Well,ive just come back from a couple of hours on our local beach......i had to drag myself off the couch as it was raining and cold.
My initial thoughts on the XTerra pro......OMG.Our beach is brown sand with an underlayer of black sand and clay so not the easiest for detectors to get depth in,the clay and black sand varies over the beach so its a good idea to ground balance regularly.I set the detector up in beach 1,recovery speed 1,5 tones and used auto ground balance,threshold up so i could just hear it......initially i put the sensitivity up to 22 but the clay and black sand made this a bit sparky so i settled at 18 and the threshold was stable with no spurious ground signals.I took one of our uk pound coins to bury and do a quick depth test......took a few scoops out of the wet sand and threw it in......i dont know exactly what depth the coin was as i never measured it but it was a good depth and gave a good signal.
Off i went and was soon picking up signals,im not going to talk about vdi numbers at the moment as this was just a test to see how the detector responded and what sort of depths targets were coming up from.First target was a low tone and when i dug it i couldnt find it......thoughts were crossing my mind about ghost signals.Further investigation produced a tiny piece of aluminium,this had come up from around 4 inches with a good signal......wtf.This was repeated many times with tiny pieces of ally coming up from good depths with good signals.......on wet sand.I then had a high tone signal and dug up a pound coin from a good depth.......banging signal with a vdi of 69........hardly going to forget that am i.I also dug an iron signal just to see if the iron id was accurate......a -9 produced a long bent piece of ferrous metal,like a giant tent peg.......ferous tone was set too quiet so i will adjust this before i take it out again next weekend.
One thing i noticed about the signals is that the ally bits gave good signals but were slightly fuzzy......the pound coins gave tight sharp signals so i assume rings would give the same sort of tight,sharp signals......i will do a proper test on both coins and rings next time out.
So what are my thoughts.......im gobsmacked to be honest,the performance is fantastic on the wet sand,even on my local beach which contains black sand and clay.The detector picks up tiny pieces of ally so will have no problem on rings and smaller jewellry.....coins will be found easily at good depths too.The stability of the machine is fabulous but even making it a bit sparky isn't a problem as its still easy to pick out good targets from the chatter.The iron id is also fabulous,to give an iron tone and a minus number on a large piece of iron in wet salt sand is normally the territory of multi frequency machines.........this machine seems to be able to match them on performance on the wet sand........i find this quite unbelievable for a single frequency machine......literally unbelievable.
Im looking forward to taking this out again next weekend and maybe doing a comparison to my GT,depth tests on various coins and rings etc.Minelab have created something special here,its not only a beginners machine,it could be capable of being the only machine you will ever need.....further testing and searches will answer that one for me.
The photo shows a few of the tiny pieces of ally the machine found at good depths proving its sensitivity and the pound coun found at a very good depth.A more solid piece of ally also gave a more rounded signal and more stable vdi.
I will post more info after next weekends session.
