Four Pull Tabs Before the Silver Appeared
3:42 PM — Borrowed detector from Alan next door. Garrett AT Pro, roughly $800 new, “intermediate” apparently. He’s had it eighteen months and found six coins worth keeping. Adjusted the shaft length to my height. Heavier than expected.
3:51 PM — First pass across my own backyard. Immediate chaos. The detector screams at everything. Iron grunts, high pings, mid-tone warbles. Ground is still half-frozen in patches from last week’s cold snap. Alan says I need to ground balance.
3:58 PM — Ground balancing is interesting. You pump the coil up and down over bare dirt while holding a button, and the machine adjusts its phase response to null out the soil’s magnetic signature. Alberta clay is moderately mineralized. The number settled at 74. Iron signals calmed down after that. Same concept as hunting for the hot spot on galena — you’re zeroing out known interference so the wanted signal stands out.
4:07 PM — First dig. Target ID showed 46, which Alan says is “pull tab range.” Dug anyway. Pull tab. From a beer can, probably Kokanee based on the colour of the remaining lacquer. About eight centimetres down.
4:12 PM — Second dig. Target ID 47. Another pull tab. Beginning to understand why experienced people ignore this range.
4:19 PM — Third dig. Target ID 48. I will not dig any more pull tabs today.
4:23 PM — Dug a 48. It was a pull tab.
4:31 PM — The coil needs to move slowly. I was sweeping too fast. You swing in overlapping arcs, maybe half a metre per second, keeping the coil about 3 cm off the ground. Going faster means the processor can’t sample enough data per position. Patience is literal here, measured in ground coverage rate.
4:38 PM — Signal that didn’t repeat. Strong ping on the forward swing, nothing on the return. Alan calls these “one-way” signals — usually trash at an angle, or a piece of foil folded in a way that only reads from one direction. Real targets repeat.
4:44 PM — Strong repeating signal, target ID 12-14. Low conductivity but consistent. Dug it. Canadian nickel, 1962. Same year as the one I found with Alan yesterday. The 12-14 reading makes sense — nickels from this era are 99.9% pure nickel, which has lower conductivity than copper-based alloys despite the metal’s name suggesting otherwise.
4:45 PM — The nickel was only about five centimetres down. No visible patina. Probably been there less than a decade? The “halo effect” — where coins oxidize into the surrounding soil and read bigger — apparently takes fifty years to develop. Fresh drops are harder to find because they only read as big as they actually are.
4:52 PM — Found a nail. The detector knew it was iron — broken, grunting tone — but I dug it anyway to see what iron looks like on this machine. Square-cut nail, heavily rusted, pre-1900 style. My house was built in 1978. Someone was here before.
5:01 PM — Moved to the strip between the sidewalk and the street. Public land, technically, but attached to my property. Alan says these strips are good because people drop change getting in and out of cars. Also full of municipal debris.
5:08 PM — Wire. Copper wire, about fifteen centimetres of it, maybe 14 AWG. Read as 82-84, which is where silver dimes live. Copper and silver have similar conductivity. False positives in this range are common.
5:14 PM — Penny. 2003. Target ID 76, which is copper-plated zinc. Modern Canadian pennies switched to copper-plated steel in 2002, but this one’s heavier — must be from the non-magnetic zinc batch still being minted that year. Seven centimetres down, in compacted clay. The plug came out cleanly because I’m using Alan’s technique: cut three sides, hinge back, retrieve, replace.
5:23 PM — Cold. Fingers stiff. Headphones (standard Sony earbuds through an adapter) picking up wind noise. Should get actual isolation cans.
5:27 PM — Signal in the 82 range, solid repeater, good depth reading. Dug carefully. About twelve centimetres down, in soil that got noticeably darker — older fill, maybe. Round shape visible before I even brushed the dirt off.
5:28 PM — Canadian dime, 1967. Centennial year. 80% silver. The silver content is why it reads high. Worth maybe $2.50 in melt value, but I’m not melting it. First silver of my detecting career, forty-six minutes in.
5:29 PM — Called it there. Fingers too cold to dig properly. Hands smell like dirt and metal. The dime is sitting on my desk next to the galena cube from the crystal radio. Two ways of extracting signal from ground.
Finds, Day 1:
- Pull tabs: 4
- 1962 nickel
- Square-cut nail (19th c?)
- Copper wire (useless)
- 2003 penny
- 1967 silver dime
Notes for tomorrow: Need my own pinpointer — the handheld wand that narrows down exact location after you get a signal. Digging blind wastes time. Also: research what was on this lot before 1978.