Metal Detecting and Metal Detectors Guide For Beginners

This site is about commercial metal detectors used for detecting metal as a hobby or past time for beginners. So let's start with asking a basic question

"What is metal detecting?"

Metal detecting is a process of using a metal detector to locate the presence of metal. The person who is doing metal detecting is known as a detectorist. The metal detector itself is a piece of electronic devise that is designed to detect the presence of metals. How it works is described in How Metal Detector Works.

Metal detecting is a fascinating hobby. There are numerous benefits and pleasures associated with metal detecting, such as it is a healthy outdoor exercise with out door fresh air and sunshine. Then there is one exciting component that puts this hobby way above any others and that is THE POTENTIAL TO FIND TREASURES!

However to enjoy this hobby it is important to have the right or suitable metal detector. This is the first step to enjoying this excellent hobby. Hence this site serve to guide you in getting the suitable model for your use.

There is a whole range of metal detectors out in the market, ranging from very basic ones to complex ones. However before proceeding lets be familiar with some metal detecting terms and common features found in a metal detector.

1. Discrimination.

This enables a process of elimination to help you recover what you're interested in. In other words, it allows your detector to ignore certain types of targets. For example. If you had your setting low, you will pick up all metal (everything from the tiniest staple to a large aluminum can).

At medium, you will mask out all the smaller, less active metal (highly corroded copper/brass or rusty iron/steel) and hear everything else (small pieces of copper, gold, brass, silver, lead, and aluminum to large pieces of iron).

At high discrimination, you will only pick up only larger pieces of copper, brass, gold, silver, and aluminum.

2. Sensitivity.

This Sets the detector to be more or less susceptible to deeper and farther targets. Hence vertical and lateral search coil range are increased as you turn up the sensitivity.

3. Ground Balance

What this does is that it zeros out high mineralization (iron concentration such as black sand and "hot rock") and ionization (salt).

This feature is extremely important for nugget shooting since this activity is usually done in mine dumps or riverbeds where there is often a lot of black sand and hot rock. It is also important for beach hunting due to the black sand and high salt content. You would likely chase a lot of ghost signals if you operated in such extreme conditions (for your detector) and didn't have this feature.

4. Target ID

This function distinguishes the target and it's depth by tone (audio) or meter (visual). Hence no matter which brand or model you have, this technology isn't perfect yet, but it should get you pretty close 80-90% of the time.

5. Volume control.

The only time you'll think about this is if you decide to wear headphones. Using headphones not only extends your battery life, but it also allows you to hear faint signals free from background noise. Thus make sure head phones jack is included in the control box.

Next we look at How Metal Detector Works.

Enter your search terms Submit search form