My buddy and I went out yesterday and hit a few parks, nothing great but he did find a nice 1906 V nickel, pretty cool. Well bored and no other places to hunt at the moment I asked him if he wanted to do a little testing, he said sure. He just got interested in metal detecting last year and I let him borrow one of my AT-Pro's to hunt with. Actually the one he hunts with I picked up for $400 and am letting him make me payments to buy it....but told him I'm holding on to it until fully paid for. Anyhow, I ran home and picked thru some of my gold and silver rings. I also grabbed my XP Deus and both coils. So we headed done to the beach and found a clean area to do the testing. This was a test to show him the numbers and sounds of good targets in the sand as he is complaining of not finding gold...ain't we all. 
So we started off shallow, 2"...then 4", then 6"...the numbers and sounds were exactly as I am used to. Now when we got to 8" and 10"...the teacher learned a lesson. The numbers were all over the place. Also I had 2 AT-Pro's with us...one running the stock coil and one running the 5X8DD. Besides the numbers being all over the place, the 2 coils showed different numbers. The small coil showed higher numbers. 2 other observations we made, the small coil though it did hit the 10" tiny gold ring (2.98gr 10k gold) it was struggling to hit it, and even though the numbers were all over both coils showed very accurate depth readings. So I myself learned a few things and reassured myself that the AT-Pro's in the sand are hitting deeper targets....I just need to pay more attention to the depth as I have probably been passing over good targets because of the crazy jumping numbers. That ting gold ring at 10" jumped around from 38 to 77....wow that's pretty variable!! So I think I will be doing this test again and videotape it, it was pretty interesting and a good learning lesson.On a side note, we tried 12" and none of the 3 machines would hit it. One last interesting thing was my XP Deus, test both coils hit the same targets...but interestingly it accurately gave the same numbers at all depths 2" to 10".
So we started off shallow, 2"...then 4", then 6"...the numbers and sounds were exactly as I am used to. Now when we got to 8" and 10"...the teacher learned a lesson. The numbers were all over the place. Also I had 2 AT-Pro's with us...one running the stock coil and one running the 5X8DD. Besides the numbers being all over the place, the 2 coils showed different numbers. The small coil showed higher numbers. 2 other observations we made, the small coil though it did hit the 10" tiny gold ring (2.98gr 10k gold) it was struggling to hit it, and even though the numbers were all over both coils showed very accurate depth readings. So I myself learned a few things and reassured myself that the AT-Pro's in the sand are hitting deeper targets....I just need to pay more attention to the depth as I have probably been passing over good targets because of the crazy jumping numbers. That ting gold ring at 10" jumped around from 38 to 77....wow that's pretty variable!! So I think I will be doing this test again and videotape it, it was pretty interesting and a good learning lesson.On a side note, we tried 12" and none of the 3 machines would hit it. One last interesting thing was my XP Deus, test both coils hit the same targets...but interestingly it accurately gave the same numbers at all depths 2" to 10".
