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NE beach hunting?
- Thread starter JamieR
- Start date
SteveP(NH)
New member
I have been hunting at Salisbury, Hampton, Jenness, and Rye for years. You have to remember that our beaches here have lots of black sand mixed in with the salt from the ocean. As such the machine has to balance against two ground signal sources that are pretty far apart from each other on the ground balance scale. Now the AT Pro does a great job of balancing against both but since it doesn't have automatic ground tracking, where it continously re-ground balances as the ground value changes we have to do it manually.
I can usually get around 6 or 7 inches in the wet sand and keep the machine pretty stable but I have to follow a few rules to do so. First off and perhaps most importantly you want to detect in such a way as to keep the balance between the black sand and the salt water from changing. The way it changes is that as you get closer to the ocean the amount of salt mixed in with the black sand is going to go up and as you get farther away the salt content is going to go down. So what you want to do is to detect in straight lines going parrellal to the ocean and not up and down the beach getting closer and farther away from the ocean. Plus when you do move closer or farther away from the ocean you should ground balance again. You probably will need to ground balance manually as the auto ground balance doesn't always grab the right value. If you are in the wet sand your ground blance should be between 15 and 20, probably closer to 15. After you get the machine balanced for your conditions then you need to re-ground balance whenever you hear the machine starting to get unstable again because as the tide comes in or goes out the amount of salt is going to change too.
One other thing you can do to keep the machine quiet is to notch out the first notch above iron as that is where the salt dings at. Plus you probably want to keep the iron discrimination all the way up at 40. There are a lot of nails, lobster trap wire, etc on our beaches.
Your AT Pro isn't going to get the depth of the Minelab multi-frequency machines that lots of folks use around here, but you should be able to detect the fine gold chains and small gold like earings that those Minelabs can't pickup and a lot of the stuff is in the top 7 or 8 inches anyway.
One other thing to keep in mind is there wasn't any really good nor'easters this year and so the beaches were sanded in just about all winter this year and they are still sanded in. This has been one of the worst seasons for beach detecting in recent memory as the real goodies are buried under 10 feet of sand right now. We need a really big coastal storm to cause some beach erosion before there will be some good beach hunting around here.
I can usually get around 6 or 7 inches in the wet sand and keep the machine pretty stable but I have to follow a few rules to do so. First off and perhaps most importantly you want to detect in such a way as to keep the balance between the black sand and the salt water from changing. The way it changes is that as you get closer to the ocean the amount of salt mixed in with the black sand is going to go up and as you get farther away the salt content is going to go down. So what you want to do is to detect in straight lines going parrellal to the ocean and not up and down the beach getting closer and farther away from the ocean. Plus when you do move closer or farther away from the ocean you should ground balance again. You probably will need to ground balance manually as the auto ground balance doesn't always grab the right value. If you are in the wet sand your ground blance should be between 15 and 20, probably closer to 15. After you get the machine balanced for your conditions then you need to re-ground balance whenever you hear the machine starting to get unstable again because as the tide comes in or goes out the amount of salt is going to change too.
One other thing you can do to keep the machine quiet is to notch out the first notch above iron as that is where the salt dings at. Plus you probably want to keep the iron discrimination all the way up at 40. There are a lot of nails, lobster trap wire, etc on our beaches.
Your AT Pro isn't going to get the depth of the Minelab multi-frequency machines that lots of folks use around here, but you should be able to detect the fine gold chains and small gold like earings that those Minelabs can't pickup and a lot of the stuff is in the top 7 or 8 inches anyway.
One other thing to keep in mind is there wasn't any really good nor'easters this year and so the beaches were sanded in just about all winter this year and they are still sanded in. This has been one of the worst seasons for beach detecting in recent memory as the real goodies are buried under 10 feet of sand right now. We need a really big coastal storm to cause some beach erosion before there will be some good beach hunting around here.
SteveP(NH)
New member
JamieR said:
I always run in Pro mode and when I am at the beach I run with the iron discrim at 40 and I usually bump the sensitivity down a couple of steps and then decide whether or not to notch out the first notch above iron depending on conditions.
Remember that the best targets at the beach are gold jewelry so you want your detector as hot as you can get it without falsing so you can get those low conductors. The coins are just to keep you amused while you look for jewelry.
