Spent 2 ½ hrs on the beach with the Bounty Hunter Discovery 3300 and have to share my experience. I started the day expecting to hunt the water for 5 hrs with my CTX 3030, but after 2 hrs the headphones died and rather than sacrifice the remaining $9 of meter money decided to fetch my back-up detector, the Discovery 3300, from my truck. In regards to background, I have spent many years on the beach and in the water metal detecting both the east and west coasts of Florida with multiple detectors. I often post my better finds on TreasureNet and on FindMall. Bought the Discovery 3300 at COSCO for $99.99 – just could not pass up a great deal and just added inexpensive headphones from Amazon for about $20.
First of all, as expected, the 3300 acted like any other single VLF machine in salt water and over wet sand - it gave falsing involving both low (rejected) and high (accepted) tones; which would hinder most salt water and wet sand hunting. However, on dry sand the Discovery 3300 really shined.
I decided to grid a large section of beach in front of a popular Gulf front restaurant which included multiple pathways to the water. Given the 3300’s small coil size (7”), I swept quite rapidly but kept the coil to the ground and took baby steps as I slowly progressed. On a regular basis (about every 2-3 minutes), the 3300 would come across a rejected or accepted target and I’d make a mental note (most serious flaw of the experiment) of the detector’s ID and actual target ID. I dig all targets, good or bad, on the beach.
I spent about 2 ½ hrs hunting and the results are shown below. Overall, I found 27 coins; over 10 coins/hr. Also found about 15 pieces of aluminum scrap and pull tabs which the 3300 correctly IDed.
Targets were recovered from near the surface to about 9” deep (corroded cent). As shown in the pic, most of the coins had obviously been in the sand for a long time given the degree of corrosion. The 3300’s ID system was excellent; it correctly identified 25 of 27 coin denominations correctly, from zinc cents to 25 cent pieces. Importantly, the 3300 found and correctly IDed nickels – I always said that it you can find nickels you can find gold. Further, small aluminum disks, about 3mm in size (bottom center in pic), inhabit the hunted beach and the 3300 detected and correctly IDed them as well.
The beach gave me a great opportunity to see what this detector could do in dry sand and it did very well. Ten coins per hr is better than my average (7-9/hr) over the years with the CTX 3030 and with the Excal. More importantly, I had a great time metal detecting with the 3300 and, after all, isn’t that what it is all about?
Happy Hunting
