Problem detecting old town site

[taiwest]

Yesterday I went to an old town site. I'm fairly new to metal detecting and the Tesoro Vaquero in particular.
Firstly, I had an extremely difficult time finding a spot to ground balance. Regardless of where I placed the coil, it would beep. The ground was full of old nails and iron.
Once I balanced, I kept creeping the discriminate up until I was finally on max. Even there, each swing gave me a beep, beep, beep with some scratchy iron in between.
I could not make a swing without at least a few signals sounding good. I dug a ton of old nails and iron. I also switched to a 5.3 concentric, the only other coil I have for it.
What I did find is if the signal sounded good in discriminate, but did not sound good in all metal, I started to ignore.
So how come I can't discriminate most of the iron on max?
Any tips or pointers from Vaquero users in a turn of the 20th century town site? I have purchased and read the Tesoro Tejon / Vaquero book.

Perhaps I should be using a different detector on this site. I also have a Tesoro Deleon with standard coil and a White's XL pro with a full range of coils.
The only one I'm really familiar with is the Deleon.
I'm mostly invested in coin shooting

Thanks in advance.

 

[Hot zone]

I don't have a vaquero, but my tesoros hit hard an deep or large iron or like any detector they like the sound of circular objects... Old town sites do have iron relics that may be of interest to you tho... When looking for coins and raising the coil high off the ground And still getting a loud tone I am pretty sure it is too large for a coin... A pin pointer that doesn't sound off on the surface when you have lifted the coil and still got a loud signal is a dead giveaway that there is no coin near the surface... Small coils can help in junky areas as well as reducing the sensitivity and limiting yourself to shallower finds.... Running high discrimination and giving up gold and nickels will make poorer targets chopped .. I like to dig up some of the iron to find out what it is... Having read the books you have probably tried these things! If I had it all to myself I would just dig up a lot of the iron that could be masking good finds.. At the turn of the century people didn't trust banks, there is always the potential of finding a cache of coins in a jar...

 

[Hot zone]

I try to use the iron finds to tell me something... Are they items from the barn or the house... Can the perimiter of the house be determined... And possibly the front entrance...flowers, shrubs still growing? Foundation? Limiting myself to the most likely areas and digging up some junk... When you could work all day for a dollar, every penny was valuable here out west! Good luck!

 

[MUD(S.W.A.T)]

Keep hunting, you'll learn to listen to the Iron and pick out the higher tones.

Keep @ it and HH !!

 

[Tom_in_CA]

tai-west, you're doing something wrong. That machine should be able to effortlessly pass individual iron nails. Be aware that you have to play with swing speeds. ie.: you can't "stop on the target" and so forth, as that's a motion machine (albeit fairly slow motion).

I'm assuming you've learned NOT to hunt in "all-metal" (if I understood your post correctly), when hunting a site that's riddled with nails. So once you're in disc. mode, with the disc. knob raised up so that you're eliminating individual nails . You can determine that point on the knob by passing sample nails in an air test. Slowly advance it till the passes of the nail start to "crackle" when air-testing.

Next I think you are confusing one-way sparodic "chatter". That machine of yours is prone to chatter over items you're rejecting (especially if they're near the disc. setting point, or very close to the coil, etc....). So you have to learn about "repeatability". If you only hear an occasional beep or flutter, but it's not repeating IN THE SAME place, then pass it up. To be sure, you can try various directions over the target (360 degree slow-move-around-sampling). Because if it's a coin trying to hide next to a nail, then sometimes trying different angles of sweep can bring in a certain direction that begins to "repeat". But otherwise, pass one-way flutters.

 

[taiwest]

Thanks for the advice everyone. I think I was having problems with my ground balance, as the ground was so dirty, I could not find a clean spot. Since then, I have been trying some cleaner areas, and notice when I don't get the GB in the ballpark, it will sound off constantly.

 

[detectingarizona]

you might want to try getting a rod to hold a decent magnet on the end to clear a hole of nails and junk iron. just a thought, never tried it, but have seen people do it while hunting in iron filled rivers