Tips for Finding Coins with Your Metal Detector!

No matter what metal it’s made out of, there’s nothing more exciting than finding a coin when you’re metal detecting. Once you see that telltale circular shape, your heart starts beating fast until you can get your hands on your find and determine what kind of coin it is and when it was made.

It’s easy to get excited about coins because they can be worth a lot of money if they’re rare and they’ve managed to stay in good condition. The other exciting thing about coins is that they have the year on them, which means you don’t have to guess what time period your find comes from.

The good news is that you don’t have to have a high-end metal detector in order to find coins – even entry-level detectors will locate them. If you’ve got coin fever, you can increase your odds of finding coins by following a few simple tips.

Go to Areas Where People Congregated

Whether you head to a park, an old schoolyard or fairgrounds, your best shot at finding coins comes from hunting in a place where people used to gather. If a lot of people were there, it’s likely that at least one of them dropped a coin.

Find the oldest gathering spot you can because it will increase your odds of finding older, and potentially rarer and more valuable, coins.

If You Find One, Keep Looking in That Hole

Don’t abandon the hole you’ve dug once you found one coin in it. Make sure you run your detector over it one more time. Many detectorists make the mistake of immediately assuming they’ve tapped out their target if they find one piece of metal, but that’s not always the case. If you’re lucky, you might come across a coin spill.

Look for Paths

If you’re on ground that, as far as you know, has never been a high traffic site, look for any kind of path in the grass. If you can spot a path, that’s the likeliest place coins would have been dropped. Maybe someone lost one as he walked along that worn path.

Don’t Give Up Just Because a Site Has Been Hunted

Some areas, like parks, have likely been hunted many times over. Don’t let that stop you, however, from giving that site a once-over with your detector. Just because it has been hunted doesn’t mean you won’t find anything. Detectorists routinely uncover coins in parks that have been hunted repeatedly – sometimes they find them in parks they themselves have already hunted.

Get a Big Search Coil

Generally speaking, the bigger the coil, the deeper it will find targets. When you’re looking for a coin, the 8 inches of searching depth you’ll get with an 8-inch coil won’t be enough to turn up all the coins that are hiding underground. Consider upgrading to an 11-inch coil to find deeper targets and potentially more coins.

Turn Up Your Discrimination

To find more coins, you’ll want to cut down on the junk signals you’re digging. If you’re digging nail after nail, it will take up the time you could be using to find coins.

Turn up your discrimination mode to weed out the iron signals you won’t want if you’re looking for coins. You still might get tricked by the occasional bottle cap if you’re hunting in a trashy area, but with a higher discrimination setting, you’ll be more apt to find targets you’re actually interested in.

Become Familiar with Your Detector’s Sounds

To ensure that you find more coins, you’ll want to be able to interpret what your metal detector is telling you. Finding coins will become second nature once you become used to the tones your detector makes when it finds some.

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