Interested in starting Metal Detecting

holadude

What would I expect to pay for a decent detector, and what brands are recommended? A guy near me sells Whites out of his house.
Any tips on where to look once I get a detector?

CROCKofCOINS

White's----I would guess $300 to $400 dollars would be a good starting unit.

>>Any tips on where to look once I get a detector?<<
I live two miles from the beach, so that is a good place for me :-) Also I hit the school yard play areas--> "Tot Lots" and park tot lots.
If I have access to an old home yard, that is also a good area to hunt.

Have Fun

Jerry

lordmarcovan

White's is a good brand. Talk to your local dealer and discuss with him the sort of things you wish to hunt for and the kinds of sites you might go to. There are a number of subspecialties in the hobby, such as prospecting/nugget shooting, coinshooting, relic hunting, beach hunting, and so on. Each subdiscipline has different needs in a detector, so pick the kind of hunting you think you are MOST interested in and ask what sort of machine best suits those needs.

For example, a visual ID meter that separates targets is good for coinshooting in parks, but not vital for relic hunting rural sites. Ditto for discrimination- a park coinshooter might wish to reject a lot more trash while a relic hunter is only worried about depth and will dig just about every signal. Of course, discrimination is standard on practically every machine these days. And the good news is that one general-purpose detector will perform most of the specialized tasks I mentioned above. Coinshooting is probably the most popular pursuit with the folks on this forum, and among folks who don't live near beaches (I do live near beaches, but am not much of a beach hunter).

A decent starter machine for most of the well-known brands generally starts in the $200 to $250 range, and has a lot more features than the $200 starter machines of only a decade ago. (For example, digital target ID can be had even on a lot of these lower-end models now, whereas in 1992 when I bought my first modern detector, you had to shell out nearly $500 to get a machine equipped with it.)

$350 to $500 will get a respectable middle-of-the-line machine. That's probably as high as I would recommend a beginner going, since you want to get your feet wet and get a feeling for the hobby before you spend too much.

A person with a $200 detector who researches his sites and knows where to go, and patiently, persistently hunts the right sites, will do far better than a fella with a $1,000 state-of-the-art machine who does less homework and only goes out occasionally.

holadude

Thanks for the info. Now I just have to convince the wife to let me buy one.

CoinOnTheCob

I think this is worth announcing. I have a White’s MXT. I like it and continue to get better with it. Last Christmas I wanted a MD for my son. I went back to the dealer where I bought my MXT and he laid some very good info on me.

The Garret Ace 250 is about $250.00 and is equal to the White’s Prism V in capability. The Prism V runs around $499.00. It was a no-brainer, I bought my son the Garrett Ace 250.

lordmarcovan

We've given this link to several others in the past.

Kellyco's deal on the Garrett Ace 250, while twelve bucks more than it used to be, is still pretty hard to beat for a new starter machine.

The Ace 250 has quite a following and is affectionately referred to as "The Yeller Feller" by those who use it. (Because of its distinctive color).

It apparently does most of the stuff my more-expensive Garrett GTAx-550 does.