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Once Again At My Favorite Beach - GPX 5000


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Outstanding. What do you use to dig this stuff? Your retrieval rate is fast. I dug 51 coins and 3 rings in Savannah over 4 days - probably about 20 hours, but I'm new, and the beach was crowded. I'm sure most of it is experience and one heckuva great detector, but a 14" hole is a bit of work.

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The sheer volume of finds is impressive . One of the copper cents is almost gone !.... sand fleas ?

Nothing like that here,,,so far. (Maybe the Corona caps? I think that guy comes here..LOL...)

Endless amounts of junk on your beach and you still find gold.....It would be my favorite beach too !

 

 

 

 

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14 hours ago, Tom_in_CA said:

Good show !  Good pix.   Love that beach-kissed charcoal grey silver 🙂

Thanks Tom. The show is almost over. I'll be lucky to get 2 or 3 more hunts in before the Memorial Day opening. Then it's off limits until Labor Day. I need the break anyways and get back to some household duties.

11 hours ago, F350Platinum said:

Outstanding. What do you use to dig this stuff? Your retrieval rate is fast. I dug 51 coins and 3 rings in Savannah over 4 days - probably about 20 hours, but I'm new, and the beach was crowded. I'm sure most of it is experience and one heckuva great detector, but a 14" hole is a bit of work.

Thanks. I use a small handle spade and dig on my knees because it's faster than standing up. Also, when I get into the rock layer, it's easier to dig it like a back hoe would (scrape it ). But it's really a slow, steady pace, otherwise I would burn out after a couple of hours. The reason I get what I get, is because I found the perfect combination of machine to beach conditions. There are times when a discriminating machine can run circles around the GPX, not in depth but for quick ferrous / non ferrous hunting. As an example, when the tide is low and enough sand has been removed to get to the layer with all the coins and a lot of iron. Even though the GPX has some iron rejection, and you can further investigate targets and get an idea of deeper iron, it is tedious and time consuming. The other detectors would leave you in the dust getting all those silver and gold targets with their target ID's 😄 

1 hour ago, rvpopeye said:

The sheer volume of finds is impressive . One of the copper cents is almost gone !.... sand fleas ?

Nothing like that here,,,so far. (Maybe the Corona caps? I think that guy comes here..LOL...)

Endless amounts of junk on your beach and you still find gold.....It would be my favorite beach too !

 

 

 

 

Thanks. I'm lucky that the surface trash is gone (except for the recent dropped Corona caps) which were all in about a 15 foot circle.... no party going on there 🙄 Only the deep stuff is left behind. The copper coins suffer the most in those conditions. Not sure if it's wear and tear from the storm surges, or if it's just the acid chemistry leaching out the copper or both, but eventually it consumes the whole coin. Silver survives better but is probably pitted and grainy under that black mess.

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17 hours ago, schoolofhardNox said:

I started out trying for silver but decided to concentrate on low conductors, hoping for some gold. Total of 40 nickels that hunt, counting the war nickel. I ended the afternoon digging for high conductors as well, and was rewarded with yet another half dollar.

Great hunt, HardNOX! 👍🏼 It reminds me of my beach hunts with my Whites TDI.  My digging technique is much different than yours, but I’d imagine my sand strata is quite a bit different than yours.

Could you elaborate a little on how you describe above of your ability to decide to concentrate on digging lower conductors with your 5000 for a while, then switch to digging higher conductors?  Does the GPX have this ability without loss of depth??  I do have this ability to differentiate between higher and lower conductors to some extent  (if I ground balance my TDI), but I would be greatly limiting my depth capability with my PI by enabling ground balance on the TDI, so I don’t hunt in GB mode.  

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13 minutes ago, Raphis said:

Great hunt, HardNOX! 👍🏼 It reminds me of my beach hunts with my Whites TDI.  My digging technique is much different than yours, but I’d imagine my sand strata is quite a bit different than yours.

Could you elaborate a little on how you describe above of your ability to decide to concentrate on digging lower conductors with your 5000 for a while, then switch to digging higher conductors?  Does the GPX have this ability without loss of depth??  I do have this ability to differentiate between higher and lower conductors to some extent  (if I ground balance my TDI), but I would be greatly limiting my depth capability with my PI by enabling ground balance on the TDI, so I don’t hunt in GB mode.  

Thanks. Yes there is no loss of depth that I know of. It's simply the way it responds with a certain timing chosen.  The 5000 will either give you a low to high sound or a high to low sound depending on the target. I don't know the cut off point but zinc pennies sound high to low. Somewhere after that it will switch low to high. I call it low conductor hunting, but in reality it is small targets/ shallow/ low conductive targets vs big targets/ deep/ high conductive targets. So a low conductive target could be everything below zinc pennies and also small iron, while high conductors are copper cents and up and big iron. That's a generalization, always exceptions. With the bit of iron reject it has, the shallow iron is easy to pass on. It also has a function called inverted which I use to change the low conductors to read opposite from the stock setting. In other words I like to hear low to high sound for low conductors and high to low sound for high conductors, backwards from the preset. The ground balance is used on most timings I think. The coin/relic timing has ground balance off, but changes the disc so that everything above foil reads the same. But it is the deepest setting on the machine, but sometimes tricky on salt and black sand. There are a lot of other settings that also help. It is very versatile, but a bit hard to read at first. I will never learn all the settings for all situations. I stick with what works and am happy to be dumb to the rest 😄 You must have the older (and deeper?) TDI. I think on the TDI SL, you can toggle between low/all/high.

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21 minutes ago, schoolofhardNox said:

You must have the older (and deeper?) TDI. I think on the TDI SL, you can toggle between low/all/high.

I have a TDI Pro...it has the low, all, high switch settings, but those are only applicable when the ground balance is enabled...I easily lose 4” to 6” of depth if I turn on ground balance on the TDI Pro.  Yes, I have to swing very slowly in wet or mineralized sand to keep the threshold more stable, but that extra depth is key for having a chance at the older finds when there’s no erosion present. 

I’ve never used a Minelab PI before , but if you don’t have any loss of depth and are still able to hear high/low, low/high conductivities, that’s the cat’s meow!! 👍🏼👍🏼  I believe a Garrett ATX can give similar conductive delineation of target response with no loss of depth also. 

 

 

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7 minutes ago, Raphis said:

I have a TDI Pro...it has the low, all, high switch settings, but those are only applicable when the ground balance is enabled...I easily lose 4” to 6” of depth if I turn on ground balance on the TDI Pro.  Yes, I have to swing very slowly in wet or mineralized sand to keep the threshold more stable, but that extra depth is key for having a chance at the older finds when there’s no erosion present. 

Makes sense. Loosing 4-6" makes all the difference in getting deeper than the rest. In that case, I would go without ground balance and skip the medium to loud targets and just go after the ones that are barely audible. Even if it sounds like ground noise. As long as it sorta repeats, I would remove some sand to see if it brightens up. After a while I got better at figuring out ground noise from an ultra deep coin sound. Not always right but another angle at getting the deep stuff.

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24 minutes ago, schoolofhardNox said:

After a while I got better at figuring out ground noise from an ultra deep coin sound. Not always right but another angle at getting the deep stuff.

Ahhhh, that’s a critical “Angle” to attain in one’s back pocket of tricks for both Prospectors and beach hunters using PI’s......It separates the boys from the men! 😂

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