Using the Anderson
rod in one hand and my detector in the other worked surprisingly well. I had
absolutely no issues balancing the Anderson, I suspect its weight keeps it
stable. I did initially have a bit of a problem storing the Anderson when I needed to dig. I started by
carrying a cloth to lay the Anderson
on, when I put it on the ground, but that became a bit of a chore. Then I
discovered that the Anderson
could be rested across the handle and against the control box of my Detech EDS
detector and would sit there quite happily when I was still holding my detector
while digging. I do keep my hand on it though, as should it fall it may damage
the antenna. The antenna is replaceable but why have the hassle of buying and
importing a new one from the manufacturer? If the digging gets a bit tough I
need to lie my detector down and I found that the Anderson will rest in the detector’s arm cup.
So I started by baiting the Anderson with silver and that
seemed to work well in that I found silver coins and silver plated objects as
well as copper-alloy (the Anderson is constructed of brass, I believe) and lead
(old lead tends to contain silver as an impurity). So far so good!
I then baited the Anderson
with gold, which I expected to turn up gold coins but that did not happen. Over
the past 200 years many fields in the south of England have been fertilized with
rag waste, which was contaminated with buttons and other metal objects
associated with clothing. The Anderson took a great
liking to gold plated buttons (as in picture) and the like as well as
copper-alloys. I guess this is because I was using almost pure gold bait and
gold plating generally consists of high karat gold so to the Anderson it is a perfect match.
Now I was hoping to find Iron Age gold stater coins which
have a variable mix of gold (70-80%), silver (10-20%) and copper (5-10%). This
is a moving target effectively so even using a gold coin as bait there would be
no guarantee that the coins buried scattered in the field would be a match. I
could persevere with the gold bait or on the basis that all man-made gold
objects contain either silver or copper or both I could switch back to silver
bait…
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