How to Locate and Identify treasure with your metal detector.

Time to locate your treasure trove. This page will help you with some basic techniques for locating valuable metals.

While swinging your metal detector you will notice many different sounds coming through your earphones at seemingly random times. But how do you know if you are onto something good?

It comes down to a few factors, including type and repeatability of the sound.

Type: With some experience on your metal detector you will notice that different metals make different sounds in your headphones. You will learn which sounds indicate a valuable metal and which not. Valuable metals like gold or silver will probably make a high pitch beep on your metal detector, low value metals like iron will make a dull beep. You can even “screen out” certain metals so you will only hear a sound when a valuable metal is located. Consult your metal detector manual for info on how to screen out specific metals and only go for what you are after. Many scales start at Iron on the left and move through foil, then gold range and finally onto the silver range at the upper end of the scale is pure silver.

Repeatability: The sound you hear should be repeatable. If you swing your coil across a spot and hear a noise you should be able to swing the detector back across that same spot and hear the sound again over and over. This sound / beep must be repeatable over and over again. if the sound is erratic and jumps around this may indicate the target is not great, chances are you found trash. If the sound is only heard once and not again the screened out iron target was either mistaken for a good metal or the object may be very deep. When starting out dig all sounds to learn more about your machine.

Depth: Most metal detectors will also tell you what depth the item is on the LCD display. You will then know how deep you will need to dig. Some deep items may only give faint signals at first sweep. Move over the area at different speeds to make sure you don’t ignore something good.

Size:Some detectors will also indicate the size of the object or graphically show you what it thinks the metallic item is. If the you are after coins and your detector indicated a can sized object you may be out of luck.

*handy hint for the metal detecting novice – when you first get a new metal detector dig every sound you hear so that you can discover what each sound could mean. Plus you get experience at digging and pinpointing targets.

Bench Testing

When you buy a new metal detector it is recommended that you “bench test” it. Place your detector on its side on a wooden or plastic table or other surface preferably outdoors. Get a few items from around your home that are made of different metals like a gold ring, silver jewelery, coils, copper, bullets etc. Turn the detector on and take each item in your hand. move the items across the coil and listen for the noise your metal detector makes. You will soon learn what metal makes what sound and what your detector is telling you.

Here is a nice instructional Video on Bench Testing (The Detector used here is the Euro ace – A European Version of the Garrett Ace 250 – The controls are very similar but the ID scale of the normal ace 250 is much more descriptive).