Hi Joebody,
I just got back from AZ and happy to say I was quite pleased with the Beachscan's response in the Gold Basin and the King Tut area. So, in answer to your question whether other PI's can be used on the desert the answer is yes.
No, I didn't find any gold this trip, but have two suspected meteorites. I say suspected because they are not the normal variety found at Gold Basin, but are two distinct "rocks" that are not native to the area. Whether they are meteorites will have to be determined by someone more qualified than me.
As for the operation of the Beachscan, it is very light weight and swinging it all day was quite comfortable and easy. As for its operation, it was quite smooth with little ground response over most of the ground which included the caliche covered hills, the drywashes and even over the "nasty" black rocks that cover much of the area. The machine was very smooth in the King Tut area also.
The only areas where I did experience a more distinct ground reaction is where the "black" rocks were embedded in the red clay. There I would get significantly more ground reaction. However, by going slow, this was minimized. Overall, the reaction was far less than I would get from a VLF in the same area.
Two items I will mention is I did get periodic false signals when I accidently clobbered a rock with the coil and when shoving the coil under a bush, I would get intermittent false signals when a bush limb would drive the coil rapidly to the ground. Both of these conditions were quite easy to recognize.
As for depth, I dug some really deep lead bullets and other junk primarily in the washes where they could get buried to significant depths. Most of the other junk I dug on the top and the sides of the hills was rather shallow simply because the bullets just didnt' get that deep. However, I did bury several bullets to different depths in all the different terrains and found I could easily detect them to very significant depths. (I did dig them back up).
My overall evaluation was I liked the machines I used. It was really nice to be able to ignore most of the hotrocks for a change. Outside of a few piece of basalt and a couple of strange greenish rocks, I didn't have any hotrock problems.
Searching the washes was also fun simply because the Beachscan would basically ignore most of the black sand and had almost no ground response in these areas. Once in a while, I would get a whimper in a wash ladened with black sand but this occurred only seldomly.
The Goldscan did ground balance well in all areas but if it were me, and I wanted a ground balancing PI machine, I would wait for Eric's new gold machine which, hopefully, will be out soon.
This new unit should be better balanced, have autotuning, and a much improved audio than the older Goldscan.
As for the Beachscan, it will not find the extremely small gold VLF's can find, but it can find deep stuff especially in places that give VLF's fits. Simply stated, the Beachsan would make a great "poor man's" PI gold hunting detector. No, it doesn't have ground balancing but the ground response was far less than I have experienced with most VLF's.
P.S. sorry about any incoherent sentences. I am still numb from the 13 hour drive back home.
Reg
