Down the beach with the SDC2300

[wooly]

We were heading down to visit my daughter on the Rosebud foreshore today so I thought I would take the SDC and have a play.
Unit worked great on the dry sand and a couple of the 5 cent coins I reckon were around 400mm deep.
Found that the unit worked great on the Dry and wet sand and also in shallow water of a couple of inches but as soon as I put the coil down around 18 inches it was making a hell of a racket. Also found that the coil felt very buoyant and took a bit to keep it at the bottom. I tried all setting including the salt settings but still could not get rid of the noise in water more than a couple of inches deep.

 

[silver]

Is the coil water proof Wooly ? 95c is still money,.. looks like a 5 to 1 ratio on the targets(bad to good),.. if it had of been a gold ring under your coil you would have pulled it for sure,... no lead there yet, so look to the gutters or the cutters when they appear.

Cheers and Beers.
Silver.

 

[wooly]

Is the coil water proof Wooly ? 95c is still money,.. looks like a 5 to 1 ratio on the targets(bad to good),.. if it had of been a gold ring under your coil you would have pulled it for sure,... no lead there yet, so look to the gutters or the cutters when they appear.

Cheers and Beers.
Silver.

Yep the whole unit is suppose to be waterproof to 3 metres. Total spendable was $3.70 and 1 teardrop sinker in there too.

 

[silver]

Maybe there are a lot of targets in under the water,... from the looks of your finds up on the sand(some of them),... maybe under the water has not had a lot of attention. I've walked away from noisy target areas before only to return and find that it's been multiple targets causing all the noise(shhhhhh) and found lots of goodies instead of the big junky targets I thought it they would be .

 

[Goldpick]

That looks like a typical PI beach hunt, same with my Infinium, lots of bottle caps and bobby pins. You do get spots in the water where a lot of very small bits of iron settle, so that can drive you nuts at times. Lots of bottles cap might indicate that you are working too far up the beach where a lot of the lighter gear settles, particularly lots of aluminium.

 

[Moneybox]

wooly what bothers me is that everybody seems to accept the horrendous noise these machines make and there's no way of adjusting it out.... Sure it finds a few targets just like you will with any detector but I don't think anybody can put up with that noise and keep their hearing working for long.

I was terribly disappointed when I bought Sandra the SDC2300 for an upgrade from her White's GMT and all she wanted to do was throw it aside and pickup the old machine that is lighter and much more user friendly. Not only that but she could see me there with the Garrett ATX happily swinging away with absolutely no noise unless there was a target.

I spent a lot more money and bought her the adapter and the Sun Ray Pro Gold headphones. We went out Friday for a swing at an old school site and found a bit of junk. She actually used the SDC for quite a awhile without complaint and enjoyed the afternoon. The headphones won't stop it screaming but at least your ears and those around you won't suffer.

 

[Redfin]

Hey MB, surely it is not loud if you put the threshold on 1, the lowest setting.
Mine is as quiet as a church mouse.

 

[mbasko]

Hey MB, surely it is not loud if you put the threshold on 1, the lowest setting.
Mine is as quiet as a church mouse.

Gotta agree especially now with my repaired B&Z booster - much better audio/threshold control. Even without the booster I wouldn't say that the noise is horrendous. Most complain that the inbuilt speaker is too quiet? They are definitely not as smooth in threshold as a GPX5000 but the threshold should be smooth enough & definitely not "screaming"?
MB it shouldn't be as extreme as your saying? Maybe try to catch up with someone else with one & compare it? The SDC wouldn't really be my choice of machine for old school sites, beaches etc. though. Goldfields are it's forte & what it was designed to do.
What threshold level do you run the ATX at? Sounds like you run it low or right down. If there is absolutely no noise I would say too low. You need to have an audible background threshold in order to pick up faint targets - important when gold detecting or chasing deep targets.

 

[Guest]

So are head phones a must on the SDC? And SDC users would set the threshold at 1' using a booster if possible?

 

[mbasko]

I don't use headphones at all if possible - haven't on any machine, hate the things. I have my threshold on 3 (below 1/2 way) then use the booster volume to adjust as required.
Before I set it up with the booster & had to use the supplied headphones I still had the threshold only set on about 3-4. Fairly low. The inbuilt speaker was far too quiet for my liking no matter what you set it on - so yeah if its was down to using either headphones or the inbuilt speaker I would go with the headphones (much to my disgust :lol.

The importance of having a good, audible threshold was highlighted to me again on Saturday. Very faint signal/threshold change, barely a murmur, on a large piece of quartz. Kicked it out of the ground & ran the coil over another side & the signal brightened up considerably. Without the audible threshold I most likely would have not heard any faint break/signal & missed it altogether. Maybe why it was still there?

 

[Bacchus]

Seem to remember this being discussed when you trashed ( with respect ) the SDC in another thread Moneybox , you can easily run the SDC in the manner in which you do your ATX by dropping the threshold back to 1 ! You will then only hear from your machine when you hit a target . From a gold finding point of view I could not do without a threshold as its the fine Pull of the threshold I listen for.