The Hunter Gt Tests Ctx, Deus 2, Nox And Legend

[☠ Cipher]

Surprising results in nastyish soil. 

[strick]

Seen this last night. The fella set up the Nox as I would have...The results do not surprise me...as i spent most of yesterday morning digging deep high conductors with the CTX at an old ball field...I've said before that the Nox will go as deep as the CTX or maybe deeper depending on how well one is able to read the language of the machine. It just depends on the operator and the field conditions.  This was a good video. 

strick 

[☠ Cipher]

I was more surprised by the CTX doing as well as it did, and the Deus 2 not doing as well. I expected the Deus 2 would hit it if any of them would. I knew the CTX had the potential to provide a better ID at depth, but I expected the Nox and the Deus 2 to have a deeper tone, even if it came up as Iron. I’ve only had the CTX for one short season so far, and I’ve probably internalized too much of the malarkey from those who want to see it deemed outdated because they can’t or won’t swing it. The other day an old timer out my way referred to it as an “outdated big box machine.” I suppose you could say it’s ergonomically outdated, but I don’t agree that it’s an outdated performance platform. It’s goals in development were different. It’s a deep isolated target machine built just as the tide was shifting to an emphasis on recovery and iron commingled targets. 
 

In any case, I only pay attention to a few testers and reviewers. TheHunterGT has long been one of the few. His review of the CTX and many other machines are worth the watch. 

[Steve Herschbach]

CTX is a top notch detector, and far from being obsoleted by anything else on the market. What it does, it does extremely well. Equinox was certainly never meant to replace it.

Minelab E-trac, CTX 3030, Excalibur Versus Equinox

[phrunt]

The test results there mirror my results comparing the Nox to the CTX on deep silver coins, only mine are genuine finds not planted targets.  The CTX easily outperforms the Nox on them, I use the 15x12" on the Nox and 17x13" on the CTX so the CTX also has the coil size advantage but the results are telling, the CTX is a long way ahead of the Nox on these coins, both in ID performance and overall depth of detection.  In saying that until I started using the CTX I thought the Nox was awesome for the job, and it was, the CTX is just going deeper.

I don't bother using the 11' coils on either, I'm after depth so why not use big coils.

In my opinion the CTX is a long way from outdated, until something does better at it at these deep silvers it's still the best for the job.

[stevejhgla]

I saw that he left the equinox in fe not fe2.  I may be wrong but I think whichever fe setting you leave it on is the one that is used.

[phrunt]

yes, you're correct, he ended up doing his test on the Fe0 setting.

This was a recent trip to one of my field spots I've been going to for some time now with the Nox and other detectors, the Nox although doing better than all of my other detectors with possibly the exception being the Vanquish they both missed (or I did) a lot of the NZ threepence silvers as it ID's them the exact same as pull tabs and there is only so many pull tabs a guy is willing to dig in a sports field where you don't want to dig many holes.  The CTX ID's them more accurately at slightly different numbers to the common pull tabs giving you more of a dig indication, many I believe were just too deep for the Nox to ID them accurately too usually being approximately the depth of my Carrot, sometimes more.  Seeing in these areas I have to hunt by ID to dig as few holes as possible if their ID's were off they were missed with the Nox, but not with the CTX.  I hadn't had a day with more than a silver or two for some time as all the easy silvers were gone until the CTX came along, now the fields are almost new again but dominated by the silver threepence that I missed a lot of due to the pull tab issue.

A nice 9am until 11.45am hunt.   These were all the silvers from just that one morning.

[mh9162013]

I think FBS/FBS2's ability to better ID silver coins is a given (compared to MIQ). The problem is the sluggishness of the FBS/FBS2 machines, in terms of both weight and recovery speed (compared to the Equinox).

Honestly, I can live with the slower recovery speed of the E-Trac. But that weight...my shoulder now has what seems like a bit of soreness that hasn't gone away since I first used the E-Trac for several hours.

My shoulder would get sore when using the AT Max or Vanquish 540. But after a day or 2, it went back to normal. But ever since I used the E-Trac, I have a chronic shoulder problem. Ugh.

[Steve Herschbach]

I'll toss in the ground mineralization caveat Simon. Nox actually does better on silver in really bad ground than the CTX, or at least my really bad ground I should say. I really liked my CTX but just had no real reason to keep it due to my location, especially given the weight difference. But in any normal type stuff CTX has the edge for sure. The big coil puts it over the top, and is a real groundhog for big field coin and relic hunting. A harness situation for sure for a lot of people though.

[phrunt]

1 hour ago, Steve Herschbach said:

I'll toss in the ground mineralization caveat Simon. Nox actually does better on silver in really bad ground than the CTX, or at least my really bad ground I should say.

I'm not at all surprised by that, it shows that there is much room for improvement with FBS 3,  if they could improve FBS2 for ground handling, recovery speed, lighten up the detector and possibly improve small target sensitivity along with make it a bit hotter on gold targets they'd have a new flagship based on the FBS platform, I hope it's possible as the CTX made finding coins fun again.  I sure love my multi-IQ detectors a lot but I do see advantages of FBS detectors on coins especially in my soils at least.

I might be a bit bias towards the CTX as I love target ID's for detecting coins and the more accurate the ID the more I like the detector, the Nox is brilliant for me with target ID's, the CTX is just better, mostly because it's ID range has more information.

I prefer the CTX for silver coins, the Nox for everything else 🙂