Weekend Relics

[hung]

First I hope it’s been a great xmas to all.
Well as usual, I traveled to spend xmas with my wife’s family in a coastal city distant 2 hours by car from where I live. Next day we usually return to join my parents.
I have an aunt who owns a house and also celebrates christmas there as well.
Her house although refurbished and beautiful is pretty old, with construction dating back to the early 1930’s.
Before the house, there used to be a long time school there, originally built by the jesuits which got remodeled through the centuries. Her back yard descends in a 45 degree angle directly to the beach down there.
In fact all houses lying beside hers are like that and a stone wall originally built by the jesuits themselves still exists. Only now the top portion got covered with concrete.
This weekend while my wife was busy preparing the dishes for the xmas night, and I could not go to the beach that day ( I am a beach freak, must confess), I decided to do a quick exploration at my aunt’s place taking my detector. As my FG80 has been left at a team member’s house who livers close to the expedition site, I took the PDC210.
It was an awfully hot day despite it had been rained a while before. Her backyard due to the geographic position does not get any wind so in a matter of minutes I was all wet due to concentrated heat. Man was it hot, sultry and humid!
Well as soon as I got there and turned the PDC on, I got several beeps in various parts of the yard . The beeps were single type and by the symptoms I knew there could be buried targets there.
I also noticed right away beeps also happened due to possible thunderbolts far away due to heavy clouds in the horizon. The PDC is prone to interference by it. Mine is a later model less sensitive, but still prone to it at some degree.
But definetly the majority of beeps there related to targets.
I was right , in a matter of about 20 minutes after a quick scan in the whole backyard, I ramdomly chose one particular spot and could proceed to carefully mark its origin. It was hard. By the beeping patterns I knew it was not gold. Copper, silver, etc. emit one alternate beep. Gold emits more than two fast beeps.
After determining the origin of it, aproaching the spot from various angles and sides, (have I already said it was hard?), I placed the PDC on the ground in a 45 degree inclination set by a small branch and opened the case to get the center&deep in order to determine depth. That’s when I found out it was not inside the case. Damn! I had left it at home !
I had to find another way of doing this. I moved the PDC in a S-N direction this time, keeping the same angle and proceeded to slowly walk back. Although this is the procedure to do with later models as FG, DC, it seemed to work. At least a few inches from the original point it beeped indicating it was not deep.

In fact, after hand digging for a while (the idiot here also did not bring any shovel as I thought my aunt had one), I found and old silver covered handle of a knife, spoon or fork. It was at about 6 inches deep. Detection happened from around 10 feet away.

During the time spent there I failed in pinpointing several targets. The method described above did not work on a couple of occasions where the depth proved to be a lot deeper than the one I could reach with only one piece of tile to dig. So no way I could continue.
Add to this the extreme physical stress I was in that hellish environment.
That’s why I said it was not an easy task.

Next I had a beep from 20 feet, but curious enough when trying to aproach the target’s location the beeps stoped.

Hey Esteban, does it sound familiar?
Yes, small noble metal objects other than gold also produce ionic fields which due to electrostatics seem to allow easier caption at mid distances than at close ones. For this recalibrating is needed.
That’s why Esteban has comented here that sometimes once you loose beeping, ‘ go back in your steps in order to recover them again.’

I think this is due to the fact that as many targets where there, from a mid distance, the ionic fields of them get summed which strenghtens detection. Thus it lowers considerably when you isolate only one target specially if non gold small objects

I also noticed that if you stay where you are, enhance sensitivity and scan horizontally or vertically in the particular direction real sloooooowly, you may recover it again. That’s what I did. I recovered what looks to be an ancient bronze belt buckle with copper outfits. Later when I showed this item to the elders who live there in the city they did not recognize it as a belt buckle but as part of the leather saddle used by riders in their horses in ancient times.

After 45 minutes, there were several more beeps, but I was drained. With clothes totally wet, sweating like a pig, dirty hands and body, thirsty to death and crazy for a shower or a dive in a swimming pool, I left the place telling my aunt I would come back as soon as possible to retake my ‘insane’ relic research.

I posted my experiences with the PDC in july at my friend’s place located in a really hot and dry region. We had a flat tire and while it was fixed I was playing with the PDC and could detect a small piece of copper almost on surface. It had been there for almost ten years undisturbed. The beeps were consistent and the PDC like a magnet took me direct to the target real easy.

This weekend was dfferent. So I guess humidity really plays a major role in all of this.

Ok, I know. I found junk and not valuable items at all, but It’s really exciting to uncover part of history. At least for me. Who knows some gold shows up in my next incursion?