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Makro Gold Racer Or Minelab X-Terra 705 Dual Pack ?


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Hello everyone.

I'm a newbie looking to purchase my first detector. My budget is up to 1.000 €. I'm in Portugal, Europe.

I'm looking to primarily look for gold nuggets as I live in areas where gold has been mined before (granite with quartz veins abound around here. The soil is highly mineralized and several streams cut through these granite rocks). But as I also live near the beach and also possible historical sites, I would like to try my luck with some coin / jewelry / relic hunting. I would say 70% gold hunt and 30% coin/relic/jewelry hunt.

Will a more specialized gold hunting machine be able to also find coins? I don't quite seem to find that answer.

Preferably I would like a machine where I could switch frequencies without having to change the coils. But I guess that throws me into a much higher price tag?

I narrowed it down to the Makro Gold Race and the Minelab X-Terra 705 Dual. I'm slightly more inclined to the Makro because its coils can be submersible. Any other suggestions within the set of functions I'm looking at? Having two machines is no option for me, not only because my time is limited, and also because my wife might divorce me ;)) (unless I get rich doing it, that is...)

Thanks for your tips.

 

 

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The Gold Racer can actually be used as a coin hunting machine and is certainly hotter on lower conductors and small gold jewelry items. One of the nice surprises that Monte and I seen was the ability for the Gold Racer with stock coil to pass the Nail Board Test. It did it  quite easily.  It can handle a iron infested site well.  The only thing the Gold Racer gave up over its siblings ( Racer, Racer 2,) was some depth, you could not achieve the same height over the Nail Board test as what a Racer or Racer 2  machine could get with same size coil. But that's expected,  the GR is a 56KHz machine. 

Where you will be using it approx 30% of the time maybe for Coin & Relic hunting, I feel the Gold Racer will do a pretty good job for that.

When it comes to Coin hunting and sites littered with iron etc, I still would give the nod to the Gold Racer as I feel it will fair better over the 705 in those conditions.

In case you are not familiar with the Nail Board Test, here is a link that explains what it is and how it came about.

http://www.ahrps.org/_tipsAndTechniques/Nail_Board_Performance_Test.pdf

 

As far as detecting gold, that is out of my realm and will leave it up to the other folks to give you their advise on GR vs 705 for gold.

But I would not be afraid at all to use a Gold Racer part time as a coin & relic detector.

  

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How realistic is it to expect to find gold nuggets with a metal detector in your area? Do other people do it on a regular basis, or is this just more of an idea you have? It takes actual gold nuggets to set off a metal detector and if you only have very small gold a gold pan may be a better option.

If the main use for the detector is to find small gold nuggets I lean Gold Racer, and yes it can find coins and relics. For more general purpose detecting I lean X-Terra, especially if you will ever detect on a salt water beach. The Gold Racer can't handle salt water or wet salt sand.

Just so you know the X-Terra does have waterproof coils available.

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I have a holiday house in the mountains. Nearby there are two abandoned gold mines that were explored since the days of the Romans; my father worked on those mines until they closed in the mid 1950's. When gold prices escalated in recent years the area picked the interest of a canadian mining company (Colt Resources) that has been conducting drillings to check for economic viability of a full scale mining project. There are also several places along some rivers where gold prospection has been done in the classic way. So I have some confidence that there is potential.

I didn't know Minelab had submersible coils. Are they the standard, or must they be purchased separatedly? As a general purpose machine, is the Minelab 705 a better performer than the GR?

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It depends which X-Terra you buy as to what coils come with it. I posted the coil list above. The 9" concentric coils are waterproof. The 10" x 5" DD is not.

The X-Terra will perform a wider range of tasks better than the Gold Racer. The Gold Racer is a specialty unit, the X-Terra 705 a general purpose machine. The Gold Racer gets better performance on small gold but is only average at best on high conductor (copper or silver) coins. Everything about metal detectors involves trade offs which is why many of us have multiple detectors.

Understanding Your X-Terra by Randy Horton

Detailed Review Of Makro Gold Racer by Steve Herschbach

 

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From the seller's website:

Quote

The X-Terra 705 Dual Pack comes standard with both 9" Concentric 7.5kHz Coil and the 10x5" 18.75kHz Elliptical Coil. The X-TERRA 705 Metal Detector offers the ultimate detecting experience. Capitalising on the versatility of the range, the X-TERRA 705 can be used for gold prospecting as well as for coin & treasure hunting, simply by switching between available pre-programmed modes.

Based on what you said, I guess the 10x5'' 18,75kHz Elliptical Coil (the best suited for gold nuggets) that comes with it isn't water-proof.

I wonder if I can ask the seller to replace it and I pay the difference?

 

 

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The 9" 7.5 kHz concentric is waterproof, the 10" x 5" coil is water resistant. The 6" round 18.75 kHz coil is waterproof. If water proof is that critical to you just get the standard X-Terra 705 with 9" coil instead of the dual pack and then buy the 6" DD as an accessory. The 6" round 18.75 kHz coil will be just a tiny bit better on small gold that the 10" x 5" DD.

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"Anyone in the UK using a GR for hammies? I'd like to hear about it!"  Des D

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CORS: http://corscoils.com/index.php

and NEL: http://nel-coils.com/index.php/en/

also make coils for the X-terra.  From my web-searching it appears as though CORS has a much greater selection, including three at 3.0 kHz, six at 7.5 kHz, and four at 18.75 kHz.  Having said all that, I don't have any CORS coils (yet) and the only NEL coil I have is the 15"x15" DD Attack, and that one is for my Fisher Gold Bug Pro.  (Further, I've only tested it; haven't put it out in the real world yet.)  Others here should be able to give good feedback on these brands.

As far as not wanting to change coils to change frequencies, I don't see why this would be a big deal, other than the extra weight if you travel far from your vehicle.  I change coils in the field quite often.  And if you have a high-freq coil for native gold hunting and a mid- or low-freq for coins/jewelry/etc., how often in one day will you want to change frequencies?

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The Gold Racer is a fine machine that will do a lot when you get to know it, even though it is designed for gold. Will not change frequencies, and highly mineralized soil might be a challenge for it though. Others will have to comment about highly mineralized ground, but if it will operate on your ground it most certainly will hunt anything you want without worrying over changing frequencies. In wet salt sand it would be a loser, but in the dry sand it will be a killer on jewelry. Wet freshwater sand it does with no problem though some extra ground balancing may be required depending on what you have to deal with.

It is extraordinarily sensitive to small low and medium conductors, and the noise of small junk targets takes some getting used to, but if you can live with the noise, you can cherry pick in junk and find what is lost to others by the masking. The all metal mode works great for that. For hunting gold though, it is not even close. Where a high frequency vlf will run, there really is no contest.

I have a Gold Racer and use it as a primary detector for everything, though the way I use it is adapted to the strengths of this machine. Better general purpose detectors are certainly to be had, and if silver coins are the goal it is far from the best choice, but that is not a style of hunting that takes advantage of the GR's special advantages.

On ‎9‎/‎14‎/‎2016 at 4:29 AM, Ricardo P. said:

I'm looking to primarily look for gold nuggets as I live in areas where gold has been mined before (granite with quartz veins abound around here. The soil is highly mineralized and several streams cut through these granite rocks). But as I also live near the beach and also possible historical sites, I would like to try my luck with some coin / jewelry / relic hunting. I would say 70% gold hunt and 30% coin/relic/jewelry hunt.

For a 70/30 machine I would easily pick the GR if it will run in your ground, but rather than trying to switch frequencies to do other things it would be better to simply have two detectors. Nothing will be hotter than the GR on small gold, and for jewelry it is the best I have found. A body might find after some hunting that he might not care much about that 30% part. Where I hunt, coins are low value targets and jewelry is my choice. Once you learn what it does better than anything else, that capability can be adapted to any ground it will run on and find what general detectors cannot see. If there is competition swinging general detectors, the GR gives an edge they cannot match. 

I have had more trouble with my GR than any 5 detectors I have ever owned combined. A couple months of incredible frustration to begin with, and more along the way, but I stuck with it. Once it was sorted out, and the detector learned, it does more than I hoped for. Might not be a best first detector for that reason and a few others, but once learned it will do things no general purpose machine can. For me, it was worth the trouble even though the lessons were expensive in the early going.

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