is a pi machinr really worth it?

[seeker41]

ive been considering a pi machine to deal with sanded in conditions and wonder if its worth the trouble? a few specific questions......
1. will i be digging so many junk targets that it will slow me down and allow all my excal and cz20 competitors to beat me to all the good finds?
2. are pi machines really that much deeper than an excal or cz20 with a large coil?
3. are pi machines in general slow or fast sweep machines?
4. pi machines claim to have some form of disc, do they really have a form of disc and how does it work?
5. are pi machines more or less capable of finding gold micro jewelry and fine chains?
6. what are the strengths and weaknesses of each of the following machines....
garrett infinium, whites tdi, whites tdi sl, detectorpro headhunter, tessoro sandshark.
thanks, chuck.

 

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[Terry Soloman]

This is going to be fun..

 

[seeker41]

This is going to be fun..

lol!

 

[DewGuru]

1. will i be digging so many junk targets that it will slow me down and allow all my excal and cz20 competitors to beat me to all the good finds?

Possibly. You'll dig iron, they'll dig tin foil.

2. are pi machines really that much deeper than an excal or cz20 with a large coil?

Yes.

3. are pi machines in general slow or fast sweep machines?

Either way works well.

4. pi machines claim to have some form of disc, do they really have a form of disc and how does it work?

Those claims are BS.

5. are pi machines more or less capable of finding gold micro jewelry and fine chains?

Yep.

6. what are the strengths and weaknesses of each of the following machines....garrett infinium, whites tdi, whites tdi sl, detectorpro headhunter, tessoro sandshark.
thanks, chuck.

You know my opinion.

 

[Da Sand Crab]

Dew's motto "He who digs the most trash finds the most treasure" sums it up,
for me anyway. It may get tedious and down right frustrating at times but
you have to love this hobby to get the most out of it. When I use my Excal,
I'm always wondering if I'm missing deeper or smaller targets. With my Sand Shark
I know I'm getting it all.

 

[ron lord]

On # 4 BS not , my Infinium LS and seahunter both have disc mod. I can tune out all pulltabs and Gold , but I can't tune out iron.

 

[gold fever pete]

AMEN BROTHER. Ok When using my Tesoro Sand Shark, White's Dual Field or my White's PI, I dig everything. Some of them very deep. The result is: My bud uses an Excalibur while I use the Sand Shark. He comes back with clad. I come back with jewelry.His trash is a lot less than mine. Dew's quote hits it on the head

 

[bigscoop]

AMEN BROTHER. Ok When using my Tesoro Sand Shark, White's Dual Field or my White's PI, I dig everything. Some of them very deep. The result is: My bud uses an Excalibur while I use the Sand Shark. He comes back with clad. I come back with jewelry.His trash is a lot less than mine. Dew's quote hits it on the head

Is this because you're hunting deeper, or is it because the PI's seem to handle the mineralization better? One thing I've noticed about my Excal is that it sometimes has trouble holding a solid signal on deep nickles. I was playing with this at the beach the other day and it had no trouble with deep dimes, quarters, pennies......but with a deep nickle the signal was often broken and hit-or-miss. I've not tested this with gold rings yet, but after the nickle thing I'm going to.

 

[Terry Soloman]

Is this because you're hunting deeper, or is it because the PI's seem to handle the mineralization better? One thing I've noticed about my Excal is that it sometimes has trouble holding a solid signal on deep nickles. I was playing with this at the beach the other day and it had no trouble with deep dimes, quarters, pennies......but with a deep nickle the signal was often broken and hit-or-miss. I've not tested this with gold rings yet, but after the nickle thing I'm going to.

Yep, I find a lot of nickels, deep hoop earrings, and gold walking behind Excals with my Sand Shark. Bottom line - PI is deeper than anything else in any condition.

 

[bigscoop]

Yep, I find a lot of nickels, deep hoop earrings, and gold walking behind Excals with my Sand Shark. Bottom line - PI is deeper than anything else in any condition.

In recent weeks I've really been putting the Excal and WOT to the test and I have to say, it has obvious issues seeing nickels/gold in the deeper mineralized sand unless it's some really healthy gold, and those nickels had better be clean and laying flat. I would never have believed it without going through all the motions to know for certain. In soft, deep sand, it appears PI users are possibly at noticeable advantage. (I say possible because I have yet to put a good PI through the same motions but I'm also fairly certain it will easily see these deeper nickel & gold targets.) Not saying PI's are the best beach machine choice, but for the deeper, softer sand, I'm thinking they're certainly the best way to go.

 

[U.K. Brian]

Its funny that so many claim that P.I.'s have no discrimination when they were the original detectors that did. Iron has always been a problem but then it remains so to a degree with round iron and large iron breaking through the discrimination settings of all VLF's.

On the beach silver foil was a major problem before ringpulls added to our woes. Early pulse machines were either insensitive or blind to silver paper.

Then there's the "dropped gold" method of discrimination that many P.I.'s can take advantage of. It only works because the detector loses sensitivity and discriminates out gold much sooner than ferrous.

Add to that the detectors that use the decay rate of the returned signal to indicate iron giving a meter reading, warning light or audio. The drawback here is the iron has to be fist size or above so little use in a field of nails.

Then there's the hybrid machines with a primary pulse seach mode to provide maximum depth such as Eric Fosters P.P.D.1 (Pulse Power Discriminator 1) which was rather heavy and ate batteries but used a conventional discrimination to provide iron I.D. by meter deflection. Protovale had the Pulse Analyst around the same time. This worked in the same way but only used AA batteries thanks to a battery miser circuit design.
Wrights had the "Groundhawk" (way before the U.S. Groundhawk). The problem with this was you didn't have a meter providing discrimination at all times but had to switch between the discriminating and all metal modes and allow a few seconds for the detector to settle.

Perhaps we should skip over the Whites based Searchscan 650 PI that was not very sensitive towards low conductors and the Titanium Adonis which "sort of worked", towards the P.I. "discriminators" of today. The Infinium has its fans but like the TDI is flawed. The TDI will allow most iron to be ignored, or ring pulls and crown caps what ever you want really but whatever you don't want to dig costs you in wanted finds. For example when set to pick up gold and silver (down to dime size) it will ignore ring pulls and crown caps but also hammered silver. No real worry in the States but major in Europe. Set to pick up gold, hammered silver, small and medium cupro-nickle it will miss most iron but at the cost of larger silver and our £1 and £2 coins which are just the ones you want to find at more than $1.50 and $3 each. So always the price to pay !

Hopefully the full range discriminating Pulse Devil will get into production one day in the meanwhile there's various solutions being tried including the SPI MX3 pulse which I haven't tried with five tones to help with target I.D. Its fairly cheap which worries me. Something great you can charge the world for.
There's also the continued trend to add magnetometers to P.I.'s to deal with iron as on the some Detech SSP coils and if you have an older detector then a Reeves Jones "Ferrous Hound" can be added to the coil which provides audio when over iron but not non ferrous, so if it sounds off you don't dig.

 

[CASPER-2]

just a small sample of deep - mostly "old gold" finds in water with PI
and mostly at supposedly "hunted" out spots with other machines

 

[Jack Straw]

I still wanna be Dew when i grow up.

 

[hamiddetecting]

I wish you luck!