Well, not quite on the beach yet. But it will be at the weekend.
I have a Quest V60 on the way and will be testing it on the beach over the next week or so. I am not expecting great things given the poor results reported so far. Although they have all been with the V80 but I doubt there is much difference in the firmware.
On paper the V60 should be amazing on the beach so we shall soon see. This is not a sponsored test by the way. I have paid for the V60 and as such I am under no obligation to give it a free pass. I will be telling it as it is, good or bad.
So just a quick update on the V60 test. I had it on the beach for a couple of hours last night and, I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised!
There have been several reports of problems with the V80 over the past few months, mainly to do with stability. Some users were reporting that the machine was unusable on the ground where they were searching. None of these have been on the beach though. Which is a bit odd because the beach is the number one spot to be using a simulataneous multi-fequency machine like the Quest V60 and V80. Of course not everyone lives near a beach.
It is early days and I have more testing to do. All I can say is that, on the beaches I searched, at the time I searched, the machine behaved impecably. It was completely silent on the wet sand until it hit a target. And that was with sensitivity at the default of 75 and a power setting of 4.
The display was crisp and easily readable even though I was not using the backlight. I only had my headtorch on. And overall the machine was a pleasure to use.
The only slight criticisms if you can call it that was the shaft could do with being carbon fibre (only available on the V80) and I think it would suit the smaller 9" coil. The 11" felt like it was not balanced well with the machine and I could feel the old arm aching after swinging it for two hours. At the moment the 9" coil is not available in the UK but I would certainly switch to that if/when it is available.
Like I said, early days but I have a good feeling about this machine.