Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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Tropical Storm Sebastian
Source: nhc.noaa.gov
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Almost December and there was a tropical storm in the Atlantic named Sebastian. It is heading away from us and won't do much of anything for our beaches.
I found out yesterday that some of those formless beaches have a lot of scattered modern coins and maybe an occasional surprise.
I found out yesterday that some of those formless beaches have a lot of scattered modern coins and maybe an occasional surprise.
The ring I picked up yesterday was a fancy ring with lots of stones - one big red one and numerous clear smaller stones. Turned out it is junk though.
The coin count was high, but mostly pennies.
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I feel like I have enough experience with the Minelab Equinox 600 now to compare it to the Garrett ATX. I'm just talking about general impressions. I don't have as much experience with the Equinox yet.
First, the biggest difference to me is that the Equinox is a quick starter. It doesn't take a long time to learn how to use it. It seemed like it took me a really long time to get comfortable with the ATX. They are very different types of detectors.
One thing that I like about the Equinox, and found surprising, is the effectiveness of the different detecting modes. It has modes for Park, Field, Beach and Gold. Each of those has two settings or sub-modes. For example in the Beach mode there is a mode for detecting on the beach and one for detecting in the water. You can easily select a mode and it will do a pretty good job for you. At least that is my experience. I was surprised, for example, how well the beach mode handled the black sand that you find on some Treasure Coast beaches.
The ATX has no preset modes but you can ground balance the detector for any type of ground. Nothing wrong with that. You can use either discrimination or all-metals modes. Discrimination mode works well, but I prefer all-metals when going for the absolute maximum depth in wet salt sand.
If you aren't accustomed to ground-balancing a detector, you might find doing that tricky at first.
You can rebalance as you move to different areas of the beach.
One of the biggest differences between the two detectors is the weight. The ATX is a heavy detector and the Equinox is light. I'm sure there are people who would not want to lug around the ATX.
The ATX uses up battery power fairly quickly, while a fully recharged Equinox will run for a long time.
When you get a detector that like the Equinox has a meter readout, you might expect it to help you identify the type of target that is producing a signal. I've found that very little help, and have in the past shown why. Gold rings, for example, produce a wide range of numbers. That makes no-dig decisions risky.
I believe you can learn to extract as much information from audio signals as you will get from a meter readout, although a meter readout can provide some useful additional information when used in conjunction with the audio and a good analysis of the site.
I didn't expect the Equinox to detect very small piece of metal like the ATX does, but it detects small pieces as well as the ATX as long as they aren't iron. The Equinox gives a barely audible signal on some pieces of iron that the ATX would scream. That is the case even if you are not discriminating iron. Sometimes you won't want to be bothered by barely visible pieces of iron or other metals. The sensitivity of the ATX to small pieces of iron can be either a problem or a benefit, depending upon what you are trying to do. I think most beach detectorists would not like that characteristic of the ATX.
The Equinox is a easy to use metal detector that in my opinion is very satisfactory for the vast majority of situations. There are however still situations when I would select the ATX. That would be especially true when I want to make extra-sure I'm not missing anything. That is how I see it at this point. I would use other detectors at times too, but for this discussion I'm just talking about the Equinox and ATX.
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We are still getting some fairly high tides, but the surf is down to around two or three feet. The surf will continue to decrease for the next several days.
The weather is beautiful now. I like it much better than those nearly 100 degree days.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
