Dimes and pennies

[fishnfacts]

Is it my detector?
I just bought my first detector, a Bounty Hunter Discovery 2200 and it seems that other than pull tabs and cans all I find is dimes and pennies. Don't people lose quarters and nickels or is it the detector. I dig every signal because besides being new to this I don't want to miss that special treasure.
Am I doing something wrong?
I am ordering a Garret Pin Pointer today to assist in less digging.

Thanks for any help!

 

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[airscapes]

you can only find what is under the coil. Think about it, if you drop a penny, do you pick when you don't know where it went? If you drop a quarter, do you stop and look for it.. I do..
Nickles are just not that plentiful.. pull out all the change in your pocket and see how many nickles you have compared to other coins.. Don't buy the garret, spend the couple extra bucks for the Whites TRX pin pointer, it is the new top dog in the pin pointer market.
When it comes to what you are finding, the locations is 99% and the detector is about 1%.. If the goodies are there, you will find them. One other thing.. if there is bottle cap just above a coin, you won't see the coin till the cap is removed.
This article was very helpful to me in understanding what is going on under the ground
Truth About Search Coils
Good luck and don't give up!

 

[luvsdux]

Lots more pennies and dimes in the ground than other coins.
luvsdux

 

[cudamark]

I don't remember what the 2200 has for discrimination but make sure you're not ignoring those low non-ferrous tones....like what you would get for a nickel, gold ring, or pull tag. As for quarters, maybe you just haven't walked over one yet? You've tossed one on the ground and your machine reads it, I presume? Maybe where you're hunting, someone has gone through and high graded all the quarters. I hunted with a guy like that one time. He couldn't get up and down very easily to make a recovery so he concentrated on silver readings only. If it didn't read at least a silver dime, he walked away.

 

[gusser]

Your machine is fine. Spend as much time as possible in the field learning it. BH is capable of finding what you're looking for.

 

[shufflr]

I' d say off the top of my head I probably average 8 to 10 dimes/pennies for each quarter. And he is right people look for dropped quarters a lot harder.

 

[Normsel]

Well I can say i average about 5 quarters to every dime and 5 pennies to every nickel. The biggest thing with any detector is knowing it and I don't care if you spend $99 or $2000 it takes many hours of detecting to get the best out of it. Practice Practice Practice

I have found over $60 in clad in 15 days so far this year

 

[parkgt]

More dimes than quarters, more copper cents than dimes. I try to avoid zinc signals and sometimes don't dig cents unless I am in an area that I think might have older Wheats.

 

[RobRieman]

More dimes than quarters, more copper cents than dimes. I try to avoid zinc signals and sometimes don't dig cents unless I am in an area that I think might have older Wheats.

I avoided the zincolns until I found out they hit the same as an IH. I always wondered why I never found any. Found my first a week after I learned my lesson!

 

[Eddie Current]

All good comments... just keep digging and you WILL find some of the good stuff.

 

[Dave Rishar]

Analyze your site. Figure out the age of your site through research if you can, and then enter the recovered coins and their dates into a spreadsheet. There will be a pattern. Look for it.

One theory is that for every quarter dropped, there should be two and a half dimes, five nickels, and twenty five pennies in the ground as well. I don't really buy that, but the idea is basically sound - people will drop more change with lesser face value than higher face value, and at a certain face value level that depends on the time period in which it happened, they may or may not go back and look for it. Think about it: you'll find pennies all the time on the ground these days, but how often do you see a quarter? Or better yet, a half dollar or a dollar coin? (Granted, nobody uses the latter two coins, but if they did, they would go back and look for them.)

If your site isn't entirely virgin, it's darned likely that one or more people high-graded it in the past few decades, assuming that they didn't completely hammer it. Quarters sound nice; pennies, less so. Nickels are in the trash range and won't often be recovered by cherry pickers. Pennies of all sorts are pretty easy to identify and the folks that don't like digging holes will leave them behind. If all that you have are pennies, nickels, and a few dimes, someone high graded your site at some point. If all you find are pennies, nickels, a few dimes, and quarters from the last ten years, then that's when the site got cherry picked - hence the value of site analysis. You can figure out when the site was picked, who has hit it since, how hard they hit it, and what they were looking for. If you're finding plenty of nickels, that's almost a gimmee that no one has thoroughly hunted the site. If they had, they would have dug up those nickels. (Along with the pull tabs.)

Never fear! That guy did you a favor. When he went through and cleaned up on the quarters, halves, and silvers, he skipped over the gold. Even a very crappy gold ring can buy a lot of silver and/or quarters...probably more than he recovered. That's a lot of holes that you don't have to dig now. Go clean up after him and find all the gold that he missed, and thank him for helping you out like this if you ever get the opportunity.

 

[fishnfacts]

Dave,
That makes a lot of sense to me. The areas I have been hunting are fairly new in the scope of things.
I did however dig 2 quarters, 2 dimes , a nickel, 19 pennies, 3 ( in the same hole) skate rink tokens and a small silver pin with the stone missing today across the street from the area that I have been finding all my dimes and pennies. All of the coins are 1970 or newer.
I think I also might have found an old picnic area from the early 1900's according to an old timer I spoke with as I was leaving. Going to check it out tomorrow.
Thanks to everyone who has replied and for all your advice,

 

[stefen]

Grid off an area in your yard and plant some coins, then hunt the coin garden and listen the what the machine is telling you...

I couldn't find anything and found the problem was my hearing (still is) and learned to trust the machine.

 

[DDancer]

Dave hit it pretty much the head.
I use a similar technique to "date" an area and get a feel for whether there's potential for larger silver or older objects. Its a pretty safe assumption to make that public areas have been High Graded. A thought full hunt, noting coin age~ depths~types and concentrations, tells a story about what occurred in the past there.
In all honesty nickels fall under my second tier of things to hunt for after I've done my initial assessment. School yards are my only exception
Larger coins like quarters are universally picked up after they are dropped because they are a large shiny objects and don't tend to sink out of site before someone comes along to grab them. Nickels, dimes and pennies tend to disappear quickly and are smaller targets *heck most people wont even pick up a penny* so they don't draw the eye and the hand to grab them.
A lot of coin spills I've found are just the smaller coins.

A good area I've had with finding quarters is usually on slopes and hills were people will kick back and lay around on. These areas are difficult to walk on so not much traffic or sharp eyes catch the coins here. Also the slope tends to make coins drop under the grass, leaves or what not pretty quick so coins there are likely to be larger. Dark shady areas also tend to be good for quarters as well but expect a lot of bottle caps .

 

[Dave Rishar]

Dave,
That makes a lot of sense to me. The areas I have been hunting are fairly new in the scope of things.
I did however dig 2 quarters, 2 dimes , a nickel, 19 pennies, 3 ( in the same hole) skate rink tokens and a small silver pin with the stone missing today across the street from the area that I have been finding all my dimes and pennies. All of the coins are 1970 or newer.

That's a significant source of information right there. The coins were not necessarily dropped there in 1970, but you know for a fact that they were not dropped there any earlier than that.

How does the ground in your area treat coins? It wrecks them around here. The condition of the recovered coins can tell you more about when they were dropped - how badly corroded they are, etc. If they haven't corroded too badly, you can often get a sense of how much they circulated before they ended up on the ground. That's another piece of information that's useful for firming up dates.

I don't get concerned about a lack of quarters personally, as I'm not really looking for silver. I do get very happy when I find a ton of pennies and only a few quarters that have been in the ground for a while, as this tells me that any previous cherry pickers didn't have the depth and/or used a search or swing technique so erratic that they missed things that they shouldn't have. I also consider large amounts of nickels and pull tabs to be useful "tells", as it indicates that earlier hunters were using high discrimination and not digging targets in the trash range - the same range that gold lives in.

However, occasionally the opposite occurs. I hit a ball field last Saturday that SHOULD have had some good stuff on it, as indicated by observed activities taking place there and researching the site's history. After spending an hour covering both sidelines, I found one dime and a few bits of can slaw. What does this tell me? Someone else has hit this place hard, and probably very recently, as there was a ball game there only the week before. Did they miss anything? The lack of trash tells me that they were thorough, so it's probably not worth my time to keep on it in order to find out. After that hour of nothing, we simply moved on to another park and started finding things again.

Heck, I even check what kinds of pennies I'm digging up. Wheats (and a lack thereof) can tell me something, but what about the rest? Some folks will dig up copper memorials but leave the zincolns behind. I know from site analysis and CRH that in this area, the ratio of zincolns to coppers in circulation is about 4:1. By tracking the dates of my pennies, I can check as to whether my recoveries are tracking with this ratio; if it's completely out of whack (say 10:1 or something like that), then I know that someone has probably been skimming off the coppers. This then tells me that the person that hit the area has at least a decent machine and is reasonably competent with it.

 

[George (MN)]

If a small park was made for little kids, they probably couldn't afford to lose a quarter, if they even have one. In larger parks, there are areas where only kids go. In some parks there is nothing to spend money on, so why bring any? A boy told me he knows many kids that throw away dimes, but very few who throw away quarters (middle class suburban neighborhood, houses mostly $200K-$300K).

With today's inflation, some detecting new places may only dig quarter, half & dollar. Also, just about any detector can detect a quarter deeper than a dime, so very poor detectors might have gone just deep enough to find the quarter, but not the dimes. And if detecting rapidly, the quarter has a wider signal so is less likely to be missed. In some small towns, where there's few jobs paying only minimum wage & retired people living on Social Security, even adults will be careful not to lose quarters & might pick up any on top of the ground.

If you stay in the hobby & are eventually able to upgrade, it would probably increase your finds. My Garrett AT Pro accurately IDed a dime 7" deep, but it was just clad as the park was made in '70s. I suspect I would be finding silver at older places.

For finding quarters, parks or schools that sell things are best: vending machines, concessions stands or portable concession wagons, ice arenas, ballparks that charge admission to games, around park buildings, near street or parking lots where people might drop a coin while pulling out their keys. Best wishes & happy hunting, George (MN)

 

[gleaner1]

First off, if you are finding a lot of smaller coins then it shows the site has not been hacked to death. Secondly, larger coins and silver will hit even harder than the dimes and cents, so you know you wont miss them if you get the coil over them. Larger coins are lost less frequently than smaller coins so fewer are found naturally. Yer doing nothing wrong keep at it.

 

[catherine1]

Have been using my 80's Whites Di pro. Practice makes perfect! Pay attention to a good machine. The concept/tech has not changed!!!

 

[Pointman]

I don't think that you are doing anything wrong. If you are finding dimes, it is just a matter of time before you find quarters. I only started to take detecting seriously in less then a year. For at least the first month or more, I could count the number of quarters I had found on one hand. I think that I am well over 200 now and it is very rare when I don't find a few per hunt. I have hit quarters that sounded much bigger then what they were, I thought they were trash at first. They are hard to miss when you are over one. I have found 4 stacked on each other at least once and numerous times I will find 2 or 3 together.

Another thing, I have found over 50 silver coins in the past 8 months. I didn't find my first silver quarter for the first at least 40 hunts and now out of all the silver I have, I have only found 4 silver quarters even though I have found 2 silver halves. I can't explain it. A friend of mine has found more then that on just the hunts we have gotten together on.

 

[shufflr]

The last two times I have been out I have found a total of nine coins and six have been quarters. Five in a row now....lol