That's definitely interesting, and I guess suggests one should stick with the Field 2 & Beach 2 for the most part. (Those being the two that seem like the ones I will prefer) There in one setting I'm curious to play with, and that's the recovery. I see on each program it's set to 3, which is the equivalent to 6 on the 800, and is super fast. One thing I've learned about the Dues, it being my main detector now, for most of my sites, ever around iron, I much prefer a reactivity setting at 2, which is nowhere close to how fast this detector can recover. In iron I find it's much better to drop in coil size and keep the setting at 2 than to do anything else. So with the Equinox I was thinking I would most likely do all my hunting with the setting of either 1 or 2 on the recovery.... but this detector seems like such a different beast maybe it will not lose as much depth with the higher recovery... and I would hope that would be the case given they have the factory preset set so high. I will be sticking to the basic programs for the first while, but the recovery will be my first tweak to the settings when I experiment.
IMPORTANT: Beach hunting and Recovery speed - you will use Slow, Medium, and Fast recovery speeds while beach hunting, at times switching between them during a single hunt. You may hunt with a slow recovery speed for 100 yards, then have to switch to a medium recovery speed or even a high recovery speed, then 50 yards further switch back to a slow recovery speed again.
Do you want to MISS big fat gold and platinum rings? I told you recovery speed was important. Then adjust your recovery speed correctly for the section of beach you are hunting. Using medium to fast recovery speeds you can walk right past these rings pretty easily. Even if you are being careful, even if you are slowing gridding a beach. With medium to fast recovery speeds (Normal tones on an Explorer) you have to be super careful to slightly overlap your swings. Pay attention to the end of your swings also as you step forward you will miss them there more often. With a slow recovery speed your coil becomes much larger. On a salt water beach a slow recover speed (Long tones on an Explorer) an 11 inch coil grows to the size of an 18 inch coil. You can begin to detect rings several inches off to the side and front of your coil. This is how you avoid missing rings when beach hunting.
Example: Bernie and I were hunting two sections of beach, there's a lifeguard stand at both locations during the summer. There were quite a few targets, probably 1 target every 2-5 feet. I was using an Explorer with normal tones, Bernie was using a Sovereign with long tones. I spent maybe an hour or more gridding my beach section, dragging my scoop behind me so I could see where I had been, detecting up/down the beach between the water and high tide line. Bernie came walking over from his beach section to see how I was doing, just zig zagging and swinging over the beach I had already gridded. He stopped about half way and motioned for me to come over. Right there right centered on my scoop drag line, he pointed, target was a BIG FAT PLATINUM wedding band gawwd the signal was HUGE. It must have been in that little missed space between the end of two swings. Had I been using long tones no way that would have gone unnoticed.
If you have some sand piled onto the beach that buried the iron mostly out of reach of the detector, and the targets are reasonably spread out use a lower recovery speed. If you are quick walking between two lifeguard stands, that dead space with few if any targets again, use a lower recovery speed and walk fast. When you get to the lifeguard stand area do a quick zig/zag to assess. If there's not much iron and targets are spread out pretty decent continue using the lower recovery speed. If you are hunting during the summer when the ocean wave action tends to quickly burry all the targets in FEET of pushed up sand again slow recovery speed. The only targets reachable will be those recently lost, the past few days, maybe 1-3 weeks. Everything else is buried under so many feet of sand its like its not there. You won't need faster recover speeds to pick between targets masking each other.
Medium to Fast Recovery Speeds - Use these mostly during the fall/winter/spring storm season. During the summer the wave type is slow curling surfer type waves, they pick up a lot of sand and heave it up onto the beach all summer. Feet of this sand can build up. During the storm seasons the wave type changes to angry crashing fast moving waves. This wave action flies up the beach with speed, grabs sand and pulls it back down into the water. As it strips this sand off the heavier (than sand) targets lag behind and begin to pile up in heavier concentrations. The more storms the more sand gets stripped the better the detecting gets. At first it exposes all that summer's buried targets, then the past 5 years buried targets, more storms, bigger storms, it can strip sand down to where you are digging coins from the 1920's. Some sections of Ocean City, NJ beaches have eroded 10 feet of sand off the beach.
As the beach erodes exposing more targets, eventually the iron starts to show its ugly head. The heavier eroded beaches can have a lot of iron, that's when you start using faster recovery speeds, just as you would if relic hunting or park hunting a site with lots of iron.
During the storm season you will notice some sections of beaches are eroded, cut down, scoured, bowled, while other bordering sections of beach remain sanded in, heaped up, mounded with sand. Pretty common. Don't waste time on the sanded in sections, look north/south look for depressions and make tracks to those sections. In some cases get back in your vehicle and travel to the next beach if it all looks sanded it. Been many a time my local beach was sanded in, drove 10, 20 miles south its target city. Or vise versa. The coast is not a straight north/south line, the beach sections face the ocean at different angles. Some storms strip one beach off if its at the right angle, others are not effected.
Never found so many stud earrings.........and tiny foil/gum wrappers!
