Make the most of your metal detecting time using discrimination

Using a little metal detector discrimination will help you make the most of your metal detecting time at the beach.

The old metal detecting school rule of you have to dig it all does not apply to tourist beaches or other areas you are not likely to recover old artifacts.

Things have changed with metal detector technology making it easier to reject stuff you clearly know is not platinum, gold or silver at the beach.

I look at it this way, every piece of junk you dig at the beach, puts you further away from putting your search coil over a good target.

The last several years I have used my metal detector the Minelab CTX 3030 to take full advantage of the competition at heavily hunted sites. 

I know darn well other people using metal detectors will not pass up digging quarters, dimes and pennies, so I leave them when I hear the tones and see the target cursor placements and ferrous and conductive number read outs on my CTX 3030 screen. 

You can have those I say to myself as I push on for platinum, gold or silver jewelry the stuff I go to the beach hoping to find.

Yes Im sure I do miss the odd piece of silver too, but very little of the silver jewelry I recover avoids the scrapping process anyway.

Now I know more than a few beach hunters will be reading this thinking about hitting the comment button with a what if you miss this or that.

My response will be does digging hundreds if not thousands of small pieces of iron, bottle caps, hair pins, fish hooks, corroding pennies and chump change every year justify the time wasted digging that junk when you do not have to.

Oh man that sounds good signals sometimes turn out to be junk, but those good sounding targets are the ones I spend my time digging at tourist beaches or other potentially heavily hunted sites. 

I wonder how many people have followed me at a tourist beach and figured he is not that good he is missing stuff? 

Perhaps it was just a metal detecting ninja trail of clad coins, bottle caps and unwanted junk I clearly knew was not platinum, gold or silver thanks to well trained ears and a metal detector screen. 

Again, why dig junk at the beach when searching for platinum, gold or silver jewelry?

Cherry pick the good targets and enjoy the fruits of being a discriminating beach hunter, platinum and gold bands are some of the most common jewelry finds if you get to them before the next beach or water hunter.