schoolofhardNox

2 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

It’s simple. I have used a magnetometer along with a Minelab PI and the PI can hit the nail twice as deep as the magnetometer. No better than lugging a VLF around. So the problem remains the same - no help on the junk where you need help the most, the deepest junk.

That's different than I imagined it to be. They use them to find deep buried pipes, so I imagined (even scaled down) they would still beat a PI for smaller targets.  they must lose their punch rather quickly for smaller targets.

16 minutes ago, GB_Amateur said:

Almost.  A magetometer in motion is sensitive to magnetic field gradiants (i.e. changes) and ferromagnetic materials are something that causes this.  Both cobalt and nickel are ferromagetic, along with iron as you note.  Alloys of these two metals (not alloyed with iron) must be in fairly high concentrations which is why our USA nickel coin (25% Ni) isn't picked up by a magnet.  But I'm pretty sure there is at least one Canadian coin which is either pure nickel or very high concentration nickel alloy that is attracted to a magnet.

I think tboykin mentioned that above as well.  I can think of *potential* reasons this could be difficult (sensitivity, directional resolution, weight, speed of motion required) but in principle/theory it seems possible.

So does that mean nickel and cobalt will respond to a magnetometer, as well as iron?  Also, we could just use it as a ferrous check (with the press of a button) and not run it continuous if that makes things easier. I would love to have it as a second option after detecting a target with the PI or even any IB machine.

Since we are at it.... why not just have a PI side by side with a Magnetometer??? Have the magnetometer be the stronger signal. If the magnetometer reacts to the target it is absolutely ferrous, since I think it only reacts to iron. I'm sure to be corrected if that is incorrect. So by default the PI signal must be non ferrous. I would love to see that in a pin pointer if the scenario is valid.

11 hours ago, Rc2125 said:

Schoolofhardnox,,      had the same exact stuff going on with mine, at one certain huge beach area, regardless of literally every setting/mode/sens/gb attempted, just endless iron sounds and couldn't hit anything deeper than like 4-5 inches. Freshwater, Lake Mi. Then, at other beaches I went to,  did just fine and very deep.  The problem beach had multi layers of magnetic sand all throughout, but never had any issues in the past there, with hundreds and hundreds of hours with nox & then legend.  Due to an injury, haven't been able to go back and experiment yet, will be several weeks. 

Thanks. I'm sure by now everyone else thinks I'm nuts 😄 It will be interesting to see if that happens again when you go back. Hope you heal well. I won't be back at this beach anytime soon, but there are some sections of other beaches that give it limited depth trouble as well.  Maybe I'll try and see if single frequency has any effect.

If not too late, my vote would go to the Minelab Vanquish 540. From what others have said, it hits hard on coins and could always be used as a backup.

4 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

I'd like a little more detail on some of this:

1) What is 'disburbed ground'?

2) Regarding gold hunting in parks being hampered by the wide range of pulltab VDI's, how is that different than other detectors?

Your usual detailed (and time consuming) photos of finds.  At least one of the Buffalo Nickels has me intrigued.  It looks to be in decent shape, and I would think has readable date and mintmark (if the latter isn't Philly, of course).  Can you share with us what date+mm those two have, if any?

First this is how I see the machine for me - not necessarily how anyone else may view it. The disturbed ground I was referring to was the bulldozed beach and possibly plowed fields (although that has yet to be determined). I remember my Equinox not doing well in the plowed fields and I suspect the Manticore is not that different technology wise form the Equinox. We'll see.

As far as parks and pull tabs are concerned, some machines do a better job of assigning gold targets and pull tabs. An example is the CTX 3030. No pull tabs read 6 or 9, but a lot of small gold rings and thin women's rings read just those 2 numbers. That was nice when you were doing a stripped beach at low tide and got a solid 6 or 9 reading. That alone proves it can be narrowed down better. Pull tabs read anywhere from the 20's through the 40's and I think even into the 50's on the Manticore. Also the smallest targets can read 12 or 15 or more.

It seems we are going backwards in target ID. Foil used to read in the single digits and rarely went into the teens. Now it seems to read much higher and would be harder to discriminate or you may lose a good target. Tiny aluminum rivets like the ones on a pull tab, can have a fairly high target ID.  Not knocking the machine, it is a good machine but I feel there are drawbacks to the way they determine target values.

I can't get a good read on the dates of the Buffalo nickels, but I do remember they were Philadelphia mint. One might have been from the teens but not real sure.

On 3/9/2023 at 2:29 PM, cobill said:

Rolland, 

One of the biggest contributors to EMI and instability that I have seen is detectorists having their cell phones on while in their pockets. I was helping a friend with his brand new ML GPX 5000 at Rich Hill, AZ. and my 5000 was running dead quiet, while his was unstable and noisy. I asked him to empty his pockets...his cell was on, he had car and house keys, change,  a wallet and other items. Once he removed all those metal and electrical items, his GPX 5000 ran quiet.🤔

Bill

No wonder mine is always noisy 🙂

Awesome job on polishing them up. I have tons of old brass but none of them are polished 😄

Wow that is some snow. In western MA we are lucky so far. Any snow that was here melted soon after. At least you won't have any water shortages.  😶

34 minutes ago, Gold Seeker said:

Take that broken Snap-On opened end wrench to a Snap-On dealer and they may give you new one, I think they have a lifetime warranty on most hand tools!! LOL

I'm not sure if that wrench piece is real 😄 It's extremely lightweight.

5 minutes ago, F350Platinum said:

Great hunt again! The difference is staggering.

We had the Axiom up here a couple days ago, heck of a machine. 👍 It didn't find anything the Deus wasn't finding, but we only used it for a short time. I followed with the D2 and identified what most of the stuff was, it hit bullets well. I selected a spot where iron and aluminum trash wasn't too heavy and there was potential for good targets.

Personally I don't know how you do it, if I had to dig 2' holes for every target and have most of it be crap, I'd go nuts. 🤪 You're awe-inspiring. 🏆I could see it more on a beach than clay or wet ground.

After that experience I appreciate a discriminating VLF even more. 🤣

Yep pulse vs multi in my area shows the major differences between the 2 in both depth and discrimination. I'm surprised the Deus kept up with the Axiom. 🤔 As far as digging goes, if you just put your head down and don't count how many holes you make.... all is well until the next day 😄. I am here to make sure you never get a pulse machine or dump your Deus 🙂

Beach hunt # 28 was at one of my favorite beaches and the place I wanted to try the Manticore to see if it ground balanced differently than the last beach. It did and I posted that on the thread in the Manticore forum, so I won’t repeat it here again. I had originally wanted to hunt the dry sand at the beach down the road for old silver, but I stopped at the beach that has bathrooms first and saw a lot of exposed rocks, so out comes the Manticore for the next 2 ½ hours. Sparse pickings even though it looked like the beach was trashed from the waves some time ago. I’m sure it was hit hard, and I only managed a little bling jewelry. I then hit the dry sand and quickly found out that the Manticore really does not like that purple/ black sand. It struggles a lot. Barely a good hit on a 4” quarter, but enough for me to know that the dry area would produce. So, I swapped detectors and let the GPX do its thing. If I lived closer, I would investigate the single frequencies on the Manticore more, but honestly I have a pulse to counteract that type of sand, so it would just be a waste of time for me to try and find a better setting, if one even exists. Swap machines and be happy.  🙂 For me, the Manticore is for damp/saturated sands, and any water hunting I may try, and deep coins/silver in parks. It is not for black sand, disturbed ground or gold hunting in parks, since the pull tab range is huge and crosses over so well with the gold range. The GPX kept me busy digging, but as you can tell, the layer I was in was mostly clad from the 80’s. A couple of silvers and many copper cents was all I could muster up. I hunted 6 ½ hours with the GPX. Long hunt but I got my fix. Next week I may try that other beach down the road.

14 minutes ago, F350Platinum said:

Aaaaaaaand it's also the easiest to find. 😀 BTW that spoon bowl from my last post is silver. 🥳

It looked silver. Usually they are very thin, and yours looked like a good candidate for silver. That makes that hunt even sweeter 😋

On 3/2/2023 at 11:23 PM, F350Platinum said:

Glad you're getting enough decent weather to get out, I think you've done more this year than last. Are you getting less precious metals this year than last?

I am getting about the same gold. I don't get a lot of that anyways. Silver is definitely down mostly because the beaches are hit hard and technology is catching up with the GPX 😭

On 3/3/2023 at 1:21 AM, Sirius said:

How deep would you say these targets were? I want to know if these more valuable targets were buried deep or if they were kinda in the usual depths of 0 to 10 in down.

This beach the coins were rather shallow, most above 6", many at 4". Other beaches I have found many coins from 12" all the way to my deepest silver quarter that was near 20". At the maximum depth, there must be very little EMI or black sand present and even then it sounds like just a hint of ground noise. Many times I dig 8" of sand out just to find nothing and it was only ground noise that I heard.

On 3/3/2023 at 11:06 AM, GB_Amateur said:

Great report as always.  Just a few random questions&comments for you:

1) Do you wash your finds (including the trash) before photographing?  Not being  a beach detectorist I don't know the conditions of freshly recovered items.

2) If my wife had been around when you got back home there might have been a wrestling match for that amethyst.  (No jokes, please...)  🙄

3) Are you able to make time estimates on how long a target has been lost based upon its condition?  For example, the amethyst has a loop/clasp that appears a bit tarnished.  The stainless chain doesn't show corrosion.  (I realize it was a surface find but maybe that has more to do with the shifting sand than the length of time since lost?)

I wash my finds if they are covered in wet sand. It takes too long for them to dry out and photograph. I have a set of classification strainers that I use that makes it easy to wash them and trap the sand for disposal. I'm guessing the amethyst was probably a recent drop or was far from the wave action, never getting repeated saturation. The coins have probably been there a while. Anytime you see that red or green corrosion that does not wipe of easily when rubbed, usually means they were there in the wet environment for a long time. How long is hard to tell, but generally many years, not months.  When your wife's eye light up with one of your finds, it's better to hand it over than have cold cereal for breakfast 😄

So an update on the ground balancing. I wanted to try another beach I know better and see if the numbers change when I ground balance. I did not change any settings or factory reset the beach mode, as I wanted to compare beaches with the same settings first. I hit the wet slope and auto balanced the machine and it went down to -9, just as my Equinox does. I then put it into tracking and detected for a while. I went into ground balance mode and saw that the setting it settled on was -6. I checked every once in a while and it remained at -6. Never did it go to zero. On dry sand it bounced from -3 to +2 but settled mostly in the low negatives. I also did not experience any of the grunting ground noise that I had at that other beach. I had a wide open screen and sensitivity was set between 20 - 21, which is where the machine seems comfortable at. So not sure what's up on that other beach other than the fact that the sand was pushed around by the bulldozer. Thanks for all the advice and GB settings.

Some nice older and interesting brass fragment pieces you found there. The spoon (from the picture) looks like silver to me. What are you doing finding a Merc at a 1600's field???? 😉 Nice hunt.

1 hour ago, okara gold said:

I always do an auto GB on the wet salt sand where i hunt and it usually settles around 12 - 15. This is in Florida on the west coast. No black sand but  heavy salt accumulation. I have gone into the dryer sand area and re - ground balanced in auto and almost every time it settles back to 0. Also if the are is a heavy accumulation of shells / seaweed on the higher slope of the wet sand the GB is usually higher… around 18 - 20. If your machine doesn’t vary from 0 in various conditions then something doesn’t sound right. 

I'll give that a try and see if the numbers change. Thanks

1 hour ago, midalake said:

Maybe silly to ask?
Why do you not run tracking GB? Minelab recommends this at a salt beach. I ALWAYS run tracking and have been very successful.  
It also allows the machine to adjust for those 20'-40' spots that have a different black sand content. 

In fact, I run tracking on the D2 as well. 

That's what I was running originally. That's when I noticed the excessive grunts which lead to trying to do the Auto GB and then Manual GB. If I run tracking again, can I see the GB# by entering the GB mode,  or are you not able to see the GB number?  On a different note, I watch a video that says Minelab's tracking is slower to adjust than the Deus tracking? Do you ever notice the Deus handling different ground conditions faster?

On 3/3/2023 at 7:20 PM, strick said:

Does the machine quiet down as you pump it? Doesn't matter what the number ends up as.... as long as it quiets down as you pump it. If it is not ground balancing (quieting down during the pump) well then I would say either the ground is too hot or something is wrong with the machine..I have seen are places where the black sand is so hot that it's impossible to get the machine to balance correctly. The other thing I would add is if you are getting excessive ground noise try turning the sensitivity down...sorry Clive I could not resist..

strick 

When I ground balance (auto- pumping), it stays at zero, even though I am on a mix of black sand. As a reference, the Nox would read -9 on this sand. I know they are different, but the Manticore still sounds off on the ground with the iron grunting sounds.  Most targets I dug that day were under 4", unless it was a can.  Maybe it's just this beach. EMI is not very harsh here, and the detector while stationary, runs quiet. Todd Irvine has some good videos on the Manticore. Here's one where he does not go with the "zero theory" like on the Nox. I realize he's in a plowed field and not a beach, but the ground response is the same as I am getting when he purposely sets the machine to zero.  I guess my disappointment would be that I would have to manually go through the ground balance numbers and hope one of them quiets the ground. I'm not understanding why the pumping of the coil (auto), does not find a ground balance number that gets rid of the grunts. It just stays at zero. These beaches are not severe enough to have drop the sensitivity down to the low teens or single digits. My beaches are mild compared to some of the black sand beaches out there.  Anyways, thanks everyone for the suggestions a thanks to those that provided their ground balance numbers when they balance.

It's like a candy store 😍😍 😍 There is something there for everyone. I bought a couple machines there and they were fantastic.  Great to see them expanding. Nice job Steve on being involved there.

33 minutes ago, rvpopeye said:

Looking at the volume of finds and your time there . You must get a target every 30 seconds and dig a whole lot faster than I can !  🤔

That 5K sure is a shop vac for metal. 

So , on a scale of 1 to 10 . How sore are you after a full day digging all that stuff ??🥸

You're due for some yellah..

 

I dig fast. I don't waste a lot of time interrogating a target. If I spent more time doing that, I would probably have a lot less iron. Iron masks a lot of targets so it's easier for me to just dig it.  A spade makes for easy digging, But them deep pull tabs get old after a while 😌. At least they are the older style ones. On this beach it's much easier to dig. If you get deep, there are packed small rocks and shell that are a pain to dig. But in most spots it's just sand. So I'm a 5 or 6 the next day after digging. On tough beaches I'm an 8 or 9 the next day. Yellah is for the other guys 😄 I have to wait my turn 🙄 I'm in real trouble when the silvah turns it's back on me.

Nice hunt. That is a lot of targets from a site that you would think would be hunted to death. Congrats on pulling all that non ferrous from those nails. The 32D is a sweet find. Like GB said, the depression coinage is scarce. I've never seed a 32D dug before.

I need some of the beach hunters that have a black sand mix in their sand, to try something for me if they can. I'm having a problem with the ground noise on the Manticore in the beach modes. I run the screen wide open so that all targets are heard, but the ground noise is more common than the actual iron. It was suggested that I need ground balancing. I usually run tracking ground balance, but I have done it manually also. I prefer tracking. So my problem is that when manual balancing, the ground balance always goes to 0. It never moves when I pump it or if I manually raise it (or decrease it) I don't notice a difference. Then I bob it up and down and it returns to 0. On nice sand I would imagine 0 is fine, but on this black sand mix, it has never read 0 before, but now it does. Can some of you try the beach modes and see if you actually get a negative (or positive) number when you manually balance your machines?  I've included a picture of the sand that I have here. The machine responding to the ground noise directly contradicts the 0 reading I am getting.  Thanks.

Beach hunt #27 is at the same beach that had the big piles of sand, which were being spread out to replenish the upper beach area. It is also where I was having problems with the Manticore and excessive ground noise. Some here mentioned that the detector needed to be ground balanced. I run tracking ground balance, so I didn’t think I would have to do that. Isn’t that what tracking balance is for? Anyways, I checked the ground balance and it read 0. That can’t be right since I’m on a mix with black sand in it. So, I manually balanced (pumped) it and it stayed on 0. I manually raised the numbers and re balance and it went back to 0.  Same thing when I went negative with the ground balance. It always went to 0. So not sure what’s up with that, but I have to read up on being able to reset the detector to just that search mode or do I have to do a full factory reset on the machine. I rather not lose all my settings. I've included a picture of the sand that I posted previously, so you can see the black sand mix. So, a bit frustrated with that, but I did run the Manticore for about 2 ½ hours and found mostly shallow targets. Switched over to the GPX and ran about 4 ½ hours until it was time to leave. GPX saved me and produced a silver ring and silver pendant. A nice eyeball find while digging another pull tab, was a thin S/S chain with an Amethyst/Quartz crystal on it. I lost it as soon as I got home. 😄 Oh well, better to lose that, then to give away all my gold rings to my better half. Lots of coins, no gold, and some nice scenery. Can’t beat that.

My best detector is the one and only Radio Shack $19.99 circa 1969ish. Sleek silver case, 6" coil, loud speaker (wow) and it even assists you in digging. The shaft is so short that you hunt bent over... Brilliant, you are half way to the ground already. Who need to dig a deep hole when all your targets are lined up nicely within 2". Go ahead, tell me I'm wrong 😄 Now that my brain stopped swelling from that slip and fall I took, I'm thinking maybe I'll switch my choice to the GPX 5000.  🤔

That's not a chain, it's more like the ropes they use on large ship mast 😄 Beautiful finds!

18 hours ago, steveg said:

You ARE remembering correctly, BUT, I'm not sure there is a way to "un-combine" the location that iron targets report, and the location that most ground noise tends to report.  Reason being, at least in my mind, is that since the source of the "ground noise" often IS the background irony composition of many types of soil, the ground IS essentially an "iron target," and thus why it tends to "ID" as "iron."

Steve

Yep. At first I liked the reporting of it together but now I want to just hear the iron so that I can get a good understanding of how many nails are there. Sometimes it sounds like a machine gun going wild but when you pinpoint there are only a few nails present. I guess I'll just lower, or get rid of the iron volume in certain situations. When looking for small gold I may change the pitch of the low numbers (in 5 tones) to a higher setting, so the low numbers don't get confused with the pitch of the iron targets. Not a big deal.