You'll probably find silver where & when you least expect it! My son found lots of silver coins before I found any, though sharing same detector for first 2 years. Month after month, I found a little silver jewelry but no silver coins, boo-hoo. After many months detecting together & concentrating often on a rough old field with building foundations on it, I found my first silver while slowly eyeball-searching that field while my son had his turn with detector. What was my surface eyeball find, my first silver? A big lovely 1923 Peace Silver Dollar!!! It looked like a dusty old poker chip just lying on top of the dusty field. That same day I dug my first 2 wheats a few feet from that silver dollar, so those advising you to keep hunting for silver wherever you find wheats are correct. If took me more than another year to actually DIG UP a silver -- my first Mercury dime, this time in a tiny neglected park. YOU'RE GONNA FIND SILVER COINS AND GOLD!!! I dug my first gold this week after over two years detecting, a huge gold ring buried in the same hole with a crummy old spoon on a beach that I hate to detect due to it being full of old iron -- well, I persisted in returning to that frustrating beach, cussed the iron, muttered when I dug the corroded spoon, and yelped with glee when, by rechecking that hole in the sand, the gleaming golden ring emerged!
As to detectors, our low-budget Bounty Hunter has found silver & other small items as deep as eight to ten inches -- it's partly a matter of fiddling with your dials to get more used to whatever machine you're using. For example, seed some silver coin or jewelry at various depths under the dirt and experiment using different settings on your detector to discover the best setting for finding small silver! My son recently upgraded to a Teknetics and is digging even more silver, but keep in mind that my Bounty Hunter found my gold ring in midst of a trashy, iron-infested beach! HAVE FUN AND LET US KNOW WHEN YOU DIG THE SILVER OR GOLD! Andi-who-is-older-than-the-hills-& can't-climb-them-very-well-anymore