Advice on salt water beach and shallow water detectors

Rscardino10 · Jun 1, 2016

Hey everyone, I'm looking to purchase a new detector to hunt the beaches of North Carolina/ outer banks. Would like it to be water proof and great in the sand. I have heard so many different thoughts on what detector to get.. Some saying AT PRO is great some saying stay away, some saying go for a PI ect. I will mainly be hunting on the beach / water but may occasionally go further inland. With a price range of under 700 what do you think is my best bet for what I want to do? Thanks!

SouthFLdigger · Jun 2, 2016

As stated by others, CZ-20/21, BHID, or Excal if you plan on getting wet or going waist deep. If not a DFX, CZ-3D and other lighter ID machines will fit the bill nicely. Only a hand-full of single frequency detectors provide good performance in wet salty sand and the AT-PRO is not one of them. Although in certain low salinity and low magnetite beaches the AT-Pro will be stable and reasonably deep. Ive used all of the machines mentioned except the CZ-3D. The CZ20 i use only in the water, the BHID while deeper than my CZ-20 when in all metal has a bad habit of having a floating coil. This is easily resolved by tie wrapping a small 1" PVC pipe near the coil to the shaft capping both ends and filling it with sand. The BHID, and Whites DFX are my dry sand wet sand units and work very well and are deep units when maxed out. BHID=max sens all metal 12-13" down on a med ring while paying close attention to threshold, DFX about 11" on wet sand on the same medium ring PAG=3-4, Sens 76, custom beach program. The Excal II will go just as deep as the above units with the stock coil, but again a bit heavy and use it only in the water along with CZ-20. Right now there is no "cheap" detector that is really all terrain and waterproof, except maybe the CTX3030. As far as non waterproof single frequency units that will work in most terrains and maintain decent depth (7+") including wet salty sand= XP Deus, Nokta Fors Core, Makro Racer 1 and 2.

shinythings1 · Jun 2, 2016

adamBomb said:
I dont get how you can say you didnt like the CZ because of the weight and then went ahead and got another machine that is nearly the same weight I have both an excal and CZ21 and each tire me out after 1-2 hours on the stock shaft. I had to mod each to be comfortable.

I found the CZ to be bulkier and more uncomfortable to wear...Maybe its just the shape of it...I really liked the build quality... and that wasn't the only thing I didn't care for as I've stated above... I found that I liked the threshold... now if I were diving with it with boats around, I wouldn't want the threshold.

The point of my post was that in my opinion they are very equivalent machines and just to go with what is comfortable for you. Whether it be the physical or the operation of the machine, I'm just pointing out that there's Ford and Chevy...