The Garrett AT Gold Metal Detector for Relic Hunting.                        Watch Video of this hunt below

After receiving my Garrett AT Gold detector just before Christmas 2011, I quickly went to an area where it has the hottest ground I can find in Oregon that only Pulse Induction detectors work well on. The AT Gold performed better there than my Garrett Scorpion and did better in Discriminate mode than in all metal. Now knowing the limit of my AT Gold on crazy hot iron infested ground I was ready to test it on some Civil War Relic Hunts in Georgia on my Christmas visit there.

I went to several of my usual spots near the Battle of Gilgal Church which still yielded some nice relics in the past. As targets were getting scarce I had plenty of time to see how the Garrett AT Gold performed in the hot Georgia red clay. Although this ground was not as hot as ground I have encountered in California and Oregon it did have its hot pockets to contend with. I found with the Fast Track ground balance function worked quite well and fast at the press of a button and about 4 pumps of the coil it was done!

I did this fairly frequently in the changing ground where this Battle and encampments took place. The ground ranged on the VDI scale from a low of 35 to a high of 84. I also came across pockets of large pieces of quartz rock atop of a hill where a Confederate trench was constructed which contained a good deal of iron minerals which set off the detector. As per my test in Oregon revealed, I set the AT Gold in Disc mode and scanned the quartz rock and got no signal telling me that the quartz were hot rocks. I know that there were no gold in this quartz as there is no history of placer or load gold in that particular area plus I had tested it years ago with mortar and pestle.

Now knowing that the AT Gold performed very well in Georgia while hunting almost exclusively in the all metal mode except testing hot rocks in disc

mode, I had more confidence to find those small and missed relics from previous hunts. And on my first swing at site number 2 I found 3 percussion caps in a square yard area just about 15 feet from getting out of my car. In this previous site I had found a US button from a soldiers uniform, I had high hopes for more. However I did not find anymore of those but I did find several more percussion caps as well as a few shot bullets and a small pistol bullet. No target was deeper than 4-5 inches.

Perhaps the reason I found so many percussion caps using the AT Gold this trip might be because they are small and made from brass and are low conductors, which makes it ideal to find them using the higher frequency of the Garrett AT Gold, operating at 18 kHz. It sure did bang on them hard and with crisp audio. A detector operating at 7 kHz or lower and in the discriminate mode might have missed these small caps or signaled them as iron, hence the possibly of them not being dug previously.

My settings on the AT Gold that I used varied as I was testing the machine on as many possibilities I could come up with. I usually hunted in the all metal mode sensitivity at 7 of 8. Threshold at 00-05. I tested with iron audio on and off and it worked well, but must one must get use to it as a small low conductive item can "sound" like iron, you must sometimes look at the meter to tell you what VDI number it shows. If it shows a higher number than you have set as your highest number for the iron audio then it is possibly not iron even though you might here the slight iron grunt as it still might be within the 1-40 iron range. It is good to dig all targets to get used to what the iron audio is telling you for your first few hunts, then you will more confident later to judge whether the target is worth digging as per what the AT Gold is telling you.

Regarding the Ground Balance Window feature while Relic hunting I found it to smooth out the small pockets of hotter red clay that are present while scanning without the need to ground balance frequently. I had it set on the stock setting of 2 mostly. It defiantly does work as is useful. I did some further testing on this feature when back in Oregon while nugget hunting and I found that it seems like a disc mode mixed with an all metal mode when engaged. It did seems and bit more noisy as it was trying to adjust to the ground in the window I set it at. I cut it off totally for the first time and it was a bit more stable in ground that is very consistent in it's ground balance settings. It operated like a normal VLF without the window feature.

I did find my first gold nugget on that trip and it was the smallest nugget I had ever found at, I'm guessing, a .05 grams, Unfortunately I dropped the nugget while trying to get it out of my camera bag to show my buddy, it went back into the river it came from. Oh well…more nugget hunting reviews of the AT Gold coming in the future. I did not get to totally submerge to AT Gold in the river to test out it's full water proof to 10 feet feature, but I did get it wet a bit and had no problems at all. I was quite confident being around the river while detecting with it.

In conclusion, I found the Garrett AT Gold a pleasure to use while Relic Hunting and it was light enough to swing all day long. It is a very deep machine from what I can tell, the ground balance features work as they should and I never had a problem with the ground being to hot to hunt in as the detector had all the adjustments necessary to deal with it. I finally found my favorite high frequency metal detectors for Relics and Nuggets.

Try one out folks, If you like the Garrett AT Pro, the AT Gold, having a true all metal mode, is a fantastic member of the Garrett AT Series detectors.

Tags: Garrett AT Gold for Relic Hunting, Best Metal Detector for Relic Hunting, Garrett AT Gold Review, Mashdetectors for Relic Hunting

Watch the video below of me using the Garrett AT Gold in Georgia during a Relic Hunt