Here at Enhanced Scanning, we love ground penetrating radar (GPR)! It is often our go-to tool for underground scanning to find buried utilities, items embedded in concrete slabs or block walls, and more! Every once in a while, we get requests from potential customers to help them find some sort of buried treasure. (See this “Enhanced Throwback Story” about our search for a buried tank of wheat as an example.)
Here’s the thing about hiring us for GPR scanning to do a treasure hunt: we are happy to do it, but it’s often not money well spent for our clients.
GRP scanning is best for focused searches. It’s the perfect technology for finding buried items in a relatively small area. Most of our clients who want to find what’s buried underground have us search in a defined space that they want to develop. We come in, scan an area, and tell them where it’s safe to dig.
If you’ve never seen a GPR scanner before, it’s about the size of a typical push lawn mower, and just like a lawn mower needs to pass over every square foot of grass to do its job, the GPR equipment needs to pass over every square foot of the area you want scanned in order to complete a comprehensive search. Needless to say, if you have a large area that you want scanned for treasure, such as gold or other precious metals, it’s going to take our team a really long time! And in the service industry, time is money, so if you want dozens or hundreds of acres scanned for gold, you should expect to pay a hefty sum.
On occasion, we have potential customers approach our company offering a percentage of the value of any buried treasure we uncover, rather than paying our standard rate for GPR scanning. Unfortunately, this isn’t a deal we’re willing to agree to. It’s too much of a gamble for a company like ours—especially since the likely outcome will be that we will have performed a bunch of work for free or for very little payment. You may be able to find an adventure-loving individual with a GPR scanner elsewhere who likes to take on high-risk jobs with the potential for a high reward, but unfortunately, we are not those individuals.
While that might make us sound boring—since hunting for buried gold is arguably more exciting that hunting for buried pipes or electrical lines—we actually enjoy what we do! We love helping our customers get the information they need to proceed safely with their projects. We love working with sophisticated technology to find the “unfindable.” We are constantly investing in new equipment and training to continue to be the best at what we do. If that sounds like what you’re looking for in a GPR scanning company, we’d love to hear from you!