Vent: I was helping map a site near Tucson and my metal detector kept going off over nothing

2 comments

2 Comments

Oh, the classic Tucson dirt troll. Sounds like the ground itself is just messing with you, full of ghost signals from ancient, disintegrated junk. Nothing like spending an hour digging up angry, magnetic dirt that used to be a tractor. You didn't find a site, you found a whole area's graveyard of bad hardware.

terry_shah1716h ago

Happened to me last year near an old ranch. The ground was full of tiny iron flakes from decades of farm equipment breaking down. My detector would chirp on every swing, but I'd dig and find nothing but red dirt and rust dust. Turns out the whole area was mineralized from old scrap metal that had basically dissolved into the soil. Had to drop my sensitivity way down just to get a quiet sweep.