Minelab X-Terra Classic Information Summary

[Steve Herschbach]

17 minutes ago, GB_Amateur said:

Or is it simply that the ground phase and its associated drift (due to changing ground conditions) can be a more important quantity when hunting native gold (the primary and intially only reason the new Gold Bug was developed) than target ID? 

That is the theory. However, I and most prospectors hunt by ear and I know if the detector is drifting out of ground balance due to audio feedback. That is one of the major reasons to have a threshold while detecting. So for me at least the ground phase is something used rarely if at all. The target id  number on the other hand I may want to eyeball with nearly every target, and squinting at the speedometer is annoying. I actually went with the F75 for a long time instead of the Gold Bug Pro and a primary reason for that was I preferred the target id number display while in all metal on the F75 versus the Gold Bug Pro. The drop from 19 kHz to 13 kHz is in theory not good but it really only affects birdshot and smaller targets. If you hate birdshot get the F75. If you like digging birdshot get a 19 hHz model instead! The only way I could hit birdshot with the F75 was to run the machine maxed out with the 3" x 7" elliptical concentric. The stock and other large coils will generally pass on it.

You would think flipping the display to put the target id front and center while in all metal would be a trivial task, but when I lobbied for it I was told it is not as easy as switching two wires.