Need help

[Ed Steinhoff]

Help!
I am going to Sarasota fla in mid Feb. Have very little beach experience. Have fisher f70 fisher f75 and garrett atpro. What settings do you recommend and which machine? Have many years experience on dry land

 

[tvr]

I've used the F75 on the beach over the wet and dry sand. My recommendation is run it in all metal. Ground balance it and check ground balance frequently. Ground balancing to the wet saltwater sand will have ground balance in the single digits and most likely between 1 and 3 over the very wet sand. If I remember correctly, there are ten clicks between each full number change of the ground balance (might be five) one click off can make a difference in detection depth over the wet sand. As you move towards damp sand the ground balance moves up the numbers pretty quickly. Stay on top of the ground balance and you should do well at finding metal in the sand at good depth.
Two annoying things for me about the F75 over the wet sand:
1) the sound of iron is a "boinging" kind of sound that I find very annoying if there is a lot of bits of rusty iron around; and that includes fairly small flakes of rusty iron.
2) it will find very small targets. One beach hunt I dug a lot of small sequins. Plastic ones about 1/4 inch in diameter with foil on one side. Kept falling through the scoop but sounded very good with the detector and ID range was where I'd expect for small gold (like earring backs).

I can not speak to using either of the other two detectors on the salt water beach. I have seen people do well with the ATPro but I have no idea what settings.