Minelab and HIGHLY MINERALIZED SOIL

[TORRERO]

I have traveled to South America several times and do some metal detecting on the beaches in Colombia, but the sands on several beaches are EXTREMELY MINERALIZED.
The example is that some beaches work OK, but some can not be hunted unless you constantly re-tune the ground balance.
I took my Whites DFX there and some beaches it worked good, but others it would not ground balance at all, leaving me to not be able to hunt these beaches... since I did not know how to manually ground balance the DFX.

(I know it can be done, but even Whites repair center seemed shocked to learn that you can manually ground balance a DFX)

I have also taken several Tesoros, Sand Shark being Pulse Induction, worked well... but I never seem to get more than maybe 6 to 8 inches.. Another Tesoro with manual ground balance also worked but there were also
beaches that this machine had a hard time on, regardless of how much I ground balanced it..... (it did work though, just had to keep re-tuning the balance)

My question is, I'm looking at the Minelab CTX-3030 or a Minelab Etrac, and want to know if these will work in an extreme environment like that, (because of the multi-frequency BBS) or will I drop that money and travel only to find they don't work on these beaches so mineralized.

Thanks for your help
Richard

 

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[redcobra8u]

I just bought a CTX and from my limited experience and what I've read, the CTX should do very well in those conditions. Interested in what others have to say.

 

[cudamark]

The Sand Shark (and other PI machines) should work fine on a mineralized salt water beach. Their main drawback is the lack of discrimination to eliminate iron. Your best bet with a machine with discrimination is a multifrequency detector, such as the Minelabs Sovereign, Explorer, E-trac, CTX, Excalibur, or the Fisher CZ21, and White's Beach Hunter ID. I tend to like the Minelabs better myself. In a water environment, I would recommend a waterproof machine like the CTX or Excalibur. If you plan on going deeper than 10 feet (3 meters) I'd go with the Excalibur. That said, highly mineralized sand can be a problem with all machines.....even PI's. It's usually depth that suffers and is lessened, but, sometimes you need to slow your swing way down to get rid of the false signals,even on shallow targets. We have some pretty nasty black sand on some of my beaches and I find the Excalibur works pretty good if you work it slow. Depth does suffer a bit (as does my friends White's Dual Field PI machine). Not personally knowing how bad your ground is, there's no way to make a guarantee on which (if any) of the machines mentioned, will work good for you. If I had to guess, and I didn't need discrimination, I would get a Garrett Infinium LS which is a PI machine. If you want discrimination, my money would be on the Excalibur.

 

[Rick K]

TORRERO,

Here's what you need. Sadly, it's not for sale - it is a prototype. The good news is that Fisher hired the developer and acquired the rights. They have announced that they will be developing pulse induction detectors based on this technology. Maybe by next year we will see something.

Notice how the black volcanic sand totally defeats the CTX. The video was in French – but it's pretty clear what they're doing – demonstrating two kinds of iron rejection/identification and the ability to see through even massive amounts of extremely Ferrous black volcanic sand.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G8sdp4RG73g&feature=youtu.be

 

[TORRERO]

Mineralized sand

I have seen places like this in the past, but generally speaking I can ground balance the machine to work... found a place like that in Spain 🇪🇸 and as long as ground balance was adjusted we were ok, back then I had a Fisher CZ-5 which is probably the easiest machine to ground balance. But these high tech electronic machines seem very difficult to manually ground balance.. My DFX is almost impossible...

 

[DeepseekerADS]

One of the virtues of the CTX, it is adjustable to almost any situation.

Yes, I loved that video posted, but I have to wonder how the CTX was set-up.

 

[Rick K]

Regarding the CTX set-up - My French is pretty non-existent, but at about 4:40 on the video, I'm pretty sure he said something like "mode plage" "sensabiletet maximum" - which would be "beach mode, maximum sensitivity".

 

[Sovgtguy]

Look for either a Sovereign GT or Excalibur.... They punch thru wet sand like it wasn't even there.
I use the WOT coil and dig targets up to 23" ... Coiltek 15" .

 

[stoneshirt]

Hey.I'm living in Santa Marta de Magdalena.How often do you get down here! Where are you Hunting?

 

[Terry Soloman]

Garrett ATX