Dreaded black sand

[Ravenuts]

I was wondering if anyone had any tips on how to get through black sand w/my MD. It gives crazy signals but I dig anyway and find coins.

[copenhaigan6783]

What would be the best detector for a beginner

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[Digger_O'Dell]

Ravenuts, what detector are you using? I seem to have gotten a lot of black sand experience the past few weeks and might be able to help. But, if you're finding coins, you are already on the right track. Typically if you are not set even close for those conditions everything will be masked out and your machine will be "blind".

Edit: I read back that you are using the BH machines, which are very basic and not very adjustable. Not much you can do with those to compensate for black sand, or for any mineralization in the soil for that matter since you don't have a ground balance setting or even a sensitivity setting that I can find listed in the manuals. Since you are finding coins, I would just keep doing what you have been doing as it's already better than I would have expected under the circumstances.

[Ravenuts]

LOL! yeah I figured that much. But, I switched from a 10" coil to a 7" and it worked AWESOME! Still disturbances.....but better. Thanks for the advice Digger.

[Digger_O'Dell]

No problem! Really glad it's working out for you.

On my first beach hunt i saw a long expanse of beautiful slightly off white sand and envisioned tons of coins and hoping for several gold rings, preferably class rings! I auto set the ground balance right away and it came up as a 7. Odd, usually in the 20 to 35 range. OK, I'll go with it. Figured I'm new to the machine and it knows what it likes better than I do. Cranked up the sensitivity to a bit above my normal running range and off I went. About an hour later I'm scratching my head because I hadn't gotten even one single blip of a signal. So out of curiosity I threw down a penny and detected over it-NOTHING! Dug down about 1-2 inches and there it was, thick layer of black sand! With my concentric coil I had to drop the sensitivity down to about 10 (of 30 max), and drop the ground balance all the way down to 3 before I got good signal.
Found out reading later on I should have used my high frequency DD for that situation, and I had thought of it but I was already a mile from the car and couldn't justify going all the way back for a "maybe it'll help" moment.