DetectingWales.com

Hi, as title says id like a straight forward answer......dagger to the heart if need be ;DIs the garrett 150 up to the job?  cos its either me, the machine,or looking in wrong places....If its me,thats ok i can take it.........ive begun taking my time more as advised....ive become more discriminating in what i dig,whereas before if there was a signal then i dug it. Ive tried the testing thing at home with pound coins,ringsm,nails, coke cans etc....yes i can discern a difference in tones,but equally if i put my detector against my shovel,it usually makes ,as far as i can tell, the same ding as when hovering over a pound coin.....come to that a crushed budweiser can......now ok,ive only been out 9 times ..six times to 3 diff beaches....3 times to the same poxy farm ;D and come away with 3.55 (3-50 in one swoop and 5p i saw lying on sand) and a model kids car 99p variety.....oh yes and a half full throw away lighter covered with a pair of knickers.....i left the knickers,if anyone wants the directions to them ,they are welcome  ;D.....im sure this farmer thinks im keeping all the loot to myself............having said that i did find a very thick nail which i thought might be ancient ,and on closer look (see how desperate i am) it might not be a nail at all,cos there seems what might be a face and some detail on it ,maybe feet at bottom and perhaps the folds of a garment visible,plus what might be a kind of miniature candelabra on back.....im prob just deluding myself..a bit like looking at cloud formations and seeing elvis presleys face.....anyway ..is the garrett 150 ,for want of a better word, maybe not rubbish, but not a long way away from it?

you,ll prob have loads of different answers to this question but personally id put it down to ,,you need to persevere, old stuff is about and its only time before you find something that makes it seem worthwhile , myself after 6 years tectin i still dig everthing unless it sounds like a wet fart and you,ll be surprised that stuff that sometimes sound like rubbish is good stuff,, i take it your new to the hobby ,, and many of us {inc myself} prob spent the 1st 12 months digging up all sorts of tat regardless of what machine we used,, the more good stuffyou find you tend to get a inkling where there is more ,,, you just got to start and your away. 

No, the Garrett is not rubbish. I think we all start off like this. Persevere and you will learn your machine and start to get some decent finds.

OK, here's the direct answer you asked for..   It's you...  ;)   Sorry but you did ask LOL ;)   Nah, not really, you are just in the real world now, everyone has to learn and we all have really bad days, sometimes you go miles and don't find ANYTHING, ask folk on here.  The Garrett 150 isn't rubbish, you've chosen a really good starter machine there, welcome to the real world of metal detecting !  

Knock out at least the first left hand segment to avoid some iron, this may help a bit.

Everyone sees the news (somehow it's always the new guy that finds the gold stuff for some reason), this makes everyone think it's easy, every farmer thinks they have a hoard of gold on their land (well most of mine think they do).

Its not easy and there aren't "hoards of hoards" out there to be found, otherwise we'd all be retired by now and living somewhere warm.  

I think you've done OK as a newbie and 9 trips out. The Ace150 is not a brilliant beach machine, but a Minelab is at least £300 for a secondhand one, you should stick to the dry sand with the 150, there's still plenty of losses there.

The reason you get a good signal on cans is their size and the fact that they are aluminium which is highly conductive and non-ferrous, the spade is just large and overwhelms the machine, big iron will also do this.

Remember that all the goodies you see on here are the best of folks finds, they don't post all the cans and bottletops, there are many, many holes dug to get a good find, its not a good hobby for quick returns, in fact I doubt I'll ever get the value in finds that my machines have cost me, and that's not why I do it, but remember its healthier than smoking  ;D

Keep up with the practice and your finds will come, but rarely all at once, some folk are lucky, but most of us aren't...

The Garrett is quite a straightforward machine to learn, but you still have to use it quite a bit to learn it, Minelabs and the more complex machines take quite a bit longer (my old Minelab took me a good 6 months to get 100% with
and I had been detecting for quite a few years with a different machine before that !)

Good luck with your new hobby, just stick with it and learn the machine, dont get to disappointed too quickly  ;)

- Andy

many good finds have been made with these machines , luck playes a huge part in detecting so dont loose heart , keep at it and soon a few nice finds will turn up , above all else ENJOY YOURSELF  :) :) :)

Hi Douglas1,

Don't get despondent because you see good finds appear on this and many other forums daily. "Were am I going wrong, Do I need spend £700 - £800 on a better machine"?
These are questions we all ask ourselves when we begin detecting where really, most of the time its just down to research and finding land that has history to find. I've spent many
days detecting on unproductive land and it can be very disheartening. As has been mentioned, persevere and you will gel with the machine. It takes time to make this connection
and I see so many people constantly swapping machines to improve their performance only to find its made very little difference to their tally. If its not in the ground to start with, your
not going to find anything.
GIgan is a hardened Garrett user and she's had some lovely finds with this manufacturer.  I believe she has taken find of the month a few times in a club she's a member of. She's also
(I've heard) pulled a few hammered coins out within the last few weeks. So, stick with it and do your homework regarding places where things were happening in historical times.

My advice would be to dig all two way signal regardless of what the numbers say and try to find land that has a history to it. Ask someone on here to perhaps take you to one of their sites
for a day so that you can see for yourself the difference that alone makes. At some point you might feel you need to upgrade but don't make that decision for the wrong reasons or your just
going to be even more disappointed.

Don't give up my friend, it doesn't matter what detector you use. Put in the hours of practice and you have to walk over it to find it ! Like mike says all the good stuff you see are the rewards for hundreds of hours of finding more rubbish then good. Personally I've. Probably found 20 more times rubbish then good. When that first Roman or hammered glares at you from the ground your doubts will be a distant memory and your hooked,

all the best Nick

its not you but wrong location ;)

the ace 150 is very good machine and is well up to the job we all dig rubbish from time to time (ok a lot of the time) the only downsize is wet sand. i still use my garret 250 with a large sef coil and dont see the need in an expensive machine at the moment as im very happy with the one i have

we dig rubbish 90% off the time .get used to it or get another hobby lol :-\.we only show the tidy finds. :D

Just to proove to you that we all dig a load of rubbish I've taken a pici of my afternoons effort. I've been tempted to up-grade my detector and I do believe that when I eventually find a GOOD field if I walk over it I'll find it but till I do find that good field any machine would have done just as well.
It's not you or your detector, it's where you're going. Try to get some more land. The beaches in general are bad at present so thats not you either.
I've been detecting for nearly 3 years and still haven't found a hammered coin and the one and only Roman coin I found I couldn't recognise till someone said 'Oh you've got a Roman Grot' I only had to travel 300 miles to get it. ::) 
Keep trying, your just like the majority of us. ;)

Val

ok thanks all......I SHALL  perservere....maybe i been watching too many detecting clips on you tube  ;D.....glad to hear im not the only budweiser can collector here. :-\

Thats the spirit Douglas, stick at it mate, it will come, maybe try and get along to a rally and you'll see what others success rates are as well as a chance to get some tips.

Bl**dy hell Val, whats that thing on the top  :o  I couldn't get that in my finds pouch !

That look like a soldering iron on top there Val. Have an identical design one myself only smaller.

I was just going to say it's a pre electric soldering iron. Not often I did big targets these days but I was intrigued by this one. Thought it might be a sword  :o ::) ;D

The head is solid copper and weighs about circa 1 1/2 lbs (680 grms)  and it was the first thing I dug so I carried around for 3 hours. :o

Val

Hi mate it's deffo  as said got to walk over it to find it used a few good machines now still no hammered. Local man who bought my last machine found a long cross hammered using ace 250.

I think Da Monkey hit the nail on the head - I bought myself a minelab (bad timing of having a few quid to spend when I was looking for a detector) - and found very little for several years.

I bought my 7 year-old boy a 150 - and he started finding coins in my front garden (my missus even found a few by eye) - that the minelab didn't see because a) it was too sensitive b) I didn't know my machine.

Ok I've also used a T2 on the garden, but I've now pulled out 30+ coins from the garden (and my house is from 1949!).

So, for simplicity of use - and that it does find stuff it's a good starter machine.

I've been quite fortunate over the last year or so - but that's partly land, and the hours put in - as well as learning from others with more experience than I have! Don't give up - I almost did several times, but I'm really glad that I didn't :)

Ive not long been detecting and I have  a minelab explorer. I also have a mate who's started detecting the same time as me. He has a garrett 250. We both so far have found the same sort of stuff.

after using the T2 for a year, I went back to using the Minelab (I wanted to see if it was any good before I sold it). Since then, all I can say is that it has certainly repaid my use of it - for me it was more that I didn't really understand how to detect and also how to set my machine up - rather than it wasn't a good machine...

hi.
me and my boy got ace 250's. been detecting for a year. found nothing but cans etc on our first half dozen trips.we then went to a park by his school and pulled up a viccy penny as well as loads of modern coins.i was lucky then in getting permission on a farm that was a ww2 camp so get so many signals i am forced to ignore some. as for cans sounding like coins its because the 150 has limited discrimination markers. 303 casings sound like coins and i now have almost three ctesco bags full.
its a good machine. what i generally do is dig everything that isn't iron. you dig a lot of rubbish but thats the hobby.generally a good signal will sound strong in both directions. also another indicator is how big an area does the signal cover? a coin will be a small area. a can will be big.also cans tend to ding repeatadly and quickly.
i'm happy to show you what i've learn't on the 250 if your willing to travel to where im based.oh, beaches will always be full of rubbish. to learn we found parks were quite good.
swing the coil as low to the graound as you can get and go slow.

I have been out for 4 to 5 hours not found a thing but come home a happy man and think to my self  may be next time. But glad to be part of this great hobby.