I'm still on the road (home to Indiana in 2 days) so I'll post pictures and further detail next week.

Thanks to Monte for again organizing this enjoyable week (my second, other being last year). It was great finally getting to meet you and pick your brain. Thank you for autographing my homemade copy of the NBPT. Now it's more valuable than any of my finds.

The best part of the hunt was the camaraderie of all the attendees, comparing detectors, sharing stories, etc. I won't mention names since I don't want to overlook someone, other than OregonGregg who took me under his wing with the advice: small coil, short swing amplitude, and slow sweeps!

In summary (more details next week), I arrived early and spent 2 days in Tobar (junk ring plus the usual buttons, casings, lead bullets) and 3 1/2 days in Toano, the first two of which were skunks, but then the purse opened a sliver to provide the following:

Eagle (military) cuff button -- more research to be done to see if I can narrow down its time period -- found on the far (i.e. Northernmost) railroad utility road which is along the NE fence near utility pole 3 (Gregg's nomenclature);

Sacramento, CA scalloped edge trade token -- 5 cents, brass Sweeny and Worley at 320 K Street -- research so far puts a timescale as the first or second decade of the 20th Century, found in the Chinese camp area in a cinder (aka 'coke') pile between utility poles 2 and 3 (Gregg's nomenclature);

Extremely worn shield nickel -- going to be tough to pull a date -- found maybe 30 ft. N of the hotel foundation;

1880 Indian Head cent -- found about 20 ft. N of the hotel foundation.

My time in Tobar was spent with the Tesoro Vaquero and 6" concentric. I started my Toano time with that combo as well but the rusted sheet metal (aka 'tin') drove me crazy. (It did much better in Tobar as I was able to sweep up the surface iron trash with my magnetic rake.) I tried the Fisher F75 with 4"x6" concentric but even hearing more than one tone and seeing a VDI, it also got completely fooled by the Toano trash. Finally I switched to the Minelab Equinox 800 with 6" DD coil. It still gets fooled frequently, but (thanks to my many hundreds of hours of use) I was able to pick up some subtleties of the sounds (2 tone Field 1 with recovery speed of 4 and Iron bias F2 = 6, very low gain of 13 out of 25).

After leaving NE Nevada I headed to high in the Colorado Rockies and luckily (after 2 days of 'research' to find the location of a long ago disappeared ghost town) snared a (coin) first -- I'll tease you with that for now and report on it next week.

Chuck



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/24/2022 09:36AM by GB_Amateur.