I was out at the park during my lunch hour trying all the new settings on my XP Deus metal detector, now that I have the new software version installed.
Tweaking this and that I walked over ground that I have hunted to death and pulled many and sundry pieces of metal from said ground. One maddening thought kept crossing my mind and that was silent masking.
Silent masking is when your detector fails to see any of the targets under the ground and simply runs silent as you run the coil over them. There is a technical explanation as to why this happens but I won’t cover that here.
I simply want to bring it to your attention. It is crazy stuff though.
I will leave you with this scenario: At my deep silver park, a municipal swimming pool opened in the 1920’s. Each summer until it closed (for a decade or so), the swimming pool saw upwards of 15,000 people (data from counts reported in the local newspaper every summer). If only 1000 of those people dropped a silver dime that’s 10,000 silver dimes dropped at that park during that decade. Too high of an estimate you think? If 500 people dropped a dime each summer that’s still 5000 dimes dropped in a decade. I’ve only found about 60 silver dimes at that park since I began hunting it last year. And by the way, I am not counting any of the people who went to the park for reasons other than swimming at the pool.
So, I tell people that there are thousands of silver coins at this park waiting to be excavated. 99% of them, silently masked.
Thank you for looking!
The Dirt Is Good To Me 
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