Any Professional Fulltime Treasure hunters/Detector Biz here?

[Larsmed]

Hey

I was wondering if there are any full time treasure hunters here. This could a person who hunts with a metal detector or detection device as their full time career. Or someone who designs and sells detector too.

I often wonder how one could sustain one's self as a full time metal detector/hunter. Maybe working in law enforcement or military.

Has anyone heard of this kind of profession?

 

[Sandman]

When I was younger and worked on a dive/salvage boat, I thought I was making a living. But we lived on the boat and didn't own cars or much clothes. Some of us have made great finds over the years and made some nice $$$, but if you do the math, you'd make more money working at Wendy's. Since when do the Military or police get to keep anything they find? No, the real money is in politics.

 

[bakergeol]

You might want to check some Australian gold nugget hunting/prospecting forums. There are some OZ gold nugget beepers who do this for a living.

I have met several detectorists who had no job except detecting, however they were retired and had retirement incomes.

George

 

[99thpercentile]

I guess I could qualify. I am a geophysicist with the US Army Corps of Engineers and spend a lot of time looking for unexploded ordnance (UXO) and landmines. So this is pretty much getting paid to metal detect. It depends on your education level to do stuff like this. Someone with a HS diploma could push the metal detector back and forth along survey lines all day and probably make $20 per hour plus per diem. It would get pretty boring. I have done surveys all over the continental USA, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. I do other things as well as metal detecting, look for drug tunnels along the US border, look for tunnels in Iraq, study levees for failure zones, research methods to improve landmine and UXO detection. My PhD research area is how to improve landmine detection in soils the exhibit magnetic viscosity (what most people on these forums would probably call black sand). The metal detectors that I use cost a bit more than the hobbyist type ($20K and up, plus the cost of the RTK GPS system which is another $45K). All of our geophysical data is digitally recorded with positional information. We then process and model it to determine where the targets are, what they are and whether we should dig them. Just my two cents.

 

[THEDUKE]

I have a whites 5900/DI PRO SL Bought it new used to take it out everyday when I first bought it for good few years, now only take it out like 3x a year.
think it would be very hard to make a living doing metal detecting.
you can have some good finds with it good to hit the beaches after a storm the bay or ocean, I remember hitting a beach in seaside heights NJ on the bayside finding nothing all new change but I liked that beach cause I found a lot of mercury dimes on it.
went back there after a storm and hit same area found some v nickels, barber dimes few quarters from the 1940s and, buffalo nickels too all in same day + wheat pennies.
oldest thing I ever found was when I hit the New Jersey Monmouth Battlefield 1778 american revolution Found 18 musket balls some flat some round, also some type of handle or like a small door knob egg shaped, also found out from the park ranger that not allowed to metal detect there on the battle field.
also I found that there was a training camp on the same site, property different area that was used in the 1860s for the Civil War to train union solders, checked that area out to real good small building foundations all over that area with all vines trees growing through them, checked area best I could was not far from railroad tracks but brush was thick there only found mason jars broken.
also you can have good fines if you know old store locations that are having side walks riped up, in your area or old building being removed etc.