As said above, will work very well in dry sand and not so well over the wet sand. Can get maybe 4 inches on desirable targets over wet salt sand if you set it up with a little discrimination to reduce the affect of the salt.
The procedure I use for set up is to set the threshold to something usable, not super tuned. Set the discriminator at iron. Set the sensitivity to around 9 and then ground balance it over the dry sand that is near the wet sand area. Leave the ground balance at that setting. Head to the wet sand area. Sweep slowly and increase the sensitivity just enough to quiet any chatter down some. Do not go higher than the minimum of what will start to quiet it down and no higher than the low end of the foil word or all you do is cut out targets and reduce depth more. If it is still too chatty, turn the sensitivity down a little; but no lower than 7 to 8 range. That set up will get you some targets in the wet / dry transition area and the wet sand. I don't try to eliminate all chattering; just that chattering that seems to repeat and isn't a target but is the wet salt variation response. When set like this, good targets do repeat, but depth is not great.
Too bad the Tesoro detectors do not ground balance to the wet salt. If they did you could do much better than the compromise of using discrimination and reduced sensitivity to cut out the wet salt response. I have not found the DD coils to help much, but they don't hurt the detector response much either.
Now I use the Tejon with the clean sweep coil over damp sand towel lines to cover a lot of area looking for recent drops when hunting during beach season. First time I used the cleansweep coil on a beach it was at Nags Head with the Tejon. Kind of before the season got going. It was early April 2009. The gold ring I found fanning out from a beach entry area paid for the coil. I caught a little chirp, re-swept and nothing; so reached out a little further on the sweep and there it was.
Now, out of season, I take a PI detector or a detector that ground balances to the wet salt to get deeper. With those detectors, I hunt mostly wet sand and shallow water. I found that it only takes a couple of weeks of beach trips a year plus a couple of 3 day week ends for a detector that handles the wet salt to pay for it self. Some trips may be a bust, but one or two rings during a trip make a huge difference in how you look at justifying another detector.
Good luck at the Outer Banks. The National Park lands south of Nags Head are off limits. Nags Head and north are open for detecting. The sand movement on those beaches day to day is amazing to watch, even when the weather is good.
Cheers,
tvr
Pictures are of that first Kitty Hawk area ring and the sunrise at the beach in Kitty Hawk the day before I got this ring.
