Metal Detecting Equipment - Essentials and Recommended Gear

Hello there. In this video I'm going to talk about metal detecting equipment. Some of these things will obviously be essential, other things will not. Make up your own mind to what you want to take based on the weather conditions and how far you are away from home. The first and most blatantly obvious thing is a metal detector. This one is a Minelab e-track. Now this detector comes It comes with an 11 inch coil, 11 inch double D coil as standard. If I'm hunting in pasture land I tend to go big. This is an 18 inch coil by Detek, SEF coil, again double D, so it's 18 by 15 and in uncontaminated pasture land this helps me to get down deeper to the targets and cover more ground with each sweep in ground that is more contaminated than a lot of the pasture land I hunt. i.e. some of the farmland which might have been worked for hundreds if not thousands of years and maybe a lot of old bronze, knackered tin, rusted iron, all that sort of stuff. If I pass over it with a big coil, I might be covering five or six different targets, one of which might be good and I may well miss it. So it does pay to have a spare coil, especially if the land that you're going to and from during a day's detecting is different. You might go from pasture where you would ideally want a bigger coil To quite difficult soil, which might have been turned over a million times near a farm, would have a lot of modern rubbish there, and then you'd go for a smaller coil. To be able to change quickly is always advisable. You could always go for another detector. Some people carry a spare detector, especially if you're, say, away for a full day. If this breaks down, you're pretty much knackered. You've got to come home, maybe to carry a spare detector. I tend to just carry, although I've got a spare detector, I tend to just carry a spare coil. Use it for the change in conditions. This is the other coil. This is the one that actually comes with the machine. It's the 11-inch one. I generally just carry that round on the backpack. If I need it, I can change it within a minute. Something that will help to prolong battery life is headphones. Although the machine does have a speaker here, You're best listening to whatever it's saying to you through headphones. You can pick up tiny little changes in pitch and tiny little sounds that you might ordinarily miss if you were just listening to it without headphones. Of course, once you've detected a target, you need to dig it up. I tend to use this, just a little digging spade. Very tough. It's actually manufactured by Roughneck. There's loads of different manufacturers. I just got this one because it's got a lovely strong shaft. It's got an angled blade so when you're kneeling down you can dig nice and straight. If you're hunting in land which has been ploughed and ploughed and ploughed and rolled, it's very soft, you could very well get away with a small trowel, but that tends to be quite hard on the wrist if you're digging for a whole day, so I tend to go with a small spade. So once you've dug your hole, ideally you want to find out exactly where your target is, and in this little loop on my pants here, I keep this, which is a Garrett Pro Pointer. So when you're kneeling down, you've got the hole dug, you think you're more or less there, switch this on, stick it in the hole and you can locate the target exactly. Saves you hitting it with the spade and quite often when you lift the flap up to get into where you're digging, if you detect around the flap it's more often than not in there, especially if it's a small target. So it saves you digging an endless hole in pursuit of something that may not be there, it may be in the flap. This is really good. I've actually done a review of this in one of my other videos. Excellent machine. You don't have to stick this in your pants. It comes with a little holster which you can have on your side secured by your belt. Fits in there quite snugly. It's not going to fall out. At least mine hasn't fallen out yet. Touch wood. Now detectors generally aren't waterproof. This one's no exception. Get a quick shower of rain. It's not too bad. You can wipe it off. It won't destroy anything. But I tend to carry this in my waistcoat. which is a weatherproof cover. Starts the rain, slide that on. You can still read the display through here. It's actually clearer on a night because it's got a backlit screen and that just saves your machine getting bust. This is something I often take if I'm going out for more than a couple of hours. It's a finds pouch. This one's from a company called Protectus. It's got various compartments in there so if you dig stuff up that's no good obviously you don't want to leave it in the field because you'll find it again. Stick it in here, empty it out when you get home. There's a zipper on the top here, and you've got a compartment here for all your good finds. Zip them up so you can't lose them. This is very handy. I mentioned before that I carry a spare coil if I'm going out for a while on a rucksack. This is a decent weatherproof rucksack. And in here I've got a full set of waterproofs, just in case the heavens open. And I think I've also got a spare jumper and maybe some spare socks as well. The last thing you want to do is have a long drive home with wet clothes and wet feet. In here I would tend to carry some bait if I'm going out for a while, perhaps a bottle of water in the outside pocket and perhaps one of the most important things is a spare battery for the detector. This one actually takes AA batteries so if your main battery runs out or fails for any reason, load this up with little batteries, slot it in your machine and you're detecting again. I always carry spare batteries for the spare battery. Just in case the batteries that I've put in here don't work. The last thing you want to do is drive 100 miles to a dig and have no machine to use because of flat battery. This obviously also runs on batteries. So in my waistcoat, I carry a spare battery for that as well. I tend to wear a woolly hat because most of the time in England it's very cold, especially when the main detecting season is, which is kind of when the crops come off at the back end of the year, it can get very cold. This keeps your head warm in the summer. You may want to just go with a baseball cap with a bit of a peak on, stop the sun getting to you. A body warmer keeps the main part of your body warm but still allows free movement of your arms. The last thing you want to do is be bogged down by a heavy wax jacket or something that you're you know really sweating in and is quite restrictive. This is very good, warm, reasonably windproof and it's got lots of pockets in this pocket. I would tend to have a pair of gloves. I would wear these most of the time but if the ground's particularly dry I tend not to bother and also in here I carry a load of little Ziploc bags. When I'm out for you know more than a couple of hours you tend to find quite a lot of stuff so I like to put it In the bags, keep everything separate, prevent them rubbing together because until you actually clean them up, you might have a reasonably good, valuable coin. And if you just put it in your finds pouch when it's rubbing together with everything else, you might actually wear a lot of the detail off it. So really, that's about it. Quite a lot there. If I'm only going out in the backfield for like half an hour, an hour or so, I would tend to just grab the detector and the spade and that would do me. I never bother taking spare coils, waterproofs, whatever, because I'm only... Three or four minutes away from the house. If it does rain, I can just quickly run back, take my clothes off, and change. So you might be thinking, how in the hell is he going to carry all of that clobber? But, considering a lot of it is on a backpack, it's pretty easy. Got the detector in one hand. Earphones, you obviously wear them on your head. Spade's carried in another. I tend to carry it, metal part, back over, so when I'm swinging, I'm not detecting any part of the spade. Is in my trousers, so when I bend down, I dig, get to it, put it away very quickly, finds pouch is on here, around my waist, again I'm down, I find something good, unzip it, put it in the good part, find something bad, drop it in the outside part, and the waistcoat is something you wear anyway, provided you don't. Fill it full of unnecessary rubbish, it doesn't weigh much. You can easily go out a whole day like this, obviously you can't carry a spare detector with you unless you strap it on your back as well, but that's quite impractical. This is just about manageable. You decide how much of this stuff you want to take. Thanks for watching.