I picked up a brand new Garrett Infinium at Streeter's Treasure Hunting Supplies yesterday and so was eager to take it to the beach this morning to try it out for the first time even though low tide was at 6:45 am.  6:45 am was a bit early for me so I didn't arrive at Salisbury beach until 7:45 and I stayed for about 3 hours.

I have used quite a few detectors at the seacoast beaches and have always been intrigued about using a PI machine there.  I have tried out two other PI's there over the years.  Around 2002 or so I tried an old Garrett Sea Hunter XL 200, then a few years later I tried a DetectorPro Headhunter PI.  While both of these machines handled the salt water no problem and were deep seeking machines, they had nothing in the way of target ID or discrimination and so I ended up digging tons of trash and especially iron with them.  I've been wanting to try out one of the PI machines with some sort of target ID and/or discrimination system so when the opportunity came up to get an Infinium I couldn't resist giving it a try.

Now I have always thought that you need at least 50 hours on a machine to truly learn all of a machine's advantages and disadvantages so I will reserve my final opinion until I have that many hours on it but here are my impressions after my first 3 hour hunt.

First I have to say that Salisbury was pretty sanded in this morning so I wasn't expecting much in the way of targets and that was the way it was.  However like all PI machines the Infinium handles salt water wetted sand with absolutely no problems and gets great depth compared to the multi-frequency VLF competition so I was able to pull up some targets though most of them were aluminum.   Didn't get anything great so won't both to post pictures of the finds.

Now the thing that I was most eager to see for myself was how well the Infinium could tell targets apart.  For those not familiar with the machine it will make a high low sound (these are kind of a double ding sound) for low conductors such as aluminum, gold, etc. and a low high sound for high conductors such as bronze, brass, copper and silver.   Iron tends to produce a low high sound like the high conductors but can sometimes also sound a high low.   The Infinium does have an iron check feature where you use reverse discrimination to check if the target is iron or not.

For the most part all of this worked as advertised and I didn't dig any iron today though I did dig every target that the machine ID'd as non-ferrous.  I was very pleased by this as the other two PIs I have used were iron magnets.  

The machine got great depth as I dug several pieces of aluminum can fragments at depths greater than 15 inches.   

So far so good with this machine.  The stock coil is a 14x10 DD and there is no pinpoint or non-motion modes so pinpointing is a bit tricky compared to most of the other machines I have used at the beaches and I can tell there is going to be a good learning curve to correctly interpreting the sounds the machine makes (it also has proportional audio and the length of the high-low or low-high tones can convey additional target info.

I will keep the forum updated on how this machine does.  I work weekdays so can only get out weekends.  Anyway this machine is definitely built for the experience detectorist and won't be everyone's cup of tea but I think I am going to like it for saltwater beach work.