BTW this post was not meant to offend. If you believe in dowsing or ouija boards or bigfoot that is fine. I received a targeted email (I blame Google or some other adbot) and blew my cool. Sorry guys.
Dowsing is used in the area I once lived in to find water for the farmers. The best not only locate a source but could estimate the depth its at as well. It seems to work. The local gasboard uses dowsing to locate its old gas pipes so they seem to feel its cost effective.
Then you get on to long rang locators which just never seem to work. When you find out the person whose marketing them at the time lives in a shack it doesn't give much confidence. Better bend up a couple of coat hangers and see if you can locate the water main running to your house. If you can't find it then there's little point in spending possibly thousands for a plastic box with little or nothing in it.
There is an LRL forum where it becomes obvious that the manufacturers and the "skeptics" agree that the things are fraudulent, the disagreement is over whether one should call the spade a spade. What makes LRL's fraudulent is the bogus electronics, not the swivelly thingy which is just a dowsing rod (sometimes in disguise). The proponents mostly talk gibberish, and when it comes to the issue of whether the things can be demonstrated to work, they're smart enough to refuse to discuss the subject, they either change the subject or launch into a first-class whine about what terrible people "skeptics" are.
There is also a dowsing forum where even if you believe that people are only fooling themselves, at least you can usually tell what they said, and it's usually about the subject at hand. And there's nothing intrinsically fraudulent about describing a product as a dowsing rod and selling it. It's for dowsing, just like a Tarot deck really is a Tarot deck regardless of what you may think of the use of Tarot cards.