Beachcomber
New member
Well this puppy is going to take a little while to find the optimum beach settings but I think it's going to work out fine. Hunted for 4 hours with no fatigue and no numb fingers like I used to get from the old handle angle 
I found out very quickly that this machine does not like being used with an Open screen.....not even a little bit! It gets quite noisey and falses a lot when it doesn't have anything for the discrimination circuits to do! That was lesson one. I tired conductive Audio with Minelabs Beach Program. Didn't like that at all. So set the machine to Ferrous Audio 4 tones with max variability. This was much better even though pretty much everything gave the same tone it was still more comfortable to listen to. Also set the Audio to smooth but I am going to be doing more experimenting with these settings. I finally settled on hunting in QuickMask with a Ferrous setting of 25. Now something that I learned that is a contradiction to the Owner's Manual. It recommends using Manual Sensitivity for the Beach. Their reasoning is that they feel beaches have little or no mineralization (ie: Florida)...however here in NJ we do have black magnetic sand in our beaches. When trying to hunt in Manual Sensitivity the E-Trac falsed like crazy in the wet sand until I lowered the Sensitivity to 16 then is settled down. I wasn't very happey having to use that low of a setting. So I switched over to Auto Sensitivity and it jumped all the way up to 21 and it wasn't falsing. Ok that seemed strange but it was working ...I thought about the old saying.....dont' argue with success SO I hunted in Auto Sensitivity and the detector worked fine. I had plenty of time to think about it while I was out on the beach and I remembered that in the Manual it states the the E-Trac Monitors 3 channels to determine it's Auto Sensitivity level and that in Auto it can adjust the sensitivity of each of these 3 channels independantly of one another. So if one channel is having a problem with noise or mineralization it can lower that channel. However when you are in Manual Sensitivity a 3 channels adjustments are locked together and adjusted up and down together at the same levels. So I came to the conclusion and maybe I am wrong but I am thinking that one or more of the channels was having problems with the mineralization of the beach and required a manual setting of 16 or lower for stable operation. But in Auto the detector was able to lower the sensitivity of the channel or channels that were having a problem and raise the sensitivity of the other channels while maintaining stability and thereby increasing detection depth. But this is just my take on it. So even though I am still learning and trying to find the best settings for the beach I had a really good afternoon and found quite a few coins and some jewelry and one 10K gold ring. The ring read 12-5 so did a stainless steel bolt. Also I only had one target read lower than FE-12 and that was a 3oz pyramid fishing sinker which read 10-32. The only targets that read higher than FE12 were very deep fringe area coins that also gave iffy but repeatable audio and a consistent conductive number. The lowest of these read all the down at FE 20. The small piece of jewelry with the blueish stone read 12-1. Well off to bed so I can leave for the beach at 3am to catch the 6am Low Tide. Thank goodness for backlit displays
HH
Beachcomber
I found out very quickly that this machine does not like being used with an Open screen.....not even a little bit! It gets quite noisey and falses a lot when it doesn't have anything for the discrimination circuits to do! That was lesson one. I tired conductive Audio with Minelabs Beach Program. Didn't like that at all. So set the machine to Ferrous Audio 4 tones with max variability. This was much better even though pretty much everything gave the same tone it was still more comfortable to listen to. Also set the Audio to smooth but I am going to be doing more experimenting with these settings. I finally settled on hunting in QuickMask with a Ferrous setting of 25. Now something that I learned that is a contradiction to the Owner's Manual. It recommends using Manual Sensitivity for the Beach. Their reasoning is that they feel beaches have little or no mineralization (ie: Florida)...however here in NJ we do have black magnetic sand in our beaches. When trying to hunt in Manual Sensitivity the E-Trac falsed like crazy in the wet sand until I lowered the Sensitivity to 16 then is settled down. I wasn't very happey having to use that low of a setting. So I switched over to Auto Sensitivity and it jumped all the way up to 21 and it wasn't falsing. Ok that seemed strange but it was working ...I thought about the old saying.....dont' argue with success SO I hunted in Auto Sensitivity and the detector worked fine. I had plenty of time to think about it while I was out on the beach and I remembered that in the Manual it states the the E-Trac Monitors 3 channels to determine it's Auto Sensitivity level and that in Auto it can adjust the sensitivity of each of these 3 channels independantly of one another. So if one channel is having a problem with noise or mineralization it can lower that channel. However when you are in Manual Sensitivity a 3 channels adjustments are locked together and adjusted up and down together at the same levels. So I came to the conclusion and maybe I am wrong but I am thinking that one or more of the channels was having problems with the mineralization of the beach and required a manual setting of 16 or lower for stable operation. But in Auto the detector was able to lower the sensitivity of the channel or channels that were having a problem and raise the sensitivity of the other channels while maintaining stability and thereby increasing detection depth. But this is just my take on it. So even though I am still learning and trying to find the best settings for the beach I had a really good afternoon and found quite a few coins and some jewelry and one 10K gold ring. The ring read 12-5 so did a stainless steel bolt. Also I only had one target read lower than FE-12 and that was a 3oz pyramid fishing sinker which read 10-32. The only targets that read higher than FE12 were very deep fringe area coins that also gave iffy but repeatable audio and a consistent conductive number. The lowest of these read all the down at FE 20. The small piece of jewelry with the blueish stone read 12-1. Well off to bed so I can leave for the beach at 3am to catch the 6am Low Tide. Thank goodness for backlit displays HH
Beachcomber