Beach Hunting Questions-

[shanegalang]

For those of you with experience on beaches, wet and dry sand. Do those programs work pretty good? Do you modify the settings at all? Will the salt cause any damage to the coil? Thanks for any and all input, I will be trying the Deus in Gulf Shores this upcoming week end. I am usually a land relic hunter and of course know how well the Deus does there. Thanks....Shanegalang

 

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[vferrari]

There is nothing magic about the built-in beach mode programs. I would use your regular land search custom program with the following slight adjustments (bold are changes I would use to my land search program for the beach):

Disc/Tones - use whatever you are most comfortable with. I run with minimal of no disc personally and full tones, but that is a personal choice. I would not run with disc >10 to avoid depth loss.

Sensitivity/Tx Power - Start with 90 and adjust as necessary to prevent falsing. Start with Tx power =2 and only adjust if to Tx 1 if the sand is mineralized (black sand). No need to go to Tx=3, but note that frequency at 4 khz locks Tx power at 3 and so does shifting any other frequency (8, 12, or 18 khz) from its base.

Frequency: Lower frequency creates max depth, but honestly, I think the key here is to maximize detectability of small mid-conductors (e.g., gold jewelry) so use 18 khz unless some EMI source is preventing you from doing so, then switch to 12 or 8 as necessary. The depth loss is minimal for the high conductors (clad coins and silver) and you will hit harder on the small mid-conductor stuff (i.e., gold) which is what beach detecting is all about. If you have one of the high frequency coils, go for it! I have found they are great at the beach and you can crank frequency even higher, again without much of hit on detecting clad and other high conductors.

Reactivity/Silencer: I like Reactivity at 2.5 (ver 4) as a good middle ground, adjust depending on the density of trash. Silencer - game changer here! If the beach is littered with crown caps, go ahead and crank reactivity to max 4. It breaks up the bottle caps so they do not ring up like quarters and I think you take a minimal hit on depth. This is a big shift in my approach. I have never before recommended cranking the silencer, but I am a believer now on the way it makes crown caps go away. Not sure I am quite there on non-beach hunting but am leaning that way based Calabash Digger's test garden results. Jury is still out, but he is doing more experiments. Cranking silencer to filter crown caps especially works well on my 9" HF coil at 56 khz, the bottle caps just grunt right out and I am never fooled anymore. I do not think it compromised my high conductor depth much and probably had no effect on mid-conductor depth.

Audio Response: As desired (I keep mine at 4)

Notch: I typically do not notch anything, but experimented with the HF coil on notching out everything above TID 65 which at 56 kHZ translated to everything notched out about 15 points below pull tabs. This gave me some gold headroom below pull tabs which ring up same as nickels and gold rings, but allows heavy gold chains to come through while silencing most of the foil and ketchup packets and other junk. If you are not looking for any relics on the beach, notching is not a bad idea especially if foil trash and ketchup packets are driving you nuts. Generally, though, I just like to hear it all.


Ground Balance: On dry sand, I just keep it on tracking. On wet sand, you need to see if the GB reading is being pulled down by the wet salt sand. If that is the case, then go to Beach mode and manually adjust GB to match your reading. If you have black sand, then that will compete with the low salt conductivity reading and you will have to decide whether beach mode makes sense or non-beach manual mode or tracking makes sense by experimenting. If you are detecting on both wet and dry sand down to the surf line, then your best approach is to detect perpendicular to the shore so that the ground conductivity does not change as you swing the coil back and forth as you approach the wet sand. If you are solely detecting dry sand then use whatever pattern you want (single line parallel to shore, zig zag, spiral (around good find or spill), grid). Also if you are staying solely at the surf line or in the surf you can go parallel to shore.

Salt water should not hurt the coil, but I would rinse it off with fresh water right after detecting. Regular salt water hunters have found some corrosion buildup at the bare coil battery charging terminals and have chosen to put electrical tape over the charging terminals. I would make sure to remove the tape after detecting and rinse and dry thoroughly because some salt water may still collect under the tape.

Hope that helps.

Like I said, really liking the HF coil for the beach - found this beauty with it yesterday (a nice surprise, but who brings dollar coins with them anymore, much less to the beach!?). But the legacy 9 or 11" coils will do great as well, with plenty of gold found with them last year.

 

[shanegalang]

Thank you very much for the in depth reply sir! I will give it all a shot although I haven't gotten a HF coil yet. I am also still using the 3.1 I think it is, haven't upgraded to V4 yet as well.

 

[vferrari]

Legacy coils and 3.2 software will work just fine with the above advice. Only change would be to start with reactivity at 2 because 2.5 does not exist with ver 3.2 software. Definitely, do not make radical changes in hardware or even software version at this point. Stick with what you know for the beach trip and make the change when you're ready and on familiar territory.

 

[462]

I've done a little beach detecting on dry sand and also in the salt water. One thing I found to help, in the water I use wet beach mode and do pumping ground balance whenever it starts getting too noisy.

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[vferrari]

I've done a little beach detecting on dry sand and also in the salt water. One thing I found to help, in the water I use wet beach mode and do pumping ground balance whenever it starts getting too noisy.

Sent from my SM-G950U using TreasureNet.com mobile app

Agree, the lower GB range of beach mode is the right place to start in salt surf, but as I said above, black sand can wreak havoc with the GB reading and may force you back to the normal GB range. It all depends on the beach. On land, I never have had much success with pumping and prefer just matching GB reading precisely with the +/- buttons, seems quicker and fullproof to me (or use V4 tracking). Surprised pumping even works in the water where the water conductivity delta from the sand would be difficult for the pumping algorithm to lock on (vs. dry air). Do you get many GB fails when pumping in the water? If not I may have to experiment with that.

 

[462]

Being out in the bright sunlit it's hard to say if it failed to lock in on a GB number, but it seemed to quite the machine down.

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[vferrari]

Being out in the bright sunlit it's hard to say if it failed to lock in on a GB number, but it seemed to quite the machine down.

Sent from my SM-G950U using TreasureNet.com mobile app

At the end of the day, as long as it's still picking up and allowing you to better discern the keeper targets, that's all that matters. Thanks.

 

[Stretch Da Truth]

Nice write up VF! Thank you!
I am setting up a beach outing and will use your input to adjust my machine.
First time swinging at the beach. Hope to find some goodies!!