Bob,
Sorry it took so long to get back on here and respond to your question. I use my 5x10 elliptical almost exclusively in school and park sandboxes. It has some of the benefits of the sniper coil, i.e. getting closer in to metal playground equipment and great target separation and some advantages over it, i.e. covering more ground with a single sweep and IMO it offers a little better depth.
Target ID problems are a little bothersome. Occasionally I'll run it with both of the segments under nickel selected just to remind myself why I don't do it all the time. I've yet to find anything worth keeping on the "low side" of nickel using this coil. On the "high side" of nickel, I find mostly nickels and sometimes the odd rectangular pull tab will fool me. I've yet to find a gold ring or any gold for that matter with this coil. But I think a lot of that is because of my detecting style. The jewelry setting just drives me crazy with all the pulltabs and pencil ferrules <img src="/metal/html/cry.gif" border=0 width=40 height=15 alt=":cry"> . Since I do this hobby primarily to relax, that level of frustration drives me to pretty high levels of discrimination <img src="/metal/html/wink.gif" border=0 width=15 height=15 alt="
"> .
With the concentric coils I use, I never ever dig a zinc penny. With the 5x10, I'll find a few even with the discrimination set at the "high side" of dime and up. Not many - just a few. I'll also find a few copper pennies at this setting. If I set it at the "low side" of dime and up, I'll find a lot of coppers and noticeably more zincs.
So.... to boil it down... Early in the day when I'm fresh and rarin' to go, I'll set my discrim to both sides of nickel and from the "low side" of dime up. Later, I'll drop the "low side" of nickel and even later, I'll make it from the "high side" of dime on up.
Do I miss stuff? Certainly! Probably been over a couple dozen gold rings in the time I've been using the 5x10 in the sandboxes, but I probably would have dug a couple thousand pulltabs and pencil ferrules to get them. As a confirmed believer in not bending down without a good reason <img src="/metal/html/lol.gif" border=0 width=15 height=15 alt=":lol"> , I can live with what I'm missing. (Although - that may have recently changed. I've found that long beach scoops work very well in DRY sand in sandboxes, so I may be using the jewelry discrim pattern for this summer - just to see what I may have been missing!!!)
