schoolofhardNox

If the Deus II could find coins as deep as I'm getting and could handle the extreme EMI, I would buy it in a second. 👍 When I'm old, I'll probably just hang the GPX body on my hip and just swing the coil until I die. Then they can bury me and my machine in the dunes 😵 Clad at 12" is good for any VLF/ Multi. The CTX 3030 could peg a clad quarter at 12" in slightly wet sand, but it couldn't do that if there was a lot of EMI present. I've had a couple people watch me dig coins at 15", including one of our members here. He had a PI as well and did hear each target although some were very sketchy. 15" coins are very faint but very repeatable, and if you get a couple of them close together, you will probably be digging a lot of them that day. 18" deep coins are rare, I think I've only dug less than 10 in 4 or 5 years of hunting beaches, so no one has seen that. Most of the people that watch me dig a penny at 15" want nothing to do with digging that deep for a cent 😄

For recent history it is Minelab all the way. From the E Trac to the CTX 3030, but the bar raised substantially by the GPX 5000. Whether it's relic hunting or beach hunting, the 5000 has made detecting fun again. Only real drawback is it's weight. The sheer number of old coins and relics it's found in the last 5+ years is way more than I would have found with my old machines. Now, past history has to go to Whites electronics. They fueled me from the late 60's through the 90's.

Thanks Rick. I usually only have one day off to hunt, so I make sure it's a long one. If I had more days, they would surely be shorter in duration 😄 I do pay the price the next day, but at least one day a week , I actually get some real exercise. The good stuff makes up for some of the digging. It's funny, the deep buffalo nickels in certain areas of the beach come up a dark red color that basically rubs off on my pants. It's the greenish color ones that need real cleaning at home. If I find one that is that deep red color, I just clean it there before it oxidizes or reacts with the sunlight and becomes harder to clean. The same thing happens with some copper cents too. You can rub some clean, but they tone a bit by the time you get home. That nickel was bright silver after a beach clean, but toned a bit by the time I took the picture the next day. As for iron man, just one muscle on one arm 😄. The rest of the body is screaming at me at the moment. I tell myself that heavy 14" DD balances out the heavy GPX body. 🙄 Not really, but it keeps me going. By the end of the hunt, parts of the body just go on strike and I say "ok, I'm done" Time to go home.

Beach hunt # 29 is my last hunt at this beach…. Really, 😄 I mean it this time. Pretty hard hunt as targets were rarer until I shifted sections… then the iron showed up. The 5000 gets heavy if you don’t break up the swing time with some digging. A couple of times I went almost a half hour without a signal. I’m fairly sure I am done in the sections that were producing a bunch of silver recently. The 14” Coiltek DD anti-interference coil has really started to click with me. Some fine tuning of the GPX and this coil does above what I was expecting, considering the almost nonstop heavy EMI. The surprise of the hunt was finding the Roosevelt and the Washington at 18”. This was in the same area that I pounded, but this time I crept along like a snail and investigated many slight anomalies to the threshold. A lot of them were EMI related and resulted in no real signal in the hole once opened up. But two were very deep silvers. So that was a real surprise. I managed 5 silvers for the hunt, with 2 Mercury dimes that almost look like dirt coins and not beach finds. I’m thinking they moved some sand around that was way up on the banks of the beach. Never seen such nice clean coins before. It was also nice to see 3 dated Buffalo nickels and an early 1910 wheat cent. All in all, it was a great day hunting. The rain held off until I was almost done, and the temps were pleasant. Come on next week!!!!

That whatzit could be a fancy drawer pull also. Watch fob is very probable too. Decent hunt.

The Sunray probe was awesome for the E Trac. I wish I never sold mine. Nothing like putting the probe deep in a hole and hearing the sweet sound of silver ☺️ It didn't go super deep but it helped not scratch your coin once the hole was opened up a bit.

The E Trac with the right program and some patience to weed through a trashy park, can get you a lot of deep silvers (and wheats that mimic silvers 😄). My best two machines are both old technology. They made them so good that it will take a while before I retire them. The Equinox had the potential to retire the E Trac but the lack of target ID separation makes the E Trac the winner for parks for me. And it will take a LOT of convincing for me to retire the 5000. Some people swear by Tesoro for cellar hole hunting and I believe them but never tried one there. There is a certain comfort in old machines that I miss. As for the weather, It can rain from Saturday to Wednesday and that would be fine with me 😉 Thanks. Them trimes are small. I think I have only found 3 or 4 of them. When I hunted cellar holes a lot, I would find way more half dimes than trimes. That silver saved my butt for sure. Trash was lighter because I got lazy 😆

Beach hunt # 28 was a challenge. Started out by helping a friend out with his new (used) Equinox 600. We hit a beach and small park area for 2 ½ hours and it wasn’t producing much, so I left there and went to another beach, hoping for some good finds. Waves were pretty aggressive, and the wind kicked up, so it was much harder detecting than the calm times I had the past few weeks. Not much showing up, some technical issues, and just lots of wasted time was the narrative for this hunt. I actually doubted that I would get any silver and wasn’t even considering gold as an option. The layer I was doing was clearly from the 80’s and I just got plain lucky to get the one silver Roosevelt dime. Most of the copper cents were Memorials with just a few wheats. Kind of glad that hunt is over. 🙄 I knew I should have continued hunting the beach that was giving up silver, but I needed to check out a couple of things at the 2 beaches I hit this hunt. I was hoping to get some silvers from the park area with the E Trac, but I am severely out of practice hunting parks, especially with a machine I have not used much for probably 10-15 years. Well, that is over and for sure next week I am going back to the silver beach. Hopefully conditions have not changed much, and I can continue where I left off. Still better to better to be detecting a beach than working. 🙂

"Put as many controls on the unit as possible." I wrote that with a tiny bit of sarcasm 😄 but generally meant it. Not that I want to see a cluttered up machine or screen or have to get a college degree just to use it, but to highlight what happens when trends start in the manufacturing industry. One manufacturer does a turn on and go machine and they all follow. That is a dangerous thing to buy into, if you are and avid detectorists. If I go cheap (for the new technology) I will be disappointed in the lack of controls, but if I wait, I lose the chance to try something new and possibly beneficial to my type of hunting. I'm getting the feeling that a turn and go machine is what they want beginners to get, while a mid priced machine is what gives me the options that I usually want, and recently the high end stuff is extremely focused on one task (like the GPX 6000). You can't go by lineage anymore since the GPX 6000 is nothing like the GPX 5000. Carl, I was actually very interested when White's announced the Vision was coming. I saved up for it, since I had been with Whites since the CMV Supreme days. But legal delays and my attention span being short, I opted to try a Minelab and never looked back. I wish the V3 would have been available, but not under powered. I would have love the ability to explore the different (and sometimes unorthodox) combinations that might arise. I think it would have been a great park machine. I guess I don't understand the view of a manufacturer that doesn't want to make a machine that has beginners as well as advanced users talking about how great it is. To me it's simple, just leave a note to beginners telling them to use the expert menu at their own risk. Then just show them the factory reset button 😄 Problem solved.

I agree as well. Put as many controls on the unit as possible. That way if I'm late to the game, I will have many to choose from after some people start selling them cheap when they have had enough. 😄 Seriously, I'm all for having as much control as I can get. As long as the stock programs give good results, the people that just want to turn on and go hunting will be satisfied. That's how I am with my car.... took me 5 years to realize there was a secret box below the seat to hide valuables 😆 Never hurt me a bit not knowing that. The car drove me where I needed to go and I could care less about any other features.

Thanks! Some days are better than others but it's always a good day to be detecting. Who knows what is hiding your way. You probably could retire of some of those treasures. Time to get one of your buddies drunk and have them steal a bulldozer 😄 Just deny you know him when the cops get there.

Thanks. Beaches are funny. I hit this area in previous years and hit silver, but apparently there was too much sand to access all the silver. I assume the same is happening again here. More is left that I can not get to, but hopefully more sand will be removed and more silver will be available, and possibly some gold that may be even deeper than the silver. There is lots left that is just too deep to get. The spike is from the train that lives on the beach. I think the guys that maintain or built the tracks just through it on the beach 🤬 I think I've found about 5 or 6 of them already. The silver is a blessing! 😊 If I had to survive on the gold I find, I would be dead many years ago 😄 I never worry about the 16 D's, I toss them like zinc pennies. (sure I do 🙄). All the small targets are actual hits from the GPX. They hit on the 11", 12 1/2" and the 14" coils. They sound deep but are rarely deeper than 2-3" I am amazed at how tiny the targets are and that they can even be heard on the GPX. It's harder to find then with the pinpointer than it is to find them with the large coils. Detectors have really come a long way since the 70's.

I bet OBN makes it 🤩 He makes everything else for it 😆 Glad to see Fisher is still doing something with the AQ

Beach hunt # 27 was a grueling one. 9 hours of hunting with a little bit of testing out a new shaft system for the GPX. I got tired of the shaft twisting because of a worn-out cam lock, so I asked Steveg to see if he could make me one of his shafts. He agreed and yesterday was my first ever trial of his products. Now, I’m not one to be soft on my machines so I decided to try his shaft out with an 18” DD coil from Detech. If it can handle that weight, then it is a go for me. 2 hours spent swinging that beast and the shaft performed flawlessly. The handle I used was the original Minelab handle, snugged down as much as I dared to, so it would not break. It only moved briefly once when I was swinging the coil very fast. Nice job Steve, I’ll be in touch for the next one as a custom design. So, with that testing done I swapped to the 14” anti-interference coil that I have been using recently. The 18” DD coil just couldn’t handle the EMI, even on cancel mode. I think running a GPX in non-cancel mode and having the coil do the canceling is the future of EMI mitigation. The hunt started out slow as I was continuing from where I left off last hunt. I was worried I would not get much from this section, but it stared to give up some silver halfway through the hunt. By the end of it, I had a really good hunt with an unexpected W/L Half showing up as well. No gold, but a very defined layer of targets came to light. Most of the nickels were early Jeffersons from the 40’s as were most of the wheat cents. Most of the dimes were Mercuries from that decade too. Same for the Washington quarters. Unfortunately, I was barely able to hear these targets not because of the coil, but because my depth dropped when the train was active. I was still getting between 12” to 18” on targets. I am more impressed with this coil than I was when I first started to use it. I’m going to give this beach a break for a bit and hit another area. There’s a guy that just bought an EQ 600 and he wants to hit a beach and ask me some questions, so it’s off to his place next week. I am really happy that the GPX has a nice, solid shaft and that the anti-interference coil works at my most severe EMI beach. It really helps to have your machines set up properly. Very happy to get a chance to dig in the sand and enjoy the sunshine.

Coming soon to a theater near you 😄

I'm not sure where the stations are, but the tracks are super close, probably less than 20 feet if you are at the very top of the beach. I will never need radiation treatments.🤕 Between the big battery on my back and the train passing by about 12 times a day, I'm good, and I have a rather glowing complexion. Now if I could just get the train to charge my batteries. 🤔 I wish I had that young guy back, my vote is alien interference when I was a kid.

Naw, you're fine. You just got started finding silver. Don't bail on me now 😄 This beach is EMI heaven (if you like EMI that is 🙄), so a lot is left to find under the right conditions. Come on down and you can have as much fun as I have digging all those other junk targets too. 😩 One you try this, you will never be back 😶

Beach hunt # 26 is a continuation of going behind the GPX 6000 and trying to find the deeper targets. I’m still using the Coiltek 14” anti-interference coil on the 5000. So, I started to grid the next square of the 3 squares I did with the 6000. The other day I hit square 1 and did fairly well. Today was square 2 which did not produce much, as it didn’t produce much for the 6000 either. It did produce a couple of coins but not great considering the area covered. I decided to go back to square #1 and grid it perpendicular to the shore, instead of parallel as previously done. Not much either but did hit a couple more coins. So, I remembered some of those coins from the other hunt barely registered. I slowed down and started to really interrogate any anomaly in the threshold. I dug quite a few holes which were EMI related and did not contain any targets, but there were a bunch of them that sounded a bit different. Those targets did contain coins and they were a just a bit deeper than the other, identifiable targets previous found. I did not get far, only about ½ of square 1, so I have to finish that square next time out and maybe hit square 3 and call it done. I must admit I was not really in the mood to hunt, but I really wanted to see if I miss stuff. The answer is Yes, of course. 😄 Even doing the same area, with the same coil, and the same settings you still can find more. Granted, I changed directions and listened better, but the goal was to get more silver from an area that is producing. Surprise of the day was a thin gold name (charm?), that was found by the pinpointer and not the target I was digging. Sometimes it’s fun doing an area again, as there is a lot less iron. Mostly a comfortable hunt, but a bit chilly in the end as the snowstorm was coming in overnight. Great to sneak another hunt in.

I knew you could do it 😊 Treasure at last. Congrats on the Silver with the Nox. But before you get a camera, get some boots man.😨 It is cold when you get caught in a wave this time of year.

Your getting in some good hunts. Nice to see a Geo III copper show up. Nice looking Buck too. I never knew they had aluminum in them. I always thought they had brass. Kind of sad really.

God, I'm hoping retirement comes before they put me in a box 😄 If we only could just see everything that is still beyond our reach, I think we would all be shocked. I actually look forward to the pain 😩 as long as I can find at least silver. I'd even be ok finding copper cents, since that era is the goal of the hunt. Anything above that layer, and the finds drop dramatically. Not many fresh drops left here. The filling in of the holes is the real killer 🙄 I fill every hole up. At the start of the hunt I even sweep the sand that's around the hole to make it look pretty, but by the 7th hour I'm barely getting the job done. It takes me twice as long to fill a hole. My right arm is the one that takes the punishment. I tried to swing with the left arm, but no go. As for the movie, it's all yours 😄, but I'll take any royalties you will give me.

That is the smartest thing I have ever heard 😄 Finally someone has figured out one size does not fit all. Or just hide the advanced menus. If you figure out how to access them then you are ready for them 😊

Show her YouTube videos of all the different girls detecting

Nice looking seated. Almost looks like it even retained some mint luster. Great coin.

Nice half dime. I always thought those were a cool coin to dig, along with 2cent pieces and trimes. Obsolete denomination coins are the best coins to dig. Now you know there are old coins in that field!