AT Pro on west coast

[outdoors]

does anybody use the AT Pro on the west coast beaches on this forum please respond, like to know if the AT Pro handles the black sand at the beach or does it tend to struggle in the back sand
I would be using the AT Pro in the surf about knee deep, I keep hearing differant responses to this question thanks (beaches of southern california (san diego)

 

[Ron Lord]

n/t

 

[outdoors]

sorry forgot to say california (san diego)

 

[TheDualFieldBandit]

Hello Outdoors in San Diego,

I've tried the AT-Pro on some beaches in New Hampshire. The beaches here do have a medium amount of black sands to them. Not sure how your beaches there are? But the AT-Pro in my opinion is not that great of a salt water detector. The AT-Pro will excel on the dry sand part of the beach. It will go very deep. I dug a religious type pendant right around 14 inches deep. Right after the last hurricane Irene came through. The pendant was only 5 grams! Then the performance drops off on the wet sand part of the beach. You'll need to reground balance from dry to wet and then again once the coil goes under the salt water. The best ground balance numbers seem to be between 10 to 12 on the meter also turn the iron audio off too it's way to noisy. The depth of the detector seemed to drop off a little in the wet sands. The best it seemed to do was around 8 inches and I feel that was pushing it. Now the sad part is once that coil goes under the water it really seems to drop off. I had a hard time picking up a nickel around three inches. The AT-Pro works great in hot ground but not with salt mixed with it. Salt is at one end of the ground balance spectrum and black sand is at the other end. The AT-Pro being a single frequency detector it doesn't do as well as a dual frequency or multi frequency detectors would. I like to run the Whites Dual Field were ever there is medium to heavy black sands. The Excalibur seems to work great in the PP mode on the wet sands. Seems to be close to the Dual field in that mode. But it too seems to lose performance in the salt water compared to the Dual Field. The salt water is where the DF really seems to come to life. For some reason once the coil goes under the salt water it goes deeper and is more sensitive to smaller objects where as VLF units seem to be the opposite??? The DF handles the salt and black sands quite well in my opinion. Hope this helps with your choice of a detector.

 

[TheDualFieldBandit]

PS. The AT-Pro also seems to lose in ground depth on objects as the voltage in the batteries drop. It doesn't seem to take much of a voltage drop either to make a difference. I noticed that It lost depth with each drop of bar graph of the battery meter. The AT-Pro uses four AA batteries at 1.5 volts each for a total of 6 volts. I picked up some AA PowerGenix NiZn high voltage 1.6 volt batteries. Fully charged there at 1.85 volts each times four comes to 7.4 volts and these batteries stay up there on voltage for a long time too. Not only did this seem to make the AT-Pro go deeper in my test garden it also so seemed to improve the over all performance of the unit. Making it hit harder and with a faster recovery speed in between targets. The audio quality is cleaner and louder as well. Here's a couple of video's on these batteries.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLRN5p5zWbQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsLKj_mjnGU&feature=related

 

[synthnut]

TDFB,
Thanks for sharing this info .....It will surely benefit me with my AT Pro and other AA functioning products ....Jim

 

[TheGeorgiaCanuck]

PS. The AT-Pro also seems to lose in ground depth on objects as the voltage in the batteries drop. It doesn't seem to take much of a voltage drop either to make a difference. I noticed that It lost depth with each drop of bar graph of the battery meter. The AT-Pro uses four AA batteries at 1.5 volts each for a total of 6 volts. I picked up some AA PowerGenix NiZn high voltage 1.6 volt batteries. Fully charged there at 1.85 volts each times four comes to 7.4 volts and these batteries stay up there on voltage for a long time too. Not only did this seem to make the AT-Pro go deeper in my test garden it also so seemed to improve the over all performance of the unit. Making it hit harder and with a faster recovery speed in between targets. The audio quality is cleaner and louder as well. Here's a couple of video's on these batteries.

So you can't damage the ATPro using 1.6v batteries?