Many detectorists wonder why they aren't as successful as they feel they should be. The answer is: They are most likely lazy - and I love it, for their lackadaisical attitude allows me to find more goodies than usual and I hope they continue to be lazy.

A great many Th'ers out there are addicted to their discriminators and more like them are coming on board every day, and this addiction deprives them of the success they dream of. This brand of TH'er dreads digging the bane of coinshooters, "The Pulltab", and has become discriminator dependent, placing the pulltab in the same category as hazardous waste and relying solely upon this control to fill their pouches.

When it was first introduced many moons ago the discriminator was a godsend to the beleaguered TH'er weary of digging junk, but it is not the panacea to all things. It does not think and reason for itself and if used improperly will send you home with an empty pouch. The guy on the end of the machine is in control of the "thinking department". It's not the other way around. Many TH'ers believe the discriminator to be a magical device that will lead them to treasures galore while relieving them of the drudgery of digging junk.

Most of the fun in detecting is the anticipation of what may be at the other end of your probe, and nothing pleasures a Th'er more than plucking a prize from the earth that his detector would have deemed as junk, but you will never experience this joy with your discriminator wound out to the max.

Detector technology has advanced rapidly over the past few years, producing machines that are light years ahead of the inefficient clubs we used to wave over the ground. The detector of today is a marvel of electronics that opens up new avenues for the treasure hunter. Discriminators have been vastly improved - but nothing is perfect and discriminators have definite limits and these limits increase the higher you crank that control. You can crank that control to the limit and pride yourself in the fact that you are leaving all the junk behind - but you are also leaving behind a trail of rings, jewelry, gold coins, nickels, haloed coins, and varied collectables that outsmarted your discriminator.

Your discriminator is easily deceived and this deception multiplies with each increase of the control. You are actually stressing it out much like stressing a person out until common sense, good judgment, and logic begins to escape them and they start making mistakes.

Detectors only read the surface area of any object; nothing else matters to them. Detectors read many rings and jewelry as pulltabs. If you crank the discriminator all the way to bottlecap you may even miss a lot of coins, including haloed quarters and halves. This scenario is created when a coin has been in the ground for some time and the chemicals and acids in the soil have reacted with the coin leeching minute particles of the coin into the soil surrounding it, forming a metallic...NEXT PAGE