Hey all,
Figured I’d finally write a quick intro. I’ve been detecting for a while now and currently run three machines — a Tesoro Compadre, a Golden Mask 3 (my first), and an XP Deus. Number four is on the way: a White’s Spectra V3i. I wanted to see what happens when you throw a bit of American engineering at Finnish soil — hopefully something other than silence and ground noise.
Our family recently moved to Southwestern Finland, which, depending on who you ask, is either the best or the least terrible place in the country to go detecting. The soil’s fairly tame, the landscape’s decent, and the history is ridiculous. People have lived here continuously since the Stone Age, through the Bronze, Iron, and Middle Ages — and pretty much every layer of that has been dug up within 10 km of where we live.
I joined a local group of about thirty detectorists after we moved here. Most of them are much keener than I am, which works out fine — someone has to keep the average enthusiasm at a realistic level.
One of the more amusing local quirks is the land uplift — the earth is still slowly rising from the sea after the last ice age. So, the field you’re detecting on today might have been underwater a thousand years ago. It does make you wonder how many old shoreline settlements — and burial sites — are now comfortably inland under some poor farmer’s potato rows.
Finland has also been under a rotating cast of rulers over the centuries, which means you never know what language the next coin will be in. On the bright side, that makes dating finds easier — “Swedish king, early 1700s” usually narrows it down faster than a soil analysis ever could.
Anyway, looking forward to seeing what the V3i can do here, and to hearing how the rest of you are faring in your respective patches of history and mud.
Cheers from Finland,
Riku
Figured I’d finally write a quick intro. I’ve been detecting for a while now and currently run three machines — a Tesoro Compadre, a Golden Mask 3 (my first), and an XP Deus. Number four is on the way: a White’s Spectra V3i. I wanted to see what happens when you throw a bit of American engineering at Finnish soil — hopefully something other than silence and ground noise.
Our family recently moved to Southwestern Finland, which, depending on who you ask, is either the best or the least terrible place in the country to go detecting. The soil’s fairly tame, the landscape’s decent, and the history is ridiculous. People have lived here continuously since the Stone Age, through the Bronze, Iron, and Middle Ages — and pretty much every layer of that has been dug up within 10 km of where we live.
I joined a local group of about thirty detectorists after we moved here. Most of them are much keener than I am, which works out fine — someone has to keep the average enthusiasm at a realistic level.
One of the more amusing local quirks is the land uplift — the earth is still slowly rising from the sea after the last ice age. So, the field you’re detecting on today might have been underwater a thousand years ago. It does make you wonder how many old shoreline settlements — and burial sites — are now comfortably inland under some poor farmer’s potato rows.
Finland has also been under a rotating cast of rulers over the centuries, which means you never know what language the next coin will be in. On the bright side, that makes dating finds easier — “Swedish king, early 1700s” usually narrows it down faster than a soil analysis ever could.
Anyway, looking forward to seeing what the V3i can do here, and to hearing how the rest of you are faring in your respective patches of history and mud.
Cheers from Finland,
Riku
It took me what 8 years. But it was worth the wait 
