What kind of metal detector do you use and my suggestion would be to hunt with  permission in  in farmer's fields .

Hey Dwayne - welcome to the forum.

One thing that many people find helpful is to spend some testing with known targets. For example, take a quarter, a dime, a nickel and a penny and a nail, and have some one place them under a sheet of cardboard so you can't see them and don't know how they are arranged. Then run your machine over them and see if you can guess which target is which. While you are doing that try and pay very careful attention to how your machine reacts to each one.

When you are out hunting don't just scan the target from east to west and west to east for example, also move around it and try scanning from different directions, north to south or northeast to southwest for example. Good targets will tend to sound the same (unless there is something else near them) while trash targets will tend to change more.

Another thing to try (assuming your machine has a pinpoint mode) is to spend a bit of time pinpointing and move around the target while in pinpoint mode. See if you can detect differences in how the target responds as you swing across it from different directions.

Hope those tips help!

Hey Dwayne - welcome to the forum.  

One thing that many people find helpful is to spend some testing with known targets.  For example, take a quarter, a dime, a nickel and a penny and a nail, and have some one place them under a sheet of cardboard so you can't see them and don't know how they are arranged.  Then run your machine over them and see if you can guess which target is which.  While you are doing that try and pay very careful attention to how your machine reacts to each one.

When you are out hunting don't just scan the target from east to west and west to east for example, also move around it and try scanning from different directions, north to south or northeast to southwest for example.   Good targets will tend to sound the same (unless there is something else near them) while trash targets will tend to change more.

Another thing to try (assuming your machine has a pinpoint mode) is to spend a bit of time pinpointing and move around the target while in pinpoint mode.  See if you can detect differences in how the target responds as you swing across it from different directions.

Hope those tips help!

Hi Steve

Thank you for the pointers, I will give them a try.  My wife actually
suggested hiding targets like you suggested, maybe someday I will listen to her.

thanks

Dwayne