Ground Balancing in Wet Sand?

[Silver Slayer]

Hello Everyone,

How much does having a adjustable ground balance help in wet sand? I am thinking of upgrading to a adjustable ground balance machine to hit the wet sand. Are there any lowerer end machines out there that you can recommed that do well in wet sand? Please advise

May all your hunts be profitable

 

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[Terry Soloman]

Hello Everyone,

How much does having a adjustable ground balance help in wet sand? I am thinking of upgrading to a adjustable ground balance machine to hit the wet sand. Are there any lowerer end machines out there that you can recommed that do well in wet sand? Please advise

May all your hunts be profitable

There is no lower end VLF machine that can really handle wet SALTWATER sand. That is where Pulse Induction, or PI machines excel. VLF machines lose stability and depth in highly conductive saltwater sand..

 

[U.K. Brian]

Hi T.P.

Ground balance on most detectors has a fairly limited range which is not sufficient to deal with the positive effect of wet salt. But people sucessfully detected on wet sand years ago even with detectors that had no adjustable ground balance. All you have to do is detect in discrimination and use that control to balance out the salt.

With most detectors the setting required will be around the point where small foil discriminates out.

The drawbacks are that the coil does have to be kept really level to the surface of the sand and because you are using perhaps more discrimination than you might normally, sensitivity to items such as engagement rings is reduced. If your the type who doesn't want to dig foil on the beach it won't bother you at all. You won't get anywhere near the depth of a good P.I. but you will be covering twice the amount of ground in the same time period.

 

[JohnnieWalker]

I have a Minelab Safari that works quite well but it cost about a grand. I later bought a Teknetics T2 and tried that on the beach in the wet sand (salt water) and as long as I manually ground balanced it seemed to work okay and onced balanced it didn't matter the distance of the coil to the sand as long as I didn't touch it. The T2 also had decent depth but it picked up a lot of very tiny objects that had me digging a bit more than the Minelab but either one would find a gold ring no problem.

I think if you are going to do a lot of beach detecting a Minelab Excalibur would be ideal cause no issues in going in the water and submerging it if necessary.