schoolofhardNox

Thanks. I could have just used the Equinox and hunted differently. Had I known that this was going to be easy, shallow digging I would have done it differently. But I could have missed that ring because of all the different sizes of aluminum that may read the same as the ring, so I decided to dig as many targets as I could dig, until there was no more room in the pouch 😄.

Thanks Joe. I wish I had not procrastinated as the pond was bare for months. Target are shallow and I could have used the Nox for most of the hunts. Live and learn

So today's hunt was not at a beach, but at a place that I should have been hunting all along! I thought I missed my opportunity (kind of did) to hunt a very old drained pond. I could not find a place to park, so I kept putting it off. That was in the fall of 2020. They said the dam repairs would be done by January 2021, so I forgot all about it. Last week, I have a client that needed a scrap electronics recycling pick up, so I drove to his new house which just happens to abut the pond. Now this pond is HUGE and a lot of people have been pounding it for a year (at least 30 people that I heard of. Many nice coins and rings have come out of there, including Seated coins. Oh well. So I asked if I could park in his yard and go down to the pond and he said - anytime. Now because it has been dry for over a year, except with a small river flowing down the middle, lots of vegetation has sprung up and makes it impossible to hunt. It's very boggy in about 90% of the pond now. The side I am on is not the popular side that has been used for a couple of centuries, but I figured I would start there and maybe return some other time. Also being cold, some of the desirable area froze solid. I brought the Equinox and the GPX 5000 for this hunt, and decided on the GPX even though I would be in areas with a lot of iron ( I assumed). I was amazed that the iron rejected extremely well and most of the iron I dug was out of curiosity. This was a 4 hour hunt and I had to dumb the GPX down sensitivity wise in order to not go nuts. Targets were everywhere. This was going to be a low conductor hunt because of all the iron, as my primary goal was finding gold! I knew there would be a lot of lead, but I did not take into account the sheer number of small pieces of aluminum that I would encounter. I worked non stop and got a lesson on trashy pond hunting. I'm glad I did it and glad that I found a little bit of gold, silver and even a very crumbling Indian cent. Man o man, do humans pollute!!!! 🤬 I will be back if the weather doesn't freeze over everything soon. I'm glad I had a chance to detect it after all. 🙂

Welcome aboard Johnny! I see you got a military discount.... Thank you for your service!! Don't fret too much about selling your machine, sometimes things get in the way of doing what you originally intended to do. It's a good hobby to keep one entertained, especially if you need alone time (like I do 😄). Unfortunately there are no shortcuts to enjoying a new machine. The best you can do is read up on it and follow people's advice (especially if they are from your area and are successful). Why reinvent the wheel right? I appreciate a lot of the more talented people here and read their post trying to see if what they say will fit my type of hunting. My advice to you, for whatever it's worth, is to pick a machine that you think you would feel comfortable with and stick to it for a while. Sometimes you click instantly, like I did with the GPX 5000. Other times you need to get hit over the head over and over before the machine clicks in (like the E Trac for me). But there isn't a better hobby when I just need to put the world aside and roam the beach all day long!

I do a fair amount of older beaches In New England. In sand that is not mineralized, I would stick to the EQ w/15" coil all day long over a PI. I would probably run it with recovery speed at 1 or 2 if I could handle it. Sensitivity as high as I could get it without falsing. In that scenario, I would have excellent discrimination and maximum ground coverage and depth. The PI would probably not give me any advantage and would actually hinder progress, speed wise. Now bring in some mineralization or worse yet, what I call banded mineralization, and the PI's rules in the depth category. On my beaches, the sand is layered with tiny bands of magnetite in-between clean sand layers. The EQ struggles terribly in this situation making the disc function irrelevant, since I'm not getting any depth anyways. Coins at 15" sound faint and sweet on a PI... on the EQ they sound like.....threshold 😄 In respond to the trash targets with the TDI vs EQ, I think that I would try and find slope areas where the lighter targets get washed out to shore. Only there would I use the TDI. The other thing is that if I were running the TDI in a certain area and didn't get anything deep, then I'd switch to the EQ figuring that area is sanded in. Only break out the TDI if you have a reason to do it, basically mineralization or if enough sand is removed and you are getting close to a hard packed clay layer. When I get that close to bottom (within 15-20") only the PI can reach them targets before they get sanded back in.

I did PCGS with some silvers and colonial coppers - all dug. Never submit a copper coin that is dug. 😭 It will fail every time. They did slab a Seated half dime and a Mercury dime. The half dime was just an XF and had even color. The Mercury has some luster to it, so I think your coins would have a decent chance to grade properly. Never mention they were dug.

I'm not a rock guy, but it looks like smoky quartz or iron stained quartz.

I use 2 tones. Tried 5T and 50T but found that by running hot, it was harder to tell what was 1 of the 50T vs a false tone. In two tones I can tell false tones better. I don't worry too much about numbers since corroded zincs and corroded bottle caps can read in many of the ring ID's. Also bigger aluminum foil can get into the small ring numbers. So I skip the Target ID's all together. Now that's not to say that I don't get excited about seeing the number 1 or 9 when you are in an area that does not have any aluminum foil kicking around. It's just easier and faster to listen for one mid tone, rather than 50 different tones. I watch a lot of videos of guys working a signal for eternity, trying to determine if they are going to dig it or not. I can have 3 targets done by then 😄

Great finds! Love all the rings!

Beach hunt # 14 was a couple of weeks ago and I’m just getting around to posting it. I wasn’t expecting much with a weak low tide and a never ending sanded in beach, so I just enjoyed using the 800 and the 5000 for some fun in the sand. Nothing much notable except maybe the complete herb grinder 😲... 😄 The following week I did a day’s work looking for structures and trying to ID finds without digging any of them. Archaeologists are fun sometimes. 🙄 They actually wanted to see if any structures were around that could be found by their iron nail components. This is a no dig site until permission is granted. Also, nonferrous guesses on what they may be (flat buttons, coins, etc.) I used the E Trac for this with an open screen – two tones. Fun, but not as much fun as actually digging them up! Last week I took a break during the holiday, and it had nothing to do with the 28 degree / 17 MPH winds that were scheduled for that day at the beach.🥶 Hoping to get a couple of beach hunts in soon. All is good and I’ll be glad to hit a beach soon. (getting kind of antsy!)

I would wander everywhere until I found old stuff. Then pound all those areas hard. The answer to your question on why lady Liberty evolved is simple. Metal detecting was born and lady Liberty is trying to get away from all you hole digging varmints. She was just fine sitting until someone dug up her sister and put her in a pouch. 😄

Great hunt. Now you have a couple of areas that had old finds in them.

Merry Christmas to you as well. Hope you get some gold! 😍

Trade areas usually have a lot more activity and artifacts. Yours is probably just an early colonial field. There are many such fields located all up and down the older established areas from Maine to Florida and are a great place to hunt. !!

Great finds!!! That handle is old, and I believe it's called a tri-ped (not sure how to spell that) and is very late 1600's through early 1700's. That buckle is probably just as old as well. Some old finds there. I have found those spoon handles before and they came from an early 1720's site. Keep all brass scraps, especially if any are triangular. You could still be in the contact (trade) era and you might just turn up some Native trade goods there. That would be where I would spent my winters digging 🙃

It will be interesting on how it behaves in the brackish and salt water tests. Water in the wet sand holes at the beach is where most pin pointers fail. You have to re-tune them as the moisture lever rises. Tiny target test will be interesting as well. Thanks for taking one for the team 😲.....😄

Looks like some good finds was still left for you two to dig up. Great looking buttons and relics!

Some potential with the 2 Indians and silver jewelry. I hope you can go back to that slope and work it over some more. I like EMI areas because most people just give up there. Some of the other items are interesting too, like the barrel tap and the item below it with the tree? on it. Always fun to try and see what you can get that others missed.

Beach hunt # 13 is at the same EMI beach I was at last time. I had planned on a two-day beach hunt but had too many home things to do, so just one hunt this week. I wanted to get more time on the GPX 6000 and the Equinox, so the 5000 stayed home this time out. Tides were low yesterday so a bit more was exposed on the wet slopes, and that’s always a good thing. Since the low tides were in the afternoon, it was a good time to try the 6000 out in the dry. It really does handle the EMI well with the 14DD coil. Even when the train was approaching it handled well with just a noise cancel. When things change just noise cancel, and it settles down. I also ran auto + on it and normal ground. Manual pick up the EMI a little too much in this hotspot. Buried a quarter at 12” and it picked it up faintly. I bet I could have got another inch out of it. So not deep enough for what I want from it, but it did work out the EMI better than any other Minelab I own. This machine really is designed for the small gold, as it was intended to do. Not as versatile as the 5000, but I can see why the gold guys love this machine! It will stay in my arsenal of machines for completely cleansing the first 12” of all minute targets. Sounds like a negative cleaning up every little scrap, but if you have a very productive beach (or relic) site with very deep targets, it will remove a lot of masking targets. I did later switch to using the Steve’s method of discrimination, so as to not dig the small aluminum. The Equinox performed nicely on some deep, wet sand targets. Although not clean signals, the amount of deep lead weights I got surprised me. If the lead is still there, the gold rings may be there as well. I may try the larger coil in the same situation if tides allow next time out. Although I did not get any gold or silver, I had a great time out with both machines and got a bit more involved on what I can get from them in the areas I hunt. So far, the weather is holding out for some cold, but pleasant hunts.

Awesome recovery. Moral of the story .... never give up. 👍

Interesting. I had the headphones cutting out issue, the other day. But sometimes it comes back on. I also had coil issues that sound like what you described as screeching sounds. I thought my coil was bad (still might be), but maybe it's the battery after all. Also noticed that if the coil touched the ground, even lightly, the detector would sound off with a long tone. I hope it's not caused by the charger because I use two chargers for 2 different batteries. If I find out both batteries blew out because of the charger, I will not be happy.

What does your GPX do or not do with the bad battery? I'm having some issues with mine lately, and I'm now wondering if it could be battery related.

It's so much easier down here 😄 You pull into the main parking area, use the porta potty and start detecting - no parking fee, no permit required on state or local beaches.

Thanks Simon. I would challenge any machine to survive being @ 20 feet from the Acela train. Some machines can tolerate it with an anti-interference coil or using the GPX in cancel mode, but the depth suffers a lot. If the QED didn't lose depth and could hit coins at 15-20", that would be awesome. I would camp out until I hit every square inch of that beach 😄

So do you need a permit to park or detect Maine beaches? I'm assuming it's off season right now? I watch NH Beach metal detecting on YouTube and he has some really rocky beaches that I think the GPX would do great on. If the weather holds up I may try some soon.