Hey Indian head97, I notice that you say you're looking for "coins/tokens". As such, you know that most of them are mid conductors and higher, on the TID scale (assuming not masked, etc....). This is true even for gold coins (of $5 denomination and higher, anyhow). The only exception therefore, is going to be nickels (of which seem to always come out of the ground worthlessly corroded, and very few have numismatically good dates anyhow). Thus if you really, as you say, want to increase your odds at coins (verses being a hero digging junk to get nickels and gold rings), then I would do as wingmaster says: Be a little selective. Only go for the deeper sounds (which tend to be the older targets, afterall). Skip the shallow clad and junk sounds. Heck, I'd even go a little pickier, and even only chase the mid to high conductors (electing to pass the low conductors, even if deep), in junky parks.
Sure you can be a hero and "dig all" as gleaner1, kshollywood, and jeff of PA say. And sure, you'll eventually bag a few orange corroded buffalos or V's to add your collection. Heck, even a gold ring now and then.
But here's what will happen if you do the "hero" route of "digging all" in junky parks: You will end the day with 50+ pieces of trash (shallow foil, tabs, corroded zinc, clad, etc...), a single dateless buffalo or corroded V, 2 or 3 wheaties, a single silver, etc.... In other words, you spent all your time digging junk, when you COULD have honed in on only those signals which had more promise of being the very thing you were after: coins and tokens!
I have had this debate with persons I've hunted with, who BRISTLE at the thought of not digging all, in junky parks. In their mind, they think they are getting the "best of both worlds", by digging all. Ie.: all the deep coins PLUS gold and nickels. But it never works out this way in the end. They look with envy on my apron of 10 or 15 oldies, while they only have 2, and they perpetually wonder how come that is? The reason is, they spent all that time on their knees digging foil. Oh sure, eventually, as I say, they'll get that shallow item I passed, which admittedly could be something good. But Las Vegas odds tell you, that if old coins is what you're after, then "digging all" in junky urban parks, is not the recipe to increase the end-of-the-day count. If a person is that h*ll-bent on getting some gold jewelry, then if you ask me, why are they hunting junky parks to begin with? You ought to simply go to a swimming beach, if jewelry were your goal, to begin with. Much less junk, and digging is much easier in sand. Doh!
I have been in a park scrape (where they scraped off all the turf to prepare to install astro-turf), and we had the opportunity to treat it like "relic mode" (ie.: "dig all"), since the park (which dated to the 1870s, but is currently in a blighted district) was all torn up. I took the opportunity to save every single piece of metal I dug up, even the junk, for an entire week. At the end of the week, yes, I had about 3 or 4 pieces of gold jewelry, by the dig all method. But I'm not kidding that the junk ratio was about 200 to each single gold item. Simply not worth it, if it hadn't been a scraped park. And by the end of that week, I had perhaps 30 V nickels, buffalo nickels, etc.... All of the worthless orange cr*p, d/t nickels suffer the worst corrosion in some soil types. In the meantime, there were some nights during this project that we simply could not cover all the ground, before the tractors took away prime soil. It occured to me, when this was over, that my time would have been much better spent honing my time for silver and copper, as there were key date good shape silver coins showing up (and were right near SF, so most of the coins had the potential of being a good key date S mint
).
Anyhow, I side with the viewpoint of being a little selective in junky urban turfed parks, as you can tell
