Have you ever been given the opportunity to metal detect at an old home or building with your Garrett Ace 250, but just didn’t have the time to finish? Do you sometimes wonder what you left behind?
Generally, it is a good idea to decrease your discrimination when metal detecting old homes. You just never know what kinds of old relics you might find or it may be necessary to clear some of the junk metal in order to get down to the old silver coins. But at times, you might only have an hour or two hour window of opportunity, which is not enough time to be thorough.
It is at times like these that I recommend using a “Silver Coins & Jewelry” strategy to maximize your success. To do this, you will want to blacken all notches from just below pennies and up through the dollar notch and then blacken the nickel notch on your Ace 250. Everything else should be gray. Run your metal detector at a high, but stable sensitivity level and swing a little slower than normal. Even though time is limited, you don’t want to pass up a good silver coin by being sloppy.
Make a pass through the yard and only dig the targets that appear in the dime through dollar range in order to recover as much of the silver as possible. Keep some red and white round playing card chips in your pouch. Whenever you encounter a penny drop a white chip over the target and when ever you locate a nickel target drop the red chip. If you have dug up all of the silver range targets and have some time left, then pick one color of chip and recover the targets. If you still have time, then repeat the process for the other color of chip. Finally, if possible, you can set your Ace 250 to all-metal mode and start looking for relics and checking iffy signals.
By following this process, you will be able to cherry pick the best targets and then quickly return to the pennies and nickels without having to rescan the whole lawn. At other locations such as hardly detected parks, it can also be worth it to cherry pick the quarters and dimes so that the next guy to come through there with a metal detector might get discouraged and look for someplace else to search. If you wait, someone else might clean it out before your next visit.
Related Garrett Ace 250 Articles:
Ace 250 Discrimination & Target ID (TID)
Metal Detecting Ballfields with an Ace 250
Beach Metal Detecting with a Garrett Ace 250
Gold Nugget Hunting with the Garrett Ace 250
Relic Hunting with an Ace 250 Metal Detector
Water Hunting with a Garrett Ace 250