schoolofhardNox

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!

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.

From what I remember from the Equinox, that iron audio is not just iron targets but ground noise as well. I kind of wished they didn't combine iron targets and ground noise together on the Manticore as well. It clutters up the audio a lot. I hope I'm remembering that correctly?

I think that .417 is 10K. Really cool looking piece. Great find!

Might be copper nickel. Nice coin in great shape!

Thanks, it's really a bad strategy called "just keep digging" and hope something good comes out 😆 It works sometimes though 🤔 Thanks. That $20 I sent you to say nice stuff about me was well worth it. 😁 Beach hunting can be rough or not. It all depends on your health, attention span and temper 😄. Being able to trick yourself into thinking that the next target is gonna be gold helps as well. In my area, I have to contend with a group of really good beach detectorists. Theses guys are like laser beams, and there finds are way better than mine. They know that beaches extremely well, and even have people that live close by report to them when they see beach erosion. I have to hit areas that are not as obvious or just happened to open up (erode) before they get to them. That's an good idea 🤔 Sell all my trash and have more money to buy the next Minelab detector that promises more coins and less trash. So far the less trash has worked out very well for me, don't ya think? 😄 I can set the example of what not to do. 😊 I'd be better off selling detectors and using the profits to buy my silver coins. 👍 But I guess I could push the health benefits and the positive environmental side of it like Joe D said. 🤔 Ok - classes are $100 an hour as long as Minelab doesn't up prices anymore. 🙂

Awesome on the hammered coin. That is one sweet silver coin. With all that area available, you would need a group of detectorists to cover it for a year before it was slightly hunted out 😄 Nice finds that we don't get here very often.

A rare 2-day beach hunt – numbers # 25 & 26. Tides were super low, so I decided to take the Manticore to Beach #1, where I had some success previously digging the rocky areas. This is a popular beach since it produces seated coins and Indians fairly regularly. Tides were low but the ocean was still angry from a passing storm, so the area I wanted to do didn’t drain as well and as long as I had hoped for. 6 Hours with the Manticore did not produce much. This was one time I should have packed it up and pulled out the GPX, but I really wanted the time on the Manticore. The 2 silvers it did find, sounded out nicely and were deep. Same for the 2 Indians. Odd finds included a blank lead round which is that exact diameter as a nickel. Also, the heart attach coin turned out to be a religious verse token. I hoped it was a silver dollar, but the weight gave it away as aluminum. 😌 Not as good as I planned but enough to make me switch beaches the following day. Day 2, Beach 2: Started out with the Manticore because this was my first real outing on a trashy nonferrous and ferrous beach. I want to call this place tar beach for all the broken chunks of tar that are mixed in with the sand. I had to reduce the sensitivity which helped with the iron falsing, but the depth was nowhere as good as when there are few target present. I was getting less crisp hits on coins and even the big lead sinkers were reading softer than they should have. What really puzzled me was turning up the sweep speed did the opposite of what I thought it would do. I was running 4, but 5 and up did not help in separating the iron from the coins much. All it did was make the targets sound soft and worse (clipping as expected). So I turned it down to 3 and found if I swung fast (like those English lads do in their pastures), the targets stood out much better. It goes against the grain by swinging fast while reducing the target separation to 3, but it worked. It's not that the Manticore did not hit the coins, it’s just different that I imagined it would react like. I was running surf and seawater, sensitivity between 17 – 19, alternating between all metal and disc. I actually like the all metal for this situation. I wanted to use disc, but with the amount of iron, I needed the screen open to get the targets to sound a bit better. After a while, I decided to take the GPX out and redid the same area as the Manticore and found a couple more coins. I then expanded it out for the rest of the hunt. The more I use the Manticore, the more I think it’s going to be a real good machine for parks and unplowed fields. For the beach, I’m liking it in wet sand with sparse to medium target density. In heavy density, it’s a bit tricky in the iron. I can do a better job with the GPX in iron. Pretty beat from the 2 days hunting, the travel back and forth, and I even had to slip in 3 hours of job work between the 2 hunts. Happy to get out and hunt twice!

Awesome hunts. The low tides can be productive when you can get some wave action that changes the shore just enough to get some deeper finds. Great buckle and cannon ball. Is it war of 1812 British?

Yep. 3 grandparents polish, one Italian. I can understand Polish to a point. Can't read or write it though. That was a beautiful coin you found. Condition, for it's age was excellent.

Nice hunt. Buttons were irrelevant to a lot of detectorists in my area back in the day. They used to toss them back in the hole when they found them. They were only after Large cents and silver! I had a good friend who (once enlightened 😄), remembers throwing away a GW button before he knew what they were. I love buttons, since I dig any non ferrous and have found many good items because of previous people leaving them. That place looks like a great spot, especially if you can find the 1600's sweet spot. Good luck there.

Nice video on how the Manticore shows iron and iron bleeding. Subtitles/translation was unavailable for me on this video, but luckily I understand just enough Polish to get most of what you said 😄.

Thanks Daniel for all the hard work. I too have found that discrimination on is going to be my starting point at beaches and parks. Mineralized soil with the Manticore is probably never going to happen. I'll try what was suggested from Steve and others, but I'm guessing I'll always switch rather quickly to the GPX and not waste time trying to make something out of nothing. If all goes well tomorrow, I will be running disc on the Manticore and a moderately quick pace, chasing that low tide down. I guess we are always hoping that we can just bring one machine to do it all, but that's not how things seem to end up unfortunately. If they could just update that T2 to be a little deeper, the pulse machine may just stay home 😄

I use a small spade for all dry and slope sand. Works great. I also have the Xtreme scoop and carbon fiber handle. Pricey for sure but built extremely well, but it is a lot heavier than the light gauge ones that seem to break at their seems. So if you are not into lugging a heavy scoop on your shoulders, then it may be better to buy a couple of light gauge ones and have your welder on speed dial 😉 Seriously, I have not tried to pry rocks with it, generally scoops don't handle that too well anyhow, but I have buried that scoop as deep as it goes and never had an issue with it. The only issue is being able to pull a full scoop of wet sand up and flip it. That can lead to a sore wrist pretty fast. Hope that gives you an idea of the Xtreme scoop.

Maybe that was true for the old Minelabs, but I'm wondering if the Manticore is better when run with discrimination (in iron) than all metal? I know when I ran it in a field full of junk targets (including iron), I liked it better with discrimination. It hit high conductors much better with just a bit of falsing on some iron. Much easier to get the high conductors that way. My gut feeling that hearing it all in an iron infested area will not work without a huge amount of falsing. I guess the best way to find out is to run all metal and then the same area with full discrimination and see what happens.

Bounty Hunter was the first "Real" detector I used. My 2nd cousin took me under his wing at the age of 7 to go detecting. After using a radio shack ($19.99), he found a dealer and bought the Rebel, a BFO unit. I think it was copper color. Hot rocks never sounded better 😄 Then he upgraded to a Bounty Hunter Outlaw (the one with the good/bad meter). I can't even find a picture of the Rebel online.

Bounty Hunter Rebel

Thanks. The square one is Aruba, the round one is too shy to reveal itself 🧐

I never got into electric trains as a kid. Maybe it was a premonition of things to come 😄. I generally deal with the noise or just put on an anti interference coil and be done with it. The Manticore did better than the Equinox did, but not by much. The bad thing about super low tides and living so far away from a beach is, you have to make a decision on which beach to hunt. Pick wrong and it's the long ride home of shame 😞

Beach hunt # 24 was at the heavy EMI beach. I like to check back here when there isn’t a good low tide. I just work the upper beach to see if anything is within range. Couldn’t hear many deep coin targets, but I did manage some leftovers from previous storm damage. I wanted to try the Manticore at low tide, but I found a couple silvers with the GPX, so I missed low tide by about a half hour. No big deal since I didn’t hear many targets other than small stuff down low. Switched to the grass area for the little time I had left and hunted up a bunch of clad. The difference from the GPX to the Manticore for iron recovery is skewed, since I dug all iron targets with the GPX but did not do the same with the Manticore. Not a spectacular hunt, but I did get 3 silvers and that was more than I thought I would get there. I think next week has some really low tides, so the Manticore will get a low tide workout. Hopefully something good shows up. Always a good day when you get a chance to get out detecting.

Small targets scream out loud. That was one of the things that I didn't like about the Equinox and Manticore is the audio boost that seems to be applied to small targets. A tiny pinpoint helps you a bit, but some small rings may pinpoint small as well. Pull tabs for me have been all over the place but 20's -30's is where most fall. But 40's and even some 50's makes isolating a gold ring pretty hard I'm assuming. The land hunting seems to be where I get the 40-50's on pull tabs. I've even had some beaver tails read 27 which is what I thought a nickel would read. I'm starting to wonder if changing modes, changes target ID's a lot? If all the gold chains stay in the mid single digits, then that may help isolate at least gold chains where the tinfoil has already been washed away.

Nice low numbers. The manticore may have 99 numbers but some of the combinations are weird. Those pull tabs are stretched over a large span of numbers and probably cross gold numbers a lot. I guess that is so we don't cherry pick gold 😄 So do the foil numbers. Gone are the days when a 6 or a 9 on the CTX 3030 got your heart pumping (especially at low tide). My only gold find was a man's ring that read 53. I found a pull tab the other day that rang higher that it should have. It rang up at 53 as well.