrown areas, swing the coil under the bushes.  Go to the part of the site that is “forgotten” about.  Or go somewhere else.

And if all else fails, find somewhere else to detect.