First hunt with my new Safari

[Thisoldgoldchaser]

The results of my first hunt with my new Safari. Didnt have alot of time. Only got to spend about 1.5 hours but it was a nice day. Where I hunted is the drive in theater here in town. Been here since 1946. It has been hunted before but only a few times. The owner is a good friend of mine. Gave me permission to hunt all I want. Anything valuable I gotta split with him. Asked him if he wanted to use his axe or mine to split it. He didnt think that was funny. Dont know why?

Anyway, he had just a couple weeks ago hauled in a bunch of gravel and so everything was under a new layer of compacted gravel. Not fun to dig in. Specially since it has been raining the last week or so. Compacted and wet.

The ground is high in minerals. VERY acidic as well. Copper is eaten so bad, if you look at the pennies you can see that. The pennies look like they have been laying in hydrohloric acid. Eaten away.

Did get some sliver. One quarter 1964 and a couple of the dimes are silver. Not bad. They are in pretty good shape other than dirty. And then all the trash. More nails and screws than I expected. That wouldnt be good on the tires. So its a good thing I am going down the rows and clearing them.

Now...as to the readings. I am afraid I didnt note the ground reading.
All of the silver in the coin/jewelry mode came in at 38 on the display. The pennies came in at 30 to 32 which surprised me. The pulltabs came in, some at 22, some at 30 and 32 the same as the pennies. The other stuff was all over the scale. The photos show just some of the trash I dug. There was quite a bit of cans and bottle tops. Part cans. And of course the nails and screws. ALOT of them.

This dirt in there is some of the worst as far as mineralization. You can almost see the powder that is like dried battery acid in the soil. I dont know what it is, but
the park in town has the same type of soil.

So that was my first trip with the Safari.
Conclusions: Well, hard to say just yet. Hunting in coin and jewery mode most of the time. Evident with all the trash I dug. I didnt get alot of falshing.
Also, it was very quiet and gave me good signals. I did run it in high trash. But I did notice that even then if I tried to swing back over a signal it didnt reset that fast. You have to give it time. Not sure if I like that. Will see. It surely finds the stuff. And if sure lets you know whats there. I just ignore the ID graphics..doesnt mean much and is pretty useless. The ID numbers are ok, but I did find a few of the pull tabs that came in at 38. Any of you safari users had that? I am sure you have. Pulltabs come in all over the place.

All in allm the safari so far isnt bad. I had no problem swinging it for the time I had. And I would have noticed because I HAVE to use a light detector. It did ok though.

 

[bugg]

I see you have an 0-8. Did you ever try the 08 at this place? Im wondering how it stacks up to the safari in the iron. Im looking at a safari as an addition to my 08. But all the iron the saf picks up makes me hesitate a bit. All you folks, please dont take it as me promoting the 08,and bashing the Minelabs, I was a Minelab dealer 15 years ago, and they were nice machines.HH

 

[Thisoldgoldchaser]

No, I havent tried it there yet. I had it with me today, but just didnt get it out and I had to leave sooner than I expected due to another commitment happening sooner. I had meant to get the omega out to compare the two. I will be going to another real trashy place tomorrow so will make a point to get them both out and do a comparison.

 

[Monte]

It doesn't mater which brand, a smaller coil just handles trash better.

For me, there's something about the Explorer/Safari models that just doesn't 'feel' right with a small coil, or the time consumption of switching them compared with other models, or maybe it's the expense of a smaller coil for the Safari that annoys me. The result is that I prefer to keep an 11" Pro coil mounted (with a Safari or when I had an SE Pro) and use them in cleaner sites, preferring to grab a different model and smaller coil at sites with dense trash.

Like "bugg", not bashing a Minelab, but there's no single perfect detector so I like having units that 'compliment' each other. As you now, I'm going to grab the Omega w/5"DD in the heavily littered sites. By month's end (weather permitting) I'm tray an "average trash" site with iron junk and see what I think about the Safari w/11" Pro DD round coil Vs Omega w/11" DD elliptical coil.

Monte

 

[Thisoldgoldchaser]

Hey Monte,
Yea, I know about the solution for trashy sites. I was using the small excellerator coil there. I happened to have it on the machine when I got there and didnt feel like changing it. I was in a hurry to try out that Safari. So I actually, as it turned out, was using the right coil...though it was...NOT quite on purpose.
I was surprised though at some of the numbers I was getting on the stuff. The quarters...that I expected. 38's for them pretty much came close to what I got air testing. 36 to 38 on air tests. And it was the older pulltabs, I think, that gave me the 38's as well. The poptops, thinking back on it, came in at about 16. And there were ALOT of those. I ended up, after digging a bunch of them just ignoring the hits at 16. I guess I shouldnt have..maybe. But after digging about 2 dozen 16's down to 6 inches or so in that packed gravel and finding poptops, I surrendered. Plus my body was telling me "no more".

This would be a great place for a group hunt. There is no way that I can cover this place in MONTHS. Once I go on the road, dont know when I would be back to hunt it. So I may just try to get a few guys from the forum together, leastways those that live in this state, later this month and all have fun day swinging coils at this drive-in. And maybe get my friend to open up the concession stand at the same time. Would be great having movie fare, popcorn, soda and hotdogs, and digging holes...

 

[Monte]

You have some good idea about them opening up to serve grab and soda during a search!

As I mentioned in my last response, I generally feel more comfortable using any FBS models with a 'stock" coil and this is because I am usually using them in low target-count sites searching mainly for older silver in the 4"+ range. Stuff that's deeper than modern change and might have been missed from early-era detecting. I am not saying that all silver and older coins are deep because I know better. It all gets down to site conditions, period of use, and causes that resulted in some deeper coins, such as fill material, or the most common cause of active use and leaf droppage and lawn mowing causing build-up. So, i the case of the Safari, I just happen to like the 11" Pro coil.

I've had Explorer XS, II's and an SE Pro, and used others, with 8" coils and smaller. Without hesitation I can say that the 5" SunRay and 5" Excelerator coils worked quite well in the very trashy sites, and Drive-Ins have to be some of the toughest to search. I have owned or borrowed them in the past, but the balance and feel of the Explorer/Safari class models just looks odd and feels 'different' with those dinky coils. I'm sure that if I keep a watchful eye I will chance upon a deal for a 5" Excelerator for the Safari. For now, however, I just grab the Omega w/5" if I hit heavy trash.

One of the things I like about the Omega is the very functional VDI numbers read-out combine with the categories hat suggest certain conductive values. Of course I like the lightweight and great balance, too, and the fact that it works different from the Safari. I like to have ample control over a detector and the Omega 8000 provides that along with good in-the-field performance. But for the same reasons I like the Safari.

I know some who think the Explorer II's, SE/SE Pro's and E-Trac's are better because they offer more adjustment functions and a different set of display information. I have enough years behind the operating end of detectors to appreciate the fact that the Safari provides us with very simple yet quite functional control. Certainly it was designed toward the "typical" coin shooter with the Coin and Coin & Jewelry programs and simple target icons in those two modes. But you can cross-save programs to get different Conductive or Ferrous audio performance, and using the Relic or All Metal functions you don't have to deal with he icons. It is really far more 'friendly' to use and quick to shift modes to analyze a located target.

I'm not fortunate to have many old drive-ins left to hunt, even reaching out a ways from where I live. One now is the site of a sub-division, another houses a carnival's trailers and rides and trucks and is just unhuntable. I occasionally pass one that is now being plowed and planted every year with different crops. But I still have fond memories of working them during some of my earlier days of detecting. Nighttime movies and daytime detecting in the late '60s and into the mid-1970's we didn't have the depth and performance of today's high-tech detectors, and often didn't use a discriminator. If we did, they were the old conventional TR-Disc. models.

Coins were not deep in that hard-pack gravel, but the mineralization factor was a challenge, as was the abundance of bottle caps. Fortunately, bottle caps were not the problems then with a TR-Disc. unit as they are with today's motion-based discriminators. Silver dimes and quarters outnumbered their clad counterparts in those earlier days. If you're working a drive-in that is still active and has had fill gravel/rock brought in, I can appreciate the challenge you face. I don't think I'd hunt it with a Safari using anything but a smaller size coil, and even then I'd just work what used to be the better 'hot spots' for locating coins.

Maybe it's a combination of age, the aches and pain and limited mobility, or the fact that there are fewer good old coins in proportion to the abundance of modern-day trash, but I seem to lose interest this past decade at hunting a lot of sites that are just too littered. When I do I like something small, like a 5" coil, and a detector that is fast at responding and recovering and provides ample TID info because I tend to cherry pick.

Anyway, good luck in your efforts there. Hopefully it wasn't worked much in the earlier days and you're going to luck upon some silver at the drive-in. With the Safari and the way the FBS models work, those higher-conductive coins will be "lumped" into a smaller range of VDI numbers, and I am sure I would quite probably ignore (or notch) a small band that included some of the most annoying and lesser-conductive trash as you did.

Monte