BH Platinum at the beach?

[2deep]

My BH Platinum works fine in dry sand but at water's edge it kinda goes crazy. Is there a particular setting I should use that will allow the machine to settle down and hunt in this hard-packed, salty sand?
I've not tried the shallow water either, will this machine work there at all?

Thanks!

 

[JB(MS)]

I've tried several brand and model single frequency VLF detectors on the Florida Gulf Coast beaches and none of them were usable to any extent in the salt water or wet sand. Setting ground balance to it's positive limit and turning the discrimination up to try to disc out the salt allowed using a couple of them, but they were still noisy and didn't work well at all. The dual frequency Fisher CZ's and multi-frequency Minelabs ignored the salt and went deep in the wet sand and water, but in the mineral free dry sand the Minelabs didn't get half the depth the CZ's did.

 

[frankj3]

Below is a quote from Dave J. about my 3500 and using it on the beach. Not being an expert by any means, I am guessing this could also apply to your Platinum as well.

Maybe Dave will chime in on this and set us straight.

HH y'all.

Frank

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The ground balance control on the 3500 covers the range of iron minerals but does not "go all the way to wet salt" which is a different animal.

For working in the wet stuff with a single-frequency machine the ground balance range of which does not go all the way to salt, the following advice is usually applicable.

1. Reduce sensitivity setting.

2. Set discrimination to knock out foil.

3. Use a small searchcoil.

Users are often reluctant to do those things because the first thing they're thinking is "won't I lose depth?" Wrong question: the right question is "can I search this site?" Same thing as driving a car: just because the tires and the speedo can both hit 100 mph on the flats with no cops watching, doesn't mean you shouldn't be using brakes and lower gears on a twisty mountain road.

BTW: salt air is murder on electronics. If you're using the thing on an ocean beach, as an absolute minimum Please! put a plastic bag over its head.

--Dave J.