How long have you been detecting for?

Fast coming to my sixth year detecting, I realise I'm still a young'un in the grand scheme of things! I've achieved and learnt a lot in those six years, though. I was wondering how long our forum users have been detecting for?

Not even one year yet ,but in that time was out every day and weekends about 2_3 hours a night weekends was about 7 hours a day with my 6mxi

i started in 1995

Old fart lol

weeder wrote:  i started in 1995

Wish I'd started detecting back then!

My friends and I have this vision of loads more finds in the 70's, 80's and 90's. We often talk about land that has never been on, and how much there is to find. Was it like that back then?

Or...was there just tons more rubbish, like old iron etc?

I started detecting in the mid seventies using home built detectors, they were awful but did detect metal.... if it was big enough. They had virtually no discrimination so you would dig every signal, loads of iron and lots of Georgian copper coinage. At the end of the seventies I built a Practical wireless sandbanks pulse induction, this was a good design and worked first time but had no discrimination whatsoever. So even more iron and really deep , but it was also much more sensitive so I was now finding silver sixpences and rings and my first hammered, an Elizabeth penny ( which totally underwhelmed me, Id expected something more substantial)One of My first commercially made detectors was a Cscope 1220b, and since then at least 25 detectors from most manufacturers.
At the present time im using a teknetics t2 and the Cscope 6mx . I love both of them.
Its easy to view the past thru. rose tinted glasses , the reality was that detectors were really heavy, discrimination and ground balance were a nightmare to set and they drifted in and out of tune continually. Modern detectors are light years ahead
in every aspect. Its made detecting much more fun.

Brilliant, post. Cheers Bazday!

Aye! Built an ocillator using an oc71 transistor , two caps, two resistors a medium wave tapped winding on ferrite, an old battery. It will work as long as no one terminal of any component joins more than two others, and red to red green to green. (this was 50yrs ago) now tune your tranny to pick up the signal! Move your hand near the ferrite or any metal object, what lovely squeals!!! It could transmit nearly 50 meters. All of this thanks to Michael Faraday!!

Good morning sandscan.
It had the added advantage of listening to Hancocks half hour on the BBC home service between signals.

G'day m8! Thanks for bailing me out of the hole i was falling into, i was just trying to tell addicted to bleeps more about the csmirage as requested, but, was unable to do so without mentioning Michael Faraday and his very close friends William Thompson and their buddy Mr Tate. No doubt at all if they were here now ,they would be out in the fields waving sticks with plate-things attached, as they were wont to do the sutchlike together i understand. My point is this, during my many outings last year with my Cs, on many occasions, i picked up a clear one way signal , off on the outer periphery of my coil, up to as much as 3' away, that led to a 1p coin. I was also able to get a gradually fading signal on so called 'halo' affected ground after a coin had been removed from it. I learned to stop if i recieved any one way signal and expand search circular, so called 'snail-shell' search technique. Some super relics as a result. Perhaps some of this 'chatter' is in fact my machine alerting me to deeply buried item. To reinforce this belief i noticed another thing; on many occasions the pinpoint was off centre from the actual target. This can be caused by coin tipped over at an angle to the ground thus putting strongest signal out at ground level, but i also noted same effect when large stone on top of coin. Why ? As bar magnet can pick up a long chain of pins, do you think this might be why many cscope users have reported getting a clear signal from up to 3' from coil ? (and being derided for their claim)

Addendum: William Thompson, 1st Baron Kelvin. Cheers !

Good morning, following exhaustive tests, it has been shown that a cscope 3mx is 50% more effective than any imported machine whatsoever. Yay!