5/20/15 Report - Reveiw Of The Garrett ATX Extreme Part II. Gold Markings and Possible Confusion.

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.

ATX In Folded Position.

This is a continuation of the review of the Garrett ATX that I began yesterday.

As I said, the ATX does have discrimination.  It is simple linear discrimination with 25 incremental positions.   Low conductivity targets are the first to be discriminated.

There are 13 sensitivity settings.

For maximum detection of small and deep targets, use maximum sensitivity and zero discrimination when you can.  If there is electrical interference in the area, you can do a frequency scan to select the best operating frequency.

I mentioned yesterday that pinpointing is not easy with the ATX unless you use the pinpoint mode.   That is true of the motion mode, which is what a lot of people will use.  In non-motion mode you can sweep slowly and will not need to use the pinpoint button.

There is another pinpointing trick that I might describe some other time.

I find the visual signal strength indicator most helpful for pinpointing. I can see the peak signal strength much better than I can hear it from the auditory signal.

The ATX is a heavy detector.  That will be a problem for many people, but I find it surprisingly easy to swing considering its weight.  It comes with a harness, so that might be a solution for some.

The controls and settings are easily accessed, for the most part with one finger while you detect.

You will dig deep targets with the ATX, both good and junk.  It can get a bit tiring.

It is good on gold.  It responds to small gold very well as compared to clad coins.  It can detect small gold and chains that would be missed by many detectors, however you must use it well to get maximum performance.

I use a test target to determine how well I have the detector tuned.  I talked about that before.

For some situations, such as dry sand, the default settings might be all you need.  Just turn it on and go.  If you don't want to miss a thing, turn up the sensitivity to the max.

However if you are in the wet sand or salt water, or highly mineralized soil, you might want to make some adjustments.   If using motion mode you might want to ground balance as you move from one area to another.  That is not necessary in dry Treasure Coast beach sand.  Again, I like using a test target to make sure I am getting near peak performance.

Once you learn to use non-motion mode in salt water, that will give you the best performance.  It takes practice though, and the threshold setting is very important.  Also expect to retune frequently when using non-motion is salt water.   You may encounter audio drift.

There are some cases when you might not want to detect everything, such as on a beach cluttered with small pieces of iron.  In that case you can decrease sensitivity.

To sum it up, the ATX is a very good detector that will detect small and deep targets and is very good on gold.  It is a bit heavy and requires some practice and skill for optimal peformance.  It can beat most of the detectors being used on the beach if used well.  Like I said yesterday, if you are a person that likes to use discrimination, I'd select another detector.  You can discriminate with the ATX, but then you are minimizing the power that you paid extra money to get.

In many ways the ATX is just the opposite of the Ace 250 that I once reviewed.  I would use the Ace when I don't need maximum depth and want a detector that is easy to use.   The ATX costs nearly ten times as much as the Ace.  Of course the ATX is more rugged than the Ace.

I've heard of problems with the ATX rod freezing but I have not had that problem.  The ATX eats up batteries, but comes with rechargable batteries and a recharger.

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Often wedding rings will be inscribed with a date.  Did you know that 8-10-11 does not always indicate August 10, 2011?   It sometimes indicates the 8th day of October.  Some countries put the day before the month.

So if you see something like 20-10-2011 and are wondering how the month can be the twentieth month, it is probably the day rather than the month and your ring is from another country.

Gold purity is often given in either K (karat) or as a three digit decimal.

Karat purity is measured as 24 times the purity by mass, or in other words 24 times the mass of gold divided by the total mass of the item.   24-Karat gold is fine (99.9% Au w/w), 18-Karat gold is 18 parts gold 6 parts another metal (forming an alloy), 12-Karat gold is 12 parts gold (12 parts another metal), etc.

14k is approximately .5833% gold, but jewelers increase it to .585% for easier mixing.

Back in the old days there was a time when I used to see KP stamped on an item and thought it meant the object was gold plated.  That was a big mistake.  KP stands for Karat Plumb, where "plumb" indicates "exact."   So the KP mark is a good thing instead of a bad thing.

Look for and make good use of any markings but don't blindly accept them.  There are times when they are wrong.  Sometimes intentionally.

A lot of rings these days are 9K.   That might lead to some confusion if you do an acid test.  Normally the first container of test acid will be for 10K.

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Expect more days of calm surf on the Treasure Coast.  This is getting old.  We do still have a good negative tide.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

5/19/15 Report - Garrett ATX Review Part 1. Introduction To How To Hunt A Beach Rewind.

Written by the Treasure Guide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com

Garrett ATX Detector

Every once in a while I evaluate a detector and post a review.  I haven't done a review in a while, but I recently evaluated the Garrett ATX for beach detecting.  The ATX is used by a lot of gold nugget hunters, and I think was designed with that type of hunting in mind, however I wanted to see how it would do as a beach detector.

I didn't do one of those quickie evaluations that people sometimes do.  They assemble a detector and in short order take it out in the field for a couple of hours.  Those kinds of evaluations aren't worth a whole lot.  While you can do that with some detectors, maybe most, it takes longer to really evaluate a detector like the ATX.   My experience says that the ATX will do a lot better in the hands of a someone that has put in a good number of hours with it.  That is what I did.

I tested the Garrett ATX Extreme PI with the standard 10 x 12 inch DD Coil.  Optional coils are available.

There is no way that I would classify the ATX as a beginner's detector.  It took me longer to get to understand the ATX than any other detector that I have ever used.  Maybe that is partially because I really got into the details more than ever before.  I wasn't satisfied with simple impressions.  I did a lot of precise testing.

First of all, the ATX is a pulse induction detector.  Some of what you know about pulse induction detectors is true of the ATX.  It is definitely hot to iron.  You can detect microscopic iron with the ATX.

The ATX has discrimination.  But this is not the right detector for anyone who typically uses discrimination.  If you are going to crank up disrimination on the ATX, you should have selected another detector because you will be diminishing what this detector does very well.

There are two modes - motion and non-motion.  If you have read my posts, you probably know that I almost always use a non-motion or pinpoint or all-metals mode.  That is true with the Excalibur, for example.

The Excalibur's discrimination mode and the ATX's motion mode are similar in some ways even though they are very different types of detectors.

For good performance, the ATX requires the right settings for the situation.   If you have the wrong settings, performance can be way off.  You can say that of many detectors, but I was more aware of that with the ATX.  Perhaps that was because I did a whole lot of testing and was constantly aware of the level of performance that I was getting.

Just like with the White's Dual Field Surf detector, the threshold setting is very important.  Setting the threshold either too high or too low can make the ATX much less effective.

Let me get down to the two very important conclusions.   (1) If you like discrimination you will not like the ATX.  (2) If you like a detector you can turn on and operate in most environments without making adjustments, this detector is not for you.

Like the Excalibur (again, even though they are very different detectors) the ATX can be really sensitive in non-motion mode.  If you are not accustomed to operating in salt sand or salt water in an all-metals mode, this will take some practice.  That is a skill of its own.  You will have to learn to work with signal drift and hearing the effect of salt mineralization etc.

Yes you can run up the discrimination and decrease sensitivity and get a very steady quiet and steady threshold, but that diminishes the power and effectiveness of the ATX.

Most people will not want to use the ATX in the dry sand.  And they will not want to use it on a junky beach anywhere.  Most beach hunters do not have the patience to run such a detector hot without discrimination, and as I said, if you want to use a lot of discrimination you'll diminish the power of the detector so much that you should have bought another type of detector.

The DD coil is said to provide good target separation.  That is not what I found. One of my biggest complaints with the ATX is how wide the signal seems to be.  That took some getting used to.

The ATX does have a pinpoint mode, which is effective, but pinpointing is difficult, to say the least, in the motion mode.  You can however learn to pinpoint fairly effectively in the motion mode without using the pinpoint mode.  That takes a lot of practice though.  I don't particularly like slowing down so much to pinpoint.  With most detectors I can pinpoint very well without slowing down to go into a pinpoint mode.  Remember that with the Excalibur, for example, I always hunt in pinpoint mode anyhow.

This is starting to get a bit long already.  I'll have to finish it some other time.

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I've done this blog for a few years now.  I never expected it to be so popular. It could be much more popular and receive much more visibility, but I've turned down opportunities to have it published in some other places.

Anyhow, I was looking back at some posts from the early years and thought it might be a good idea to repost some of those older posts that got buried by hundreds of new posts.  There are so many posts now that I don't think anybody is going to go all the way back to look at the oldee ones.  Below is part of one post that got hundreds of views back in 2010.

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Let me begin to address the question even though I'm sure I can't do the question justice in a single post and probably not in a hundred posts. I'm not sure I can do the question justice at all, but I'll give it a shot and maybe something of value will come of it.

Before I begin, let me say that I'm really not suggesting that I have the "right" answer, and I want you to know that the following is nothing more than my opinion. Maybe it will help someone.

First there is no single way to properly hunt a beach. There are different strategies and techniques, and some can be applied to one situation while others might better be applied to other situations.

Some of the most important factors to consider are what you want to find, where you are hunting, and the local beach conditions. Much of the intent of this blog is to provide information on beach conditions.

Before really getting into the meat of the subject, I need to provide some background.

Success can not be guaranteed on any one outing, but you can over the long haul learn to succeed more frequently. It is about probabilities and doing what ever you can to improve the probability of success on any given outing.

There is way too much beach for anyone to cover completely. Therefore, it becomes a matter of spending your time in the right places. Some places are much more productive than others.

First you have to define your own idea of success. Some people want to find things with the highest economic value, other people want to find old things, other people want to find things of historic interest, and other people are perfectly content to go out, get some exercise and fresh air and pick up a few coins.

Your goals should match your personality, goals and circumstances. Most people would like to find something like the treasure of the Atocha, but most people do not have either the optimism, patience, and abilities and resources or commitment to do something like that. High value targets like that usually require tons of perseverance and commitment, and many people would give up way before finishing the task.

Besides personality, situation plays a role. If you want to pan or mine for gold and live in Fort Pierce, your situation doesn't match your goals very well.

Where you live has a lot to do with what you should target, unless you are willing to travel or move.

If you live in South Florida, you should be able to learn to do well hunting modern jewelry. If you live on the Treasure Coast, hunting modern jewelry is not as economically productive as in South Florida.

The Treasure Coast has the famed shipwrecks but hunting shipwreck coins and artifacts isn't easy. Unless you dive and work with someone that has a lease,you are pretty much confined to hunting the beaches, and most of the time the conditions are not good for that.

My main point of all of that is that you have to have some clarity about your own personality, your situation, what you are willing to invest in time, effort, and expense, and your goals before you can maximize the probability of success however you define it.

If you don't have too much patience and easily get discouraged or give up, set goals that are realistic and more easily achievable. Expand the number of things that you target. And learn to enjoy the hunt.

Given all of that, once you decide what you want to find then you can begin to learn the best ways of being successful in finding that particular kind of thing. There are different things to find, and many of them require different strategies an techniques.

One of the things you can do to improve your success rate is to be adaptable. Learn to hunt a variety of different types of things. That requires more knowledge and a variety of different strategies and techniques.

Learn to identify the conditions that are best for different types of hunting and adapt to the current conditions. Take what the beach is offering.

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No change in Treasure Coast beach conditions on the horizon.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

7/17/14 Report - Testing A Good Inexpensive New Detector On a Yard and In The Woods. 1829 Large Cent Found

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.

1829 Large Cent Found By New Ace 250 Detector

I'm going to do something today that I never do.  I'm going to give you a review of a metal detector.  It is the Garrett Ace 250, which just out of the box was able to detect various types of old and new targets on its first three short outings.   I was surprised by one find in particular (See photo.).

The Garrett Ace 250 is an inexpensive but very adequate metal detector.  For the price, it is an excellent detector.   Selling for just a little over $200 as compared to something more like $1200 for an Excalibur, it offers excellent performance for the price.  Don't, however, confuse it with something like the Excalibur, which has a totally different purpose.  As I've discussed before, a detector should be selected based upon what you plan to do with it, where you are going to hunt, and what you want to find, etc.

The Ace 250 is not a submersible detector.  In fact you should not get the control box wet.  So if you think it might rain, be sure to carry a cover or something with you. 

It is very compact and light weight.

It is very easy to assemble.  It came with batteries and headphones.  I assembled the entire thing and had it working in probably less than fifteen minutes.  It might take slightly longer if it is your first detector.

After quickly taking it out of the box and putting it together, I did a couple quick air tests  on coins in the house.  Everything looked good.  Then to the outdoors.

I took a penny, nickel, dime and quarter, threw them on the ground with a small distance between.  I  ran my coin over them and got good audio and display responses.  Again, no problem.

If this is a first detector for you, spend a lot of time on this step.  Also take a nail, pull tab and bottle cap.  The more time you spend practicing the better off you will be.

I'd start in coin mode.



Ace 250  Display and Buttons

The detector has five different modes that are selected by push button.   They are coin, relics, custom, jewelry and all metals modes,

You'll short change yourself if you don't spend good time practicing with known targets, but I've talked about that a lot in the past.

After some time, place some test targets very close to each other and on top of each other, like a nail and a coin.  The goal is to really get to know your detector and how it sounds when you encounter things in the field.

The settings and adjustments on this detector are easy to select and use.

Within an hour of first opening the box, I found a wheat penny along with a handful of other newer coins with this detector.  I was working an old yard that had been lightly worked before.

The one thing that you might find disappointing if you are new to detecting is that target ID is not as simple as it sounds.  It has both a graphic display, which is well organized and effective, and audio tones to discriminate.

When you first read about target ID you might imagine that it is clear cut and simple.  Just wave the coil over an object and read the ID.   It is not quite that simple though.  Many targets will cause the meter to jump around.  A target might read pull tab then nickel and the pull tab again, for one example.

In this yard there were a lot of roofing nails,  The display usually jumped back and forth between quarter and iron on those.  After a while you know how they display.

It does take time to get to know things like that though.

When a coin was detected it usually gave a pretty consistent reading.   Some cases were more complicated though.  For example when multiple targets were on top of each other or close to each other.

On the first day using this inexpensive detector in the first hour of operation in the yard I found several regular coins, including a wheat penny.

The next day I took the detector out on an old path where I found a 1909 wheat penny and some other clad coins.  Then back to the yard for a little more hunting.  I switched from the Coin mode to the All Metals mode. 

If you know me, you might be surprised that it took me that long to go to All Metals mode, but I wanted to explore the Coin Mode, so played with that a while first.  After switching to All Metals mode, one more wheat penny and a nice brass relic popped up.  I'll show the relic some time.

Then the next day a couple of hours in the woods resulted in finds which included another wheat penny, a 1829 large cent and an old inexpensive ring.

You'd never believe where I found those.  It was a very steep hillside in the woods.  A lot of the time I was following a deer path.  There was no obvious reason to suspect those items were there.  Also found was the metal end of a shot gun shell and a bullet casing.  Those types of finds were expected.  I'll show a picture of that woods area maybe tomorrow.

You can use the various modes together too.   For example if you are hunting in All Metals mode and get a signal that you want to check in Coin mode, that is very easy.  Just hit the push button with your thumb to change modes. 

I would use All Metals Mode a lot and then switch modes when I want to double check a target.

That shows what you can do with a detector that costs not much more than two hundred dollars.  I thought it worked well.  Part of it was my search strategy.  I'll get into that more sometime too.

One feature that this detector has that is better than the high-end detectors that I use is how easy it is to change the modes and settings.  Just use your thumb of your hand holding the detector without letting go of the detector rod or using your other hand.  That is a feature that I'd really like to see on my high-end detectors.

To summarize, the Ace 250 worked well inland, and I'm sure it will work well in dry sand too, although I do not know how well the few exposed metal parts will stand up to constant salt spray without some extra protection.

One reason I did this review is that a lot of people ask what they should get for their first detector.  I'm not saying this is it, because as I've explained, it depends on a lot of factors, but in many cases this would be a good first detector.

I highly recommend this detector as a first detector, especially if you are going to hunt inland.  It is easy to use and effective.  It would also make a good back-up or special purpose detector.  I thought it was a great value at a low price.

I did not test it on the beach and suspect that it is better choice for hunting inland.  I suspect that it might function well in dry sand.  I don't know how it would do in wet sand. 


On the Treasure Coas the surf is still small, but the tides are unusually big now.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net