Hi guys - I spent the past two days hunting an area with jet black sand, tons of iron (mainly pieces of nails), and minelab equinox 800 and manticore pressure.
The black sand and iron mixture really seems to give detectors a hard time. I ran in beach and beach sensitive, alternating between the two after each half hour or so. At first i really struggled to find coins due to chatter and iron... until i decided to try turning up reactivity. Bumped it up to a 5 and immediately started hammering out OBVIOUS coins but lost almost all depth, only picked up coins up to 3 inches or so. Did this for a few hours in a 20x40 area. After i ran out of targets i bumped it down to 4 and found new targets but deeper and a bit harder to isolate from the iron, then down to 2.5 and again deeper and tougher.
Interestingly, at a reactivity of 4 or 5 i could pick up 4 or 5 coins in a coil's width area. It seemed like "chatter" but was actually multiple coins in the same area. Different angles or small movements would give me different vdis but they were very stable. At lower reactivity it seemed to break the D2's brain and only registered as a single target, normally coming in as iron, not coins.
A manticore and equinox 800 user both hit the same area before me and dug a lot of holes with quite a bit of iron left in them. They seemed to do okay but what surprised me is that over 2 days i pulled over 150 coins from a 20x40 area AFTER they had hit it. The high reactivity really paid off. Since these guys didnt bury their holes i was able to rescan where they dug and a few times i pulled more coins out of their holes! Sometimes multiples! The only thing i can figure is they were getting swamped out by the iron where i wasn't.
All in all i did great with over 150 coins, 6 silver Roosevelt dimes, 2 mercs, 2 silver rings, and one tiny silver piece of a necklace.
Anyone else run reactivity way up at the beach in trashy areas? 99% of my targets were from a small 20x40 are, so just remember to hammer down once you start hitting targets in an area, especially dimes and quarters that are nice and green!
Crown ring was found yesterday, 10 of the 18 in the second pic are from the D2 within the last 3 weeks!!!