Well it's very dependent I guess.
My first rig was a Minelabs X-Terra 30 (the flagship coin and relic detecting machine released way back in 2005 (So 7 years old).
I bought this bad boy 2nd hand from a seller on a local metal detecting forum for a princely sum of $250 delivered.
I also bought a good headset ($85), Garret Pro Pointer ($150) and a Lesche Digging Tool for $60 delierved.
Total outlay was $545
With this 'beginners' set' in hand, I proceeded to hit up all the parks in my local area over 3 months (about 25 hunts) and here's the results :
My total haul was :
$430 in goldies
$42 in silver moderns (5c to 50c)
78 Full Pennies
36 Half Pennies
28 Silver coins (8 Florins, 5 Shillings, 8 Sixpence & 7 Threepence)
~200 brown buggers
2 x Sterling silver rings
1 x 18k gold diamond ring
1 x 9ct/925sterling pendant and sterling chain
7 Foreign coins
a handful of smaller relics (buttons etc)
So I guess you could say my entire rig was fully paid for pretty quick and in all honesty, that gold ring alone probably paid for the entire setup.
Mind you, this doesn't show all the JUNK you dig up as well... which over 3 months probably looked similar to this :
:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
This just goes to show you don't actually need to drop a lot of cash on a unit just to give it a go. Whilst the return for hours invested was clearly quite low (IMHO you'll never earn a living wage doing this), the fun factor and exercise I got made it quite worth the effort.
I haven't really done much in the way of detecting at all this year, but for those interested and wondering if they can get results, I think the proof here is that you can and do it on a small budget.
If I can give any advice though it's that you have to assume you'll regularly come up empty handed. Suburban metal detecting is a very hit and miss game and even with all the proper leg work on research done, you can still hit a prospective site that ticks all the boxes and come up completely empty handed.
It CAN get frustrating when you get a few of these back to back and amusingly, some of the 'best' sites I've hit are tiny suburban parks with a history of weekend sports (which makes sense).
With the suburban park scene, replenishing stock is *extremely* slow - even for busier parks.
If you want to do this on a 'regular' basis, I recommend gold prospecting or the beach where you're going to get more regular restock.
You have to remember that detectors have been around a while and during the 80s, there were people out there trying their luck on that huge spike which has picked off a lot of the low lying fruit on the larger, more popular sites.
Sometimes, thinking outside the box on a new prospective can yield surprising results and you'll be hard pressed to get a bigger rush when you dig out a plug and pop a florin or even better, a little gold!
But at the end of the day it's all about having a laugh and learning a little history. In studying up potential sites I learned a lot about my local area's history which many people I've spoken to in the area were not aware of.
