Elliptical shaped search coils for beach hunting

I often spend the majority of my beach hunting time searching tourist beaches for jewelry. 

One of my favorite metal detectors of choice for jewelry hunting at tourist beaches is the Minelab CTX 3030

I sometimes prefer to use a 10 X 5 elliptical shaped search coil with my CTX 3030 in really trashy areas.

The main reasons I use an elliptical shaped search coil at trashy sites, are iron and rejected target masking.

Both iron and other non ferrous ( iron) rejected objects can put a damper on a beach jewelry hunt when using a VLF metal detector with a little discrimination.

After your metal detector detects a target, you are not going to detect another target until your threshold kicks back in. 

A great reason not to swing your metal detector like a golf club or a scythe along the beach. 

Low and slow search coil sweeps help with target recovery speed, the time it takes your metal detector to recover from detecting one target to the next target. 

Add an elliptical search coil and you can often detect much closer to a piece of iron or a rejected target than you would if you used a round shaped search coil of the same size.

You can also get closer to rocks on the beach, or to the face of a cut on a beach.

I always search cuts I know have already been heavily searched, making sure my elliptical search coil kisses the bottom of the cut.

Inside the water is another good place to use an elliptical shape search coil, especially close to shore where it is often hilly fluffy sand.

Searching over a ridged or hilly bottom using a round shaped search coil, sometimes causes chatter or false signals and obviously effects target depth crossing higher over the valleys.

Land hunters searching over plowed fields know exactly what I'm talking about. 

You can sweep an elliptical shaped search coil over, down and up hilly or heavily rippled ocean bottoms. 

These are just a few of the advantages to using an elliptical shaped search coil for beach hunters.
This 0.6 ounce chunk of platinum was recovered close to iron obstacles inside the water at one of my favorite water hunting sites. 

I use the underwater obstacles as jewelry traps, knowing other water hunters cannot detect as close to then as I can. 

An elliptical search coil is probably not going to be as deep as a similar size round search coil, but sometimes target depth is not everything to a beach hunter, especially to people who search trashy, rocky or cut beaches. 

Maneuverability can be just as good an asset as target depth at the beach, but you never hear the word maneuverability mentioned a lot in beach hunting circles.

If you can't get to a gold ring, you are going to leave it for another beach hunter who can.