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I have seen some that come with a charger, ones I picked up from Blackube have a usb cable with pigtail mini usb's coming off of it so you just plug them in. Each battery has a light on them so they are red until charged and newer models also have a green led indicating fully charged. They should do well in any device that uses standard alkalines. I think they will do better in cold weather as lithiums don't lose as much power as alkalines do in the cold. Will find out this fall.

Well it's been 4 months on these Blackube AA lithiums on my Tejon and loving them! I am getting double the battery life with full power till they are drained. I did have an issue with one battery not taking a charge and Blackube immediately shipped me a replacement, who knows it could have been beat up in the postal. Anyone using these and relying on indicators on battery life might be thrown off though as they run at high power until they don't have any unlike traditional batteries that simply fade in power. Being lithiums they don't have a memory so if your going out for the day it doesn't hurt to top them off. They take about 2 hours to charge from fully drained. Now if they made 9 volts that would be cool.

One of the parks I hit has a stadium dating back to mid-late 1800's, the original baseball field was moved and more added. Talking to one of the grounds keepers they said there is nearly 15ft of backfill on the river side. Little too deep for my detector :0. There is stuff all over, even off the beaten path. Been doing more hunting in the woods lately and doing fairly well. I typically look at patches of trees and the diameters of the trunks as that can be a clue on the age of the area and possible clearings.

I do more coin shooting with Tejon that is 17.5 kzh. I think you get better separation from trash than the usual lower frequencies typical of relic hunting. Do which I could hit a higher frequency but not sure how much difference it would really make. More importantly is swinging over the right spot. I think the detector choice and coil choice is less important. Check the wooded areas where you are and look for some of the largest trees in the area. Park near me I found a few Indian Heads and Buffalo's. Also look on some old maps, there might be some areas that have grown in. I had found a really nice cross that was once a farm field and now is a ball park.

You could take the dirt off with a soft toothbrush and some baking soda and water. There was an offset strike on usacoinbook going for $329 in pretty good condition to give you a sort of reference. I don't know if getting it graded would be worth the $$ as a friend of mine sent a proof silver dollar still in packaging untarnished from the 40's and they gave it a 66. He also sent his 1795 large cent with reeded edge that was easy to see and they said unidentifiable. Guess they cater to the big coin dealers and just take your $$. Tossing it up as is close to the price range of others and let people bid on it might be the better option.OR toss it in a little baggy and put it away in your own collection. I have yet to sell anything I bought and fast becoming a pack rat of odd bits and cool things :)

Don't forget platinum that hits just above gold and more mixed in with the square tabs. For me often aluminum will have a more erratic signal than gold or platinum but not always the case.

As far as the Cibola and Vequero are concerned I would go with the Vequero as you can adjust the ground balance which is a must in the salt because the ground changes drastically as you approach the wet. Lower frequencies do better and as a comparison I can run my AT Pro in the wet without too much trouble but it gets chattery while my Tejon I can't even get close to the wet. Difference is only 2.5khz between the machines. My buddy has the AT Max and has no issues with the wet sand and has much more stability and his machine is 2khz lower than the AT Pro. Bang for the buck in the price range of AT series I think the Makro Multi Kruzer would do better as you can select frequencies and it has a beach mode. I don't know what the Simplex has but if it has a fixed frequency less than 15kz it is really worth taking a look at especially at the price they are offering. Not sure if there are any descent videos of it in the salt and how it performs.

Extending the range from just above foil to just above top line of nickel mark on my Tejon which hits on square tabs I dug this up in the park I hit all the time. I didn't pass up the usual coin sounds (pennies, dimes and quarters). I would have passed over this nice white gold charm with an opal in the middle. The large stone is a cz in plated metal setting, other looks like a zipper pull maybe? Thought I would have hit a lot more tabs than I actually did. Usually just coin shoot there and gloss over that range. Thanks!

On my Tejon with the concentric coil thin, medium rings and gold earings come in between the lines on nickels while a large platinum ring comes in on the high side of that. With the larger 10x12 coil they come in on a wider range but think the larger coil might be dropping the frequency a bit. Beaver tails hit at the bottom line of the nickel range marks and square tabs can be from the mid point of the markers and above. Ring tabs always hit on the pull tab mark and pretty much spot on between both coils. I pretty much avoid anything below that lower nickel mark in parks as it has never produced anything good and has always been can slag. On my AT Pro it performs similar to the larger 12x10 coil but stronger signals on copper and silver. I'm thinking of hitting that area and dig a wider range after seeing what you pulled up. Nice ring!

Simplex looks like a really good machine, forgot about that. As for the Vequero being hard to gb in high mineralized ground it might be the HOT circuit as I have similar issues with my Tejon that is just a higher frequency version with dual board. My Tejon also would get a little vague on signal and hard to gb if the batteries were half dead. I started to use some lipo batteries for it and the machine is amazing.

I have used my Tejon at the beach a few time and it is a higher frequency than the Vequero and both have the HOT coils (high output transmitter). The Tejon worked very well on dry sand but as soon as I hit damp sand I needed to keep checking my ground balance and wet sand was simply impossible as the gb was out of range. The Vequero is similar but it's lower frequency I would assume it would do a bit better. I had used the stock concentric coil which probably didn't help. Thinking that the 5x10 elliptical might fair better (one the Lobo Supertraq ships with) as it is supposed to handle mineralization better. One thing to really consider is these machines are not sealed so expect corrosion on the boards if used extensively near the salt. With that being said and the factory closed you may have to either try to do repairs yourself or try to find parts which both may be impossible. I use my Tejon the most but no longer at the beach. There is the Sandshark which is a PI and the Tigershark which is a VLF that has a salt mode but performance on the Tigershark will get you maybe 8" down on a good day? Prices on those machines you could get yourself a Garret SeaHunter Mk2 which I have and really like. In the similar price range is the Makro Multi-Kruzer, Equinox 600. Next tier up gets you into the Nokta Amphibio and Equinox 800 which would be the most versatile and stable in the VLF class.

I think it is because the electronics are built into the coil itself so there are probably limitations on what they can stuff in the area they have to work with. That would be my hunch. The 9" HF coils should be fine for relic hunting in tighter areas. I have been eyeing the Deus with the smaller 9" eliptical but leaning towards the 11". On my next year list.

It all boils down to harmonics. Trick is this case is to find the frequency that gives you best balance of detection depth with the least amount of noise and then choose the largest coil that balances that all out. I would think you should be fine with the stock coil and just be a matter of cycling through the frequencies until you find one that works. In tough areas you at least have that advantage of a wide choice of frequencies to pick from. I would try to wrap the wire a bit different too, have fewer winds as possible on the lower pole then take up the slack further up. This might reduce some of the noise or at the minimum it looks more sophisticated.

Just my initials here, was too lazy to hold the shift key down.

Though I don't have a Nox, there is one field that has overhead transformers nearby. I can run my Tejon with stock coil with no issued at all fairly close to them and run it with full gain+ and it doesn't even chatter. I run my AT Pro in the same area with the stock coil and it does pretty well but if i get too close to the transformers it starts to become unstable. Lastly with the Nel Big on the AT Pro in the same area I can't get to 100+ yards of the transformers without it being so unstable it is useless. Even with the gain down to the minimum the VDI goes bonkers. With that being said, I would try a single frequency >20 and if need be use a smaller coil. I do wrap my wires a bit different, i run them from the coil with very long coil "fewer winds" near the coil on the abs shaft cinched off with velcro strap then tighter winds to take up the rest further up. I know the wires are pretty well shielded but I want to have minimal interference where it is closer to the coil. I started to do that as the Nel Big will actually sound off on the upper shaft when I set it down as I tend to keep the shafts short (reducing the weight to swing) and found a bit more stability on that coil. The deepest coin i found was seated dime about 15" in one area and a 1950's dime in another are around 14" with the big coil. Both those areas were swampy and had a ton of top soil before you hit clay. Majority of my coins i find are far less than 10". You may want to see where that clay line sits at that old area and maybe you can use a much smaller coil with the same success. I really believe that coins don't sink past clay or at least I haven't seen that to be the case unless the ground had some construction around and it was turned up. I believe fields are only turned over 6" or so.

You're probably spot on as a picnic area. There was an old estate near by that had been burned several times in the late 1800's and finally torn down in the 1940's. It used to overlook one of the ponds and located up on a hill. Nearby is the remnants of old stables/barn that is long burned out as well. The pasture is heavily overgrown. Very tough finding anything as there is pieces of tin roof's, lead and copper flashing and tons of nails as well as 50 years of bottle tops. Even the best machines can't punch through all of that hehe. There are a total of 700 acres that have been picked through for at least the last 30 years. Been a lot of other detectorists out there as I can see all their dig holes all over. I tend to follow the hunting trails which are really difficult to see and easy to lose. There are tons of shotgun 20 gauge shotgun shells and 22 rimfires suggesting there were younger people doing much of the plinking in the areas. Slopes are steep and a lot of vegetation making it a good workout to get through. Still lots to poke through and the area is old enough i might find a pinetree if I'm lucky.

I'm on the NE side of MA. 15 min from the beach (3hours with traffic). Parking is horribly expensive now and one the NH beaches they just loaded up with new sand so not much to dig unless it's an immediate drop. will hit them this fall when things cool down. That Tiffany pendent is really nice! Great run.

Thats my first barber quarter, they sound the same as the others :). Just got back from another run through the woods and found an old gold plated hair band with pat apr 18 ??10. Guessing 1910. State of the art hair maintenance at the time.

Back to the drawing table on this, the led's I chose don't have enough of an angle to light the area and light diminishes too much along the bar only covering about a 1/2". Need to snag some from a light switch but really don't need 16 ft of them either.

Snuck a couple hours out in the area again and found this really nice barber before the mosquitos got the better of me.

Quick update. Between work and digging I started to prototype the light bar. Printed the part out, put in a couple led's I had and filled it with a platinum cure silicone which the first attempt didn't cure correct as the part was too green (freshly printed) and contaminated the silicone so it didn't cure. I re-did the fill and it seems to be hardening up. Once cured I'll solder up some leads and see if it actually lights up the display. Ends have a couple of t type hooks so i can just rubber band it on the unit. All goes well I'll refine it to something prettier.

Comparable machine to the Sand Shark is the the Garrett Sea Hunter which I picked up recently. I am really happy with it and the battery life seems longer than they say spec wise. Price wise it doesn't break the band and will pick up bobby pins just as well as any other pi :)

Quickie update, looking through parts I have/can make I started to work this out and rather than use an acrylic bar I thought it would be better to encapsulate the diodes in a frosty white silicone rubber which can act as a pad against the display. This should be much safer on the face of the display and not scratch it. Will have to work out making it water proof later on once I test the silicone and see if it transmits enough light to work. I think if this works out ok, I might be able to make it compatible with the Ace series and maybe other VDI machines that don't have a backlight.

I think back now on so many holes I dug and found a broken halo the lost the target and wonder if they could have been coins that been knocked on edge and I simply filled the hole back up thinking it was just a halo. Countless fringe targets I think I overlooked this way. For some reason I decided to dig a bit more even after the target was lost. This was on the fringe and being thin I had lost signal on it. Might hit the area again this weekend, ran out of bug spray Sunday and the mosquitos won.

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