Never found a Walker before...Now I have and shes big an beautiful!

[digger27]

Never found a Walker before...Now I have and she's big and beautiful!

Near me in a public park is an area where there once stood a private site with an old farm house and it is the most difficult iron infested area I have ever hunted.
An area that others have visited and I know for sure some extremely good veteran hunters too, and this place caused most if not all of them to run away frustrated and screaming for mercy.
Me, I am a little nuts and I have been here several times with 3 other detectors and different coils trying anything and everything I could think of to tame this beast and find some older coins that we all suspect might be hiding but are so masked that it is almost impossible to recognize them.
Now it is time to give the F70 a try at this Disneyland of iron.

I think I discovered a new hunting technique, an off the wall out of the box method that I was crazy to think of and insane enough to try...and it actually seemed to work.
4 short hunts later I am getting a little more experienced at doing this each time and the finds are getting better on each visit.

I posted about this technique in this thread about this first visit, since then I have gone back for 3 more short hunts and the results are becoming stunning.

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/today-s-finds/425985-not-worth-much-except-me.html

Here are the finds from those other hunts since that first visit.


Hunt 2







And I did dig some iron that day and some other trash.









Hunt 3 short and sweet.
Avoided most iron, very little time and now that I knew there was silver I was concentrating on that.
No silver, but the prize of the day on a sweet sounding tone was another nice knife for the collection.





I don't think that nice high tone came from the knife.
I believe this is the thing right next to the knife that caused it and that knife was totally masked.
Hey, I have always said never discount luck in this hobby.











Hunt 4 After this now I know this technique works and I am thrilled beyond belief and raring to get back to look for more.








Right now sitting here looking at this big beautiful round coin in my hand I am still stunned.
Never dug a Walker of any kind before...to find this as my first and with a date....stunned might not be the exact word.


More to come from this challenging and interesting site...I hope!

 

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[kyleeskastles]

Wow so really great stuff your digging up so far. Dunno why those guys would run screaming unless they want the silver to jump in their pocket like fish do a boat sometimes. The place sounds like a paradise to me and i like the old good iron. That stuff is like gold around here, perfect to re purpose for rustic country art.

 

[beez0404]

Congratulations on that monster sized silver! I'm anxious to see what else you pull from that site with your radical system.

 

[Carolina Tom]

Nice Walker. Congrats.

 

[park pirate]

Nice finds..

 

[CoinandRelicMan]

Congrats on breaking the iron barrier ! Nice silvers there !

 

[Argentium]

A very welcome sight indeed - Cheers !

 

[ivan salis]

the water sprinkler head masked the knife * love the "walker" halves --lovely big silver coin isn't it? -- if you know a trashy spot that drives off the easy picking guys --great it can be your "clean it out bit by bit --and get the goodies honey hole for years to come --lazy detectorist will stay away -- a couple of my best spots are "trashy as hell" --you got earn your goodies but they are there if you put in the labor .

 

[mikeraydj]

Nice walker digger! If anyone can find the good stuff it is you. You're one of my inspirations in this hobby.

 

[digger27]

Thanks all!

This site is not just full of iron, it is unusually stacked wall to wall, top to bottom and dense as it can be.
I believe they knocked the house down, took away the wood and left all the metal.
Not to mention all the farm stuff and whatever else.
It appears they didn't bring in fill dirt to cover up the place, or cover it up very deep.
This coin and others were 6", but I know a few of the guys that hit this place with crazy skills and with high end machines, but they said bye bye after one trip.
Maybe they have other much easier and more productive places to spend their time, but me, I am going to spend as much time as I can here in the near future.
Now that I know the possibilities that exist I am as excited as I can possibly be about this site and can't wait to see if I can do it again.
Also, this place is close to me and is part of a 1700 acre beautiful park that has lakes and many more normal areas to hunt if I want to take a break.
I found several silver rings and 3 gold targets out there already...can't complain about a park like this with all that it offers in your own neighborhood.

 

[cjon455]

Good for you putting in the time and effort and getting rewarded!

Awesome coin!

 

[dirtlooter]

don't you just love it when a plan works and works well? awesome detecting and finds

 

[vpnavy]

Nice finds! Thanks for sharing...

 

[jewelerguy]

fantastic walker. I love 'em..... such a beautiful design

 

[digger27]

Some say this is the most beautiful coin that the country ever produced.
Now that I found one, I might just have to agree.

 

[thebirdflu]

Congratulations those Walkers are so pleasing to the eye.

I read your previous post which explained your machine settings and I wonder if there is something roughly equivalent for other machines. If it can be "translated" for others to use I think it can a great method for us to try.

 

[Evolution]

Congrats on the sweet walker. One of the coolest coin designs in my opinion. So cool that they decided to continue it on the modern silver dollar coins. I never found a silver half in my detecting career until last year... and then they started jumping out of the ground for me. Ended up finding 5 last year. Hopefully the same happens for you. Is that your first silver half or just your first walker?

 

[treblehunter]

Some say this is the most beautiful coin that the country ever produced.
Now that I found one, I might just have to agree.

I love them too, congrats! Just goes to show nothing comes easy.

 

[digger27]

Congrats on the sweet walker. One of the coolest coin designs in my opinion. So cool that they decided to continue it on the modern silver dollar coins. I never found a silver half in my detecting career until last year... and then they started jumping out of the ground for me. Ended up finding 5 last year. Hopefully the same happens for you. Is that your first silver half or just your first walker?

First walker of any kind.
I have found 3 or 4 Kennedy clad halves in the past.
I have also been lucky enough to come across 2 Eisenhower dollar coins, also clad, but a big older style dollar coin of any kind is a thrill to dig up.
I found 2 Benjies on one hunt at one of my parks on one hunt once.
Talking to some club members they told me the club had a special meeting and hunt at that same park and area in that park a few years ago and silver halves had something to do with that meeting.
They were the prizes given out and a few members lost some so that is what I think I found.
Still very happy and thrilled to find 2 large silver coins like that, but if this is true those finds are a bit tainted in my mind...kinda like finding silver on a seeded hunt.

This one was out in the real world, missed by many other hunted that have hunted this place since 2010 when this site changed from private land to public, and found at a site that is so difficult and challenging that this has to be my favorite one of all.

 

[digger27]

Congratulations those Walkers are so pleasing to the eye.

I read your previous post which explained your machine settings and I wonder if there is something roughly equivalent for other machines. If it can be "translated" for others to use I think it can a great method for us to try.

Don't know, but I can tell you that understanding your chosen machine is important because there is a lot of "reading between the lines" using this method.
I usually hunt at such usually high settings I get a large amount of chatter and jumping around in the tones and numbers on the screen most of the time, especially at sites with a lot of EMI.
This site doesn't really have much EMI, but the huge number of mostly iron signals at this site still causes an almost an unintelligible mess of tones and numbers jumping on the screen.
Because I have had a lot of practice hunting at those high power settings I have gotten used to it and on every hunt I am getting better and better at recognizing and picking out the good signals from all the noise.
On another forum we F70 owners discuss this machine a lot and even though we all know that the F series detectors can be chatty sometimes, especially the F70, it also has several ways to tell you when it is swinging over something good now matter how much crazy stuff is happening on the screen and in the tones around those good signals.
Even so, most of those other F70 owners think I am nuts and have told me they could never deal with my settings and what I must be experiencing when I set them up that way and they all use way lower settings most of the time.

To be honest you don't really have to set up the F70 this way, in my great soil I can hit a dime at 9" deep on a sense setting of 40 out of 100 using the big 11" F75 DD coil, 40% of the power possible.
I just experimented a lot when I first got it, still love to do that too, and slowly got used to using it at low power levels AND pretty much maxed out and I still like to use it that way at sites that are old and the targets could be way deep.
This method at this site was just an experiment.
Nothing else worked for me so far at this place using several machines and detectors including a Vaquero which goes deep.
I just had a thought if I ramp it up all the way, try to blast through everything and try to get even a piece of a good signal in all that mess and hopefully notice it somehow that might work.
A merc and a walker later I am starting to believe it does.
I am still experimenting...there might be a way to fine tune my settings and make it more stable and less jumpy and still recognize those older coins with ninja abilities that can hide so well in this field of iron if I roll my coil over them.

I do believe that the tone info I get in combination with the info on the screen makes this method work.
As much as I love my Tesoros I don't think in this particular site trying to do this blast through method would work.
Masking is too much of a problem and using only the tones and no screen info added just wouldn't work very well or at least it didn't when I tried it with them.

Then again I have more experimenting to do and these 2 silver coins and one other that I know of found by a club member with a Minelab were all in a relatively small area in this pretty large site which is some info I did not have before, so I have much more messing around to do now that I can concentrate on this specific area that I now know is the front lawn of the old farm house that once stood here.

I have been here 2 times since I found that walker and no other silver popped up...yet, but that doesn't mean there aren't more there, I just have to get down and dirty and actually grid this area instead of just wandering around the way I usually do.

Soon I will go back with another detector I own that I bought for nostalgic reasons but also specifically for sites exactly like this so I am kind of excited.
I used it here once, but I don't believe I went over the area where I now know these silver coins are hanging out.
That detector is an old 1970's model Compass Judge 2, a 100kHz T/R machine that has the uncanny ability to null out and actually see through most iron and still hit on high conductive targets well.
These coins were at 6", I think I can get that far down with this thing and if the really big rusty iron that throws off those false high tone signals won't bother it I might just be able to snatch a few more silver goodies out of the ground a little easier than using this new method and the F70.

Either way, I am hitting this place as much as I can and every way I can and will continue to do that till I am satisfied that all the old coins possible have been located and dug...now that I know for sure there are actually some here.
Hopefully there are more, even a buff nickel or few more older wheat cents would make me very happy if I can find them, and Indian heads and Barbers are not out of the realm of possibilty for this old site.

"Never give up...Never surrender", is my motto, and trying new settings and techniques using all my detectors just to see the results is almost as fun for me as actually digging up those great targets still hiding from us in the ground.