Spent $150 on a metal detector that only finds bottle caps and rusty nails

Bought a cheap detector off Amazon back in April thinking I'd find old coins or relics in the fields near my town. After three weekends of digging up nothing but trash and one old beer can, I realized I should have just rented a decent one first. Anybody else get burned by a budget detector?

2 comments

2 Comments

ryanburns1mo ago

Man that's rough. My first detector was so cheap it beeped at me when I walked past a sprinkler head.

wesley_grant331mo ago

For $150 you probably got the Bounty Hunter Tracker IV or a knockoff. Those things scream at anything metallic in the ground including hot rocks. I dropped $80 on a knockoff Fisher F2 once and it couldn't even tell a quarter from a pull tab. The real issue is discrimination, cheap detectors don't have it good enough. You need something with at least 5-7 notches of discrimination to filter out nails and foil. Even a used Garrett ACE 250 for $100 more would've saved you all that frustration. That beer can find was just a reality check we all get.