Monte
"In Memory of"
I'm not an Equinox user, but I used to hunt beaches a good deal, Oregon Ocean beaches, using an assortment of single-frequency VLF detectors and did OK in the wetted salty sand and shallow water or water puddles.LovestheShiny! said:Hey IDX, wonder if Beach Mode on the Nox would work, as wet salt water sand is highly mineralized...
Most of the Oregon beaches have a lot of very iron mineral sand and are unlike the more 'neutral' beaches of Florida. You can adjust the Ground Balance for the very negative iron mineral beach, but wetted sand and salt water are not negative. They are very low-conductive, positive conductive, so I would GB to the bad ground, and then fine-tune the Discrimination to just barely reject the low-conductive wetted salt.
Transfer this thinking to working some of the places where I encountered a lot of 'coke' or 'burned coal' and those were at some of the RR ghost towns I've hunted as well as not too far from some, like in Portland Oregon, where discarded coke was used to fill part of a city park in a few places. That pesky coke would give me a good audio response when I work with my Discrimination set to just barely accept iron nails or maybe just high enough to reject iron nails. But still accepted lower-conductive thin gold chains or thin rings and some small foil.
The hunks of coke sounded loud because they were usually shallower, and there were places in the edge to side of a playground area and also in some of the older picnic table areas where coke chased a lot of people off due to the positive responses.
There I used a few of my detectors with a broad-range of adjustment in the lower Disc. range and I simply swept over the samples of coke and gently increased my Discrimination to just barely reject that annoyance. I had GB'ed to the adjacent ground, then I rejected the coke.
Yes, it was kind of a problem, but it let me detect in the area and still find coins, especially some of the older wheat-backs and silver.
We have to remember to listen for 'double-beeps' from crossing coins that are 'on-edge' or very abruptly canted and that is because they have settled in-between some of the coke since those discarded hunks don't allow them all to lay nice and flat.
Just what I have done to deal with some salty sand conditions and also hunt in a lot of the locations where I have encountered a lot of discarded clinkers. I've used some of my favorite models with a full-range Disc. adjustment and manual GB to hunt some of the saltiest wet beaches you could imagine, and out-performed some friends using their Fisher CZ's and Minelab Explorer II's and SE Pro's and a couple of Sovereigns.
Side-by-side we compared some located signals and a few planted zinc cents, cartridge cases and lead bullets an they didn't match the depth or performance I was getting with my modified White's IDX Pro. That was out hunting the super-salty Great Salt Lake.
Monte