jhettel said:
I have the Missouri topographical program from National Geographic and use a GPS to find various sites. I can find a spring or coordinate on a map and go right there with the gps, it is a super handy tool to use when detecting.
I'm going to have to listen to you. You seem to have a lot of experience and fantastic ideas. I've only JUST begun to do become interested in this. My mother-in-law loaned me a Bounty Hunter Prospector DX that she really hasn't put to any use so I thought I'd try it out. I've always been interested in History and the outdoors so metal detecting seemed a natural extension of two interests I already had so I thought, "Why not give it a try?"
I had already considered using the two tools you mention above (the software and the GPS unit) to assist my detecting. Especially the GPS unit. Used correctly, they're powerful devices.
There is a site called "geographic names information system" and you can click on Missouri and download all sorts of locations and ghost towns, fords, placenames, etc. and it also has the coordinates so you can add that to your gps and it will take you to the spot. This site has so much information that I started to print out the Missouri portion and had to stop it immediately because it was going to print out well over 1000 pages of nothing but names of places that are lost in Missouri.
I really appreciated this tip. Great information. I had no idea it existed. I downloaded the material pertinent to Missouri as well and started to take a look at it. You're right. It's over 50,000 lines and around a 6Mb file in size. Way too large to print even the stuff specific to Missouri. The information in that file just begs for an efficient search method so I downloaded the latest version of the MySQL database server onto a Windows XP desktop. I installed the database server and created a database to house the data in the file. I had to massage the data in the file a little to get it to load but it wasn't that difficult. I can now pick out only the lines specific to a particular county that I'm interested in and print them out very quickly. If anyone is interested, I'll be happy to post the details but I realise that this isn't an IT forum (I'm a UNIX junkie employeed by a large company).
Secret to finding good stuff is having a good metal detector. You cannot go wrong with a White or Minelab detector. I think the Minelab are far better than anything out there, and I have used all of them.
Makes sense to me. What about the Bounty Hunter Prospector DX? Is it worth anything? How would you rate it on a scale from 1 to 10 with 10 being an outstanding detector and 1 the equivalent of a dowsing rod? Remember, I know nothing about detectors and the DX was loaned to me by my mother-in-law.
If you go down to the bootheel of Missouri there are old house sites everywhere. Today they are all open fields, but years ago there were houses everywhere. Many people walk the fields and collect marbles, many people have thousands of marbles from the old house sites. You can drive along the roads in the early morning around New Madrid and within about 20 miles of there and see the glass twinkling in the morning sunlight, those are the old house sites and they are everywhere, even in the middle of fields. Lots of places to go in Missouri, go to the website that I mentioned and find something that interests you and try to find the area, that is the key.
Which brings me to another question if I may ... How in the HECK do you know whether or not you are allow to detect on a given piece of land? There's the obvious: State and Federal Parks and all private property are off limits unless you are given specific permission by someone in authority to grant it but how do you tell if some of these more remote areas are private property? Let me give you a specific example. I mentioned I do quite a bit of hiking all over the state of Missouri. I purchased a book that gives some directions to some of the more remote areas of the state. In this book, the directions instruct you to follow stream beds that flow through areas where there's private property on either side. I have to assume that since the author suggests walking through stream beds that the stream beds themselves are public property?
Another example ... There are some old county roads that end in the Mark Twain National Forest that aren't connected to any property. I assume these areas are OK too? I realize you may not know but I thought I'd ask because I'm curious how you knew which areas in the bootheel were OK to detect? Any other users care to give me some advice?
Another question ... I took the detector out to the park for two hours yesterday and found a really corroded belt buckle and four pull tabs. I need some help pin pointing. I don't want to buy a pin-pointing detector yet until I'm sure that this is something that I want to get into so can someone share some of their techniques/methods? Thanks.
