Nox 600 Digging Iffy Low Number Signals At The Beach

[abenson]

My Sister-In-Law who normally uses a Minelab Sovereign, wanted to go metal detecting at the beach with me over the weekend at a real sanded in beach, also lots of black sand. I figured one of my PI's would be too frustrating for her to use so I let her use my Equinox 600. I set her up in Beach 1 sensitivity 23, 5 tones, iron bias 1, recovery 3 (equal to 6 on the 800) and GB 0. I used my GPX 4000 since I hadn't run it for a while.

We hunted the wet sand about 25 feet up from the water line. After about an hour I had dug a few pennies, a nickel, some lead bullets/sinkers and some shallower can slaw. She walked over to me and said she really hadn't found anything but foil and pieces of aluminum, which didn't surprise me because all of the coins I had found were 12 inches plus deep.

So I suggested that I would go ahead of her and mark some targets and then have her go over them with the 600 and see what to listen for. I had about 8 targets marked and told her to start going over them and we would listen to the signals.  Some of the targets she couldn't get a signal at all, which I expected since I was using a PI. But I told her to go ahead and dig them because I knew something was down there. Of the 8 holes she dug 2 pennies, a nickel, a piece of copper wire, a spark plug, a few pull tabs and a small 18k ring. She was impressed at how much deeper the PI was vs the 600.

Now the interesting thing we found was that on these really deep targets, the Equinox could get some of them but they were usually one way signals and read much lower that they would out of the ground. For instance the pennies were reading in the 6-8 range. On the small 18k gold ring the Equinox was coming up with a erratic 1-2 and she said that's what the foil had been reading so she stopped digging it. I told her to dig it anyway because it was too deep to be foil in my opinion. Boy was she surprised when it ended up being a gold ring. From the size of the hole we figure the ring was about 10-11 inches deep. BTW the ring read a solid 6 on the Nox out of the ground.

This was a good reminder to me that as with most detectors, when targets are at the fringe of the detectors depth capabilities, we really do need to dig everything at the beach or we're going to miss gold.

[GaryC/Oregon Coast]

18K really gives of a nice GLOW!  Super find.  GaryC/Oregon Coast

[Mark Gillespie]

Awesome piece of gold, I've never found gold at the beach.  But I hope to try my hand at beach hunting this year.

[strick]

Dig it all as long as you are capable...beach, park, gold and relic fields...it's all the same IMHO. 

strick

[NSC]

Nice ...thats a very pretty ring

Great to see a man with detecting experience showing a newcomer the ropes.

[si-dog]

Great advice  , thank you , my Equinox outperforms all my Garrett detectors on both dry and wet sand .

[Rivers rat]

Well done

 

 

 

RR

[steveg]

Beautiful ring!

Steve

[Norm S]

My beaches are so bad that when I do get a signal I get excited. I went out yesterday morning to the beach and come back with nothing. I dug a few tabs but that's all I even got a beep on. I even turned the sensitivity to max. I hunted for two hours then it got hot and went back to my truck. 

Believe it or not I was using my 600 and didn't know it until I was putting it in the back seat. I used the wired headphones because my wireless quit working.  For beach I use the same settings on both the 800 and 600 and I honestly cannot tell the difference between the two detectors when using them. I just grabbed the  600 when I meant to grab the 800. 

I even made the mistake using park 1 once..  I only bought the 800 because I go to AZ and NV every year and want to try out the gold mode. I found some color while panning for gold in Alaska once but never with a metal detector.