AQ Day 2

[cudamark]

       Tried a dry sand hunt today with the Impulse AQ. Being the 4th of July, the beaches were PACKED! Started with plan A, went to plan B, but, ultimately ended up with plan F. Ended up on a bay beach where in the past, I've found a little jewelry, a few older (40's up) coins, and LOTS of trash. This is definitely one of the trashiest beaches in my area. I'm not sure the name of this beach, or it it even has one, but, I call it "Nail and Nugget Beach" for the slew of nails and melted aluminum can "nuggets" that are all over the place. Probably not a great place to try out a new PI machine, but, one of the few places I could get to today and actually find parking. I tried hunting in all metal, but, that lasted maybe two minutes when the realization of the site hit my ears. In all metal, I wouldn't leave a 10 foot square area. Ok, tone then. Not much better, but, a little. Time for some testing. I brought with me some of the iron junk I had found on my first adventure with the AQ. On the surface, I could actually get the discrimination to work pretty good on rusty nails if I put the reject control to at least 8. It would sometimes work at 7, but, 8 seemed pretty consistent. That was with the ATS at the preset. I also tried the ATS at both ends of it's range, but, it didn't seem to make any difference, so, I kept it at 8 for the first hour or so. Well, it did I.D. some iron, but, not all for sure. It seemed the wetter the sand, the better the discriminator worked, but, it wasn't anywhere near 100% accurate. 50% at best, and that was just real rusty nails. No way could I find a setting that would keep me from digging bottle caps or hair pins. I ran ATS and Reject from one extreme to the other and everywhere in between and couldn't find anywhere it would give any hint of a low tone. Both those items rang loud and clear with a high tone regardless of depth.....and some were very deep. I then settled on putting the reject knob on 10 to maybe help with them and the iron. Hunting around the fire rings was impossible. Just too many targets ringing in your ears. I dug a lot of low tone and mixed tone targets just to get a feel for what the machine was telling me. Most of the time it was telling me there was a good target there, but, alas, most of the time, it lied. Lots of false positives, but, I didn't get any false negatives. If it said it was bad, (or at least had a low tone in there somewhere), nothing good came out of the sand. Good targets, if you can call them that, sounded good, with no iron low tone mixed in. These were the 4 nickels I found, along with the butter knife and other "normal" items in that range. This includes the foil, slaw, and pull tabs too, unfortunately. Too many times the iron sounded just as good though. I also ran the sensitivity up and down in my testing, and found it affected the depth quite a bit, but, not the discrimination, which I expected. So far, this machine IMO is a great beep and dig machine if you need depth. If you're looking for good discrimination, forget it. It's not nearly reliable enough in my book, at least, not yet. I'll give it many more outings at various beaches before I come to any firm conclusions. I plan on hitting another beach at a minus tide early tomorrow morning at a beach that's a whole lot cleaner, so, we'll see. This outing lasted 2 hours and 45 minutes before the battery died. At least that's headed in the right direction from the 2 1/2 hour episode the first time out. Here's the take for the day.

[ColonelDan]

Good report!

Your experience tracks what I’ve seen the few times I tried to use a PI on our Florida beaches... they just weren’t for me.  Digging down 22 inches because a PI can’t discriminate well at all is not my idea of efficient detecting and at 72, I’ll stick with my VLF machines.

[Steve Herschbach]

The whole point of a PI as far as I’m concerned is to handle mineralization that’s cuts VLF performance by 30% or more. So from my perspective there is no reason to consider a PI for most Florida detecting. Though I imagine there are a few people swinging a GPX with a large coil on the Treasure Coast looking for that extra depth. 

[schoolofhardNox]

Thanks for the great write up. Picking an area to hunt is going to have a great impact on success rates it seems. Until they make a machine that actually analyzes the metal, we will always have trouble with the same targets that we have always had trouble with.... Iron and Aluminum. I'm glad the discrimination seems to react better in wet sand. That helps in the areas I want to hunt in. Looking forward to your minus tide hunt.

[Rick K - First Member]

Sorry your hunt turned out so bad. I suspect that any detector would have struggled in that location. AL nuggets, for example can’t be effectively discriminated out with any system of discrimination I can think of. As far as those large pieces of junk - the non ferrous wouldn’t give a low tone unless they were really big or really shallow. As far as the elongated rusty bits, I believe that when you are more familiar with the machine you will find it relatively easy to rule those out as likely good targets no matter what mode you run the AQ in.

I suggest you get some rusty nails, some large bits of rusty junk, some pull tabs, some coins, a few gold rings and find a place in your yard or a nearby bit of open ground and start learning how the AQ works on targets you know the identity of. It’s  all about sound - you have nothing else to go by. 

The key to success with any “audio only” detector is learning what good targets sound like and then go hunting where good targets are likely. Sounds like your site for your unsuccessful hunt has - based on your prior experience there with other machines - a very low probability of recovering a piece of gold jewelry. Add to that, your unfamiliarity with the performance of the AQ and I can understand your frustration. 

 

[Steve Herschbach]

14 hours ago, cudamark said:

So far, this machine IMO is a great beep and dig machine if you need depth. If you're looking for good discrimination, forget it. It's not nearly reliable enough in my book, at least, not yet.

I’m the guy that’s been hammering on the fact the AQ is still a PI. Beep and dig I feel is a little extreme however. That means digging every target, and I’m certainly not doing that with the AQ. In tones in particular there are many targets that clearly say “don’t dig me.”

In some locations however there will still be vast amounts of stuff that sound good enough that you have to dig them, and they will turn out to be junk. Personally, I was pretty good at using tones on the Infinium, ATX, and TDI to pick targets, and I do not find the results with the AQ to be significantly different as regards discrimination capability. The TDI could discriminate every bit as well as the AQ in my experience. The AQ mainly adds as much depth as is probably attainable in a PI designed for the beach environment. But VLF like discrimination capability, or even close to it? No.

Long story short your results unfortunately do not surprise me in the slightest. That results like this would be seen was obvious to me as soon as I saw the picture below posted back in December of LE.JAGs finds using the AQ on a volcanic sand beach. The rings are nice of course, but look at the junk dug doing so, which mirrors the type of junk you dug. If the location has the rings, great. But if not... well, all you are going to do is dig junk, and lots of it. Even before I saw the picture though I was expecting this. It’s just the nature of the technology being employed. It’s still a PI. The best I’ve used yet if I overlook the battery system... but still a PI.

Personally I’m a huge fan of the AQ and am thankful to finally get my hands on one. Like I said, the best performing beach PI to date in my opinion. But it does not replace a VLF any more than any PI before really has. Most hunters in most locations are still going to want to stick with their trusty VLFs. The AQ is for the kind of people who have always had a soft spot for PI detectors for one reason or another, and I don’t see it significantly changing the fact that PI detectors are a niche subset of the overall beach detecting market.

Great post Mark, sorry you did not get lucky on your outing. If it makes you feel any better, I’m still waiting to score my first gold ring with the AQ. I seem to have lost my mojo lately in that regard! 

[schoolofhardNox]

Steve, Is your AQ wearing a yellow face mask?? That will not help with that Corona bottle cap virus.  😄 Glad to see I'm not the only one digging junk. OOps that is not your AQ 🙄 Just read it again

[ALEXANDRE TARTAR]

1 hour ago, Steve Herschbach said:

Long story short your results unfortunately do not surprise me in the slightest. That results like this would be seen was obvious to me as soon as I saw the picture below posted back in December of LE.JAGs finds using the AQ on a volcanic sand beach. The rings are nice of course, but look at the junk dug doing so, which mirrors the type of junk you dug. If the location has the rings, great. But if not... well, all you are going to do is dig junk, and lots of it. Even before I saw the picture though I was expecting this. It’s just the nature of the technology being employed. It’s still a PI. The best I’ve used yet if I overlook the battery system... but still a PI.

It's not Le_Jag (denis)

It's another person whose name is Denis but who doesn't spelt the same way -->  Denys

He lives in Reunion, and uses BBS. He is not used to PI detectors.

So he picked up all the targets during 7 days (3 hours per day)

The Jag certainly wouldn't have had as much iron junk...

[Steve Herschbach]

In PI land there is a tendency to point at bad results and tell people “if you just knew your detector better.” It can’t be the technologies fault, it must be operator error. The reality is you can say the same thing about all detectors, VLF included, which also do not have perfect discrimination systems. It always helps to have more experience and know your equipment better. Yet this is also true. I can take a person who has never detected before and hand them an Excalibur and an AQ and have them use both for the first time for a half day at the same location. They are going to dig more junk with the AQ. I can also take a person who is an expert with an AQ and an Excalibur both, and they will no doubt still dig more junk with the AQ than the Excalibur. There is a genuine difference in the results that will be seen with the technology regardless of the experience levels of the operator. One answer to the issue of too much junk may be “you just need to get to know your AQ better.” The AQ however is not some kind of “cut through beds of iron and only see the gold” detector. There is another possible answer and it might be “should have used a VLF.”  Use the proper tool for the job, and not all sites call for a PI.

[tvr]

12 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

The whole point of a PI as far as I’m concerned is to handle mineralization that’s cuts VLF performance by 30% or more. So from my perspective there is no reason to consider a PI for most Florida detecting.

Few years back, wife and I flew to Daytona beach. Of the detectors at hand at the time, an Excal and Sand Shark fit the luggage space available best. I found an area of red sand about 10 to 15 feet wide and about 100 feet long that the excal just sounded off on in all metal and nulled completely in disc. Sand Shark pulled up coins in that area. On the same trip Sand Shark also found a ring for a panicked young lady who flipped the sand off a blanket and forget her ring was on the blanket and found a white gold keeper under a pier where the EMI was killing the Excal.   Glad you added "most"!