Metal Detector

[Tom Herman]

Don,

All good advice... I detected back in the Before Time in the mid '70's with an old Treasure Hawk: It was incapable of telling the difference between various metals and hot rocks: You wound up digging EVERYTHING, and that got old FAST.
Fast forward 30 years, and I bought a White's DFX, top of the line 10 years ago, and still pretty good.
The DFX has all sorts of cool features: There is a bar graph that goes from about -95 to +95... Anything under "0" is ferrous, and as you get to the top end (over 70), you start getting into bronze/copper/silver.
Certain strong hits on the bar graph, like good, solid 26's and 84's are usually nickles and quarters respectively. If the display is ragged and scattered, it may be junk, or oxidized metal.
Never found any coin silver with it (although a fair amount of sterling jewelry), but I did jackpot a gold ring once on a soccer field. It showed up as a corroded Zink penny, so you can imagine my shock when I pulled out a gold ring!
The way it works, is that Gold and Aluminum have very similar signatures, so if you notch one out, you'll loose the ability to find the other.
You can tailor the settings on the DFX to pass/reject almost anything you want.
There are canned programs already in it that will do well for you.
I will also concur with having a pinpointer: You will go mad if you don't have one. They save you a lot of time finding the item when you have narrowed it down to a small area.
Basically, you'll get what you pay for: Buy a cheap detector, and you'll wind up with less performance that a better one. Don't worry so much about the brand as the features. The DFX does have two different frequencies it can use, so you can fine tune it for gold or other metals.
With all of your investments in fine rifles, I imagine spending a grand on a decent detector shouldn't be an issue.
Don't expect to get rich. My unit didn't even pay for the batteries. Fortunately, I have an almost endless source of used "AA" batteries, so I've had to only buy 9 volters for the pinpointers.
Last year, I metal detected the McLaughlin Massacre site on my R & R day between fires, found a crapload of shell casings and a few bullets, but no period musket balls.
Also jackpotted a couple of rattlesnakes, so I left while the getting was good.