Dithering On 6" Coil

[Tiftaaft]

14 hours ago, steveg said:

Totally agree with Steve and Chase.  While I'm not much of a beach hunter, if I were in your shoes, and strictly a beach hunter, I'd be saving that money for the 12x15.  Now, if you plan to hunt some trashy dirt sites, that's a WHOLE other story...

Steve

Agree with the comments above.  The stock coil separates so well, the 6" would be reserved for only the trashiest of trash sites and in small confined areas (having owned the 6" for all my previous machines as personal reference...).  But the 15's and 17's I have owned usually share equal time with the stock 11's.  The 15" is the one I'm anxious to hunt with - and the coil that is tailor-made for beach hunting.. 

Tim

[Chase Goldman]

19 hours ago, Alluminati said:

If the conditions are ideal, the 6" is the best choice. Coverage is your enemy because conditions are ideal.

If the conditions are realistic, the 11" is the way to go. 11" is versatile.

Don't quite understand what you are getting at here.  Realistic vs. Ideal??  Can you explain further?

19 hours ago, Alluminati said:

Unless you want to look for boat anchors, don't use a huge coil unless you are willing to give up the sensitivity to smaller items. 

I know you are probably referring to the 15x12 here, but even shoreline work with the 6" unless it was focused on a specific feature or small area would tend to be frustrating to me.  As far as the 11" not hitting on tiny targets, well...I wouldn't want to be hitting anything much smaller than the targets surrounding the dime which were mostly recovered in wet salt sand or shallow water at the tide line.   Target recovery was, shall we say, an adventure...

[Alluminati]

1 minute ago, Chase Goldman said:

Don't quite understand what you are getting at here.  Realistic vs. Ideal??  Can you explain further?

I know you are probably referring to the 15x12 here, but even shoreline work with the 6" unless it was focused on a specific feature or small area would tend to be frustrating to me.  As far as the 11" not hitting on tiny targets in wet salt sabd or the tide line, well...I wouldn't want to be hitting anything much smaller than the targets surrounding the dime which were mostly recovered in wet salt sand or shallow water at the tide line.  

An ideal situation has about 3-4 or more targets per square foot. I have been going back to an area the size of a living room for years and still get old gold there. I've pulled 14 gold rings from there so far. If you believe that Tom Dankowski article from a while back about approx 70%-80% of targets being masked, how many gold rings are left in that swimming hole? About 85. As high as that sounds, figure "modern" people have been swimming there for well over a hundred years, losing 1 gold ring a year and the numbers work. 

Realistically only bits of these ideal areas are exposed on an average day, so the 11" serves as a allarounder. Work the shore until you get frustrated, then go offshore, rinse and repeat. If you are so sanded in that you need to hunt with a 15", I would just go somewhere else or look for silver on land until conditions improve. Remember you still have to dig those targets, a hole twice the size is 8 times as many scoops, not counting the sand you will scoop multiple times as the hole collapses into itself.

The 11" can find smallish stuff, however we can all see those targets have something special and alike about them. You could fit probably 6 - 8 individual links from a bracelet just across that earring back. I found lots of earring backs with my 11" Excal too, even on the shoreline from time to time. That doesn't have much to do with chains, the smaller, not round, broken ring, no-hole, irregular shape, lower conductors. Not that it mattered because the 11" coil could only see iron.

Lets say that the targets in the picture satisfy you, great. Now what happens if everything else in the picture is iron besides the turtle? Do you still want the 11"? I bet you do because you don't know what you're missing, literally. (No offense, just a well placed pun) I'd be surprised if the 6" could hit it.

I'm open minded that not everyone conditions are like mine, maybe some are always having to dig in deep sand, however I would bet money that they are more similar then you think. Water hunting for me is about detecting for good conditions. Picking coins and jewelry off the surface is the easy part unless I'm swinging a coil too big for the target density.

[Chase Goldman]

I think the difference is I am walking a miles long shore line not a freshwater swimming hole, so yeah, as I said a constrained area the 6" would make sense.   Otherwise, the target density is MUCH lower in my situation so coverage matters.  And, no I am not satisfied with these targets but they were ringing up hard in the 7 to 12 range at various depths  without iron tone (I hunt without disc) so they had to be scooped.  All I am saying is you can hit small targets and separate from iron with the 11".  Higher density and of course 6" is the way to go and I would be staying put in a high density area anyway.