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


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20 hours ago, phrunt said:

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 🙂

Don’t get me wrong, I think the CTX is fab. But like everything, ground conditions rules, and tilts the favor this way or that for many detectors and situations. It kind of makes all this testing comparison stuff a bit silly at times, as what works well here does not work well there, and vice versa. All that matter is what works well for YOU, in YOUR GROUND, on YOUR TARGETS. :smile:

The fact is all these detectors are great. We have a full suite of excellent options available, all that will serve quite well in the hands of any competent detectorist. Much of this stuff, in my opinion, boils down to arguments over how to split hairs.

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20 hours ago, phrunt said:

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

I agree. I bought the CTX as an isolated target and field machine, and the first thing I did was replace the 11” coil with the 13”x17”. It hasn’t come off since and probably never will. It is admittedly cumbersome to swing, but I also have a well made harness that works very well if I need it. I’m very happy with my CTX and see no replacement for it, as Steve said.

I’m over the moon with the selection of detectors I have now. Deus II with 9” coil just arrived yesterday and with that I feel now like I have all my VLF and multifrequency bases covered. 

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I think that's why my mindset has changed from always wanting the next new great thing to letting it settle in and see if I really do want it and I'm glad I've been doing that so far, I've not been overly excited about anything new lately.  The technology seems so tapped out that the differences for me especially in my milder soils with not huge amounts of junk are so minimal between detectors, often it comes down to which has the most suitable coil or offers the better cherry picking target ID's which really is a luxury that can be done without.    If the new models did something better that I particularly wanted then I'd see benefit in them.

My ears go numb these days when the new detector comes along and finds many targets in "thrashed hunted to death ground"  The default saying for any new product.

If I branched out from the old sports fields into other grassed areas where I was more comfortable digging holes my Ace 300i with it's Nel Tornado would be a fantastic detector that would get me most of the targets I'd want to get and it's a real depth demon but that further explains why these video tests people do even though they're valid for them maybe completely different results for someone else.

I can put a video up of the Ace 300 beating the Equinox on a deep silver coin by using the Tornado on it and the 11' on the Equinox,  then someone in bad soils tries the same experiment and the Equinox will win by a mile as the user is able to ground balance it and it's a detector that naturally handles bad soil better than the Ace.

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20 hours ago, phrunt said:

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.

Just how deep are you talking about? What are your Equinox settings if I missed them? Also apples to apples 11" vs. 11" what are your results?

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It seems like the way Geotech describes what the CTX and other FBS machines are doing is closer to a hybrid pulse induction/vlf signal than the other multifrequency machines, firing it’s frequencies in sequential ratios and measuring half life etc. 

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It was an example, but yes my Ace has beaten my Equinox on a deep silver threepence coin in that situation.

Apples to Apples? A cheap little Ace 300 vs an Equinox 800 is never going to be Apples to Apples.  Everything should be in favor of the Equinox.  Putting a slightly bigger coil on the Ace shouldn't be scary to someone so confident in their Equinox abilities 😉

The reason I'm so confident in this is I have a little coin garden setup in my yard, I'd run my Nox over the area so many times and my other detectors at the time too, there are a mixture of coins I'd dug in and old roofing nails from when my roof was replaced years ago.  One day a couple of years ago I fired up my Ace with Tornado 13" coil and was messing around detecting with it checking the targets in my little test garden, it hit a good silver coin target signal notch, I tested the target with my Nox, it ID'd it as junk, so I thought my Ace must be falsing.  It wasn't one of the coins I'd buried.

I decided I'd dig it up knowing my wife will kick my butt for digging up my front yard and out popped a little very deep silver threepence, a fair bit deeper than my Carrots length.

I've since repeated the test by digging a hole elsewhere outside of my yard and putting a threepence as deep as the Nox will detect it reliably and the Ace hits it fine so I went deeper and the Ace continues to ID it when the Equinox losing it.  Yes, the Ace has a 13" coil and the Equinox an 11" in this situation.  In the right ground conditions these cheap entry level type machines are good machines and someone can do really well with them.  The Ace 250 had a massive following years ago in parts of Europe especially Russia I think with their mild soils and the 13" Tornado was the coil of choice for them, which is why I bought the Tornado for mine and I can see why they liked the combination for deep targets.

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13 minutes ago, phrunt said:

It was an example, but yes my Ace has beaten my Equinox on a deep silver threepence coin in that situation.

Apples to Apples? A cheap little Ace 300 vs an Equinox 800 is never going to be Apples to Apples.  Everything should be in favor of the Equinox.  Putting a slightly bigger coil on the Ace shouldn't be scary to someone so confident in their Equinox abilities 😉

The reason I'm so confident in this is I have a little coin garden setup in my yard, I'd run my Nox over the area so many times and my other detectors at the time too, there are a mixture of coins I'd dug in and old roofing nails from when my roof was replaced years ago.  One day a couple of years ago I fired up my Ace with Tornado 13" coil and was messing around detecting with it checking the targets in my little test garden, it hit a good silver coin target signal notch, I tested the target with my Nox, it ID'd it as junk, so I thought my Ace must be falsing.  It wasn't one of the coins I'd buried.

I decided I'd dig it up knowing my wife will kick my butt for digging up my front yard and out popped a little very deep silver threepence, a fair bit deeper than my Carrots length.

I've since repeated the test by digging a hole elsewhere outside of my yard and putting a threepence as deep as the Nox will detect it reliably and the Ace hits it fine so I went deeper and the Ace continues to ID it when the Equinox losing it.  Yes, the Ace has a 13" coil and the Equinox an 11" in this situation.  In the right ground conditions these cheap entry level type machines are good machines and someone can do really well with them.  The Ace 250 had a massive following years ago in parts of Europe especially Russia I think with their mild soils and the 13" Tornado was the coil of choice for them, which is why I bought the Tornado for mine and I can see why they liked the combination for deep targets.

 I had a friend running a bounty hunter cranked up to near max gain find a half dollar near the 16" mark in an iron infested back yard. Crazy luck does happen and he was never able to have success like this again with that machine.

 

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Yes, I'm by no means saying the Ace is better than the Nox, I'm saying given the right conditions with the 13" coil it can pass the Nox and 11" coil with depth on a silver coin, I don't know if it's because the Ace has quite a low frequency which helps on the deep silvers, or if its slower recovery speed helps, it certainly seems like it has a slow recovery speed.  I could probably tweak up the Nox to match it by fiddling with settings, this is just in Park 1 with the sensitivity cranked up, and the Ace in default coin mode with sensitivity cranked up.  

My whole point is it's likely the coil being bigger making the Ace do so well, If I put the bigger 15x12" Coil on the Nox then it pulls ahead and beats the Ace with 13" coil.   For me in this situation the coil size means more than the detector used for the depth.

It's other features like the Target ID stability and big coils that keep me picking up the Nox/CTX.  If I was a dig it all kinda guy and on a budget I could just use an Ace with Tornado coil and do very well in my milder soils in a park/field type situation.  I say dig it all as the Ace 350 I like the most for silver coins only has 12 target ID segments, a lot of targets fall into the same segments so you can't overly cherry pick like you can on the other detectors.  The Ace 300 I have has target ID's and they're pretty stable, not quite at Nox/CTX level though.  For me it really comes down to bigger coils, I'd like to try a 15" Nel or something on an Ace, I think it'd do so well here.  It's hard to justify buying a coil that costs more than the detector did 🙂

I think too much focus is put on the latest and the greatest detectors when someone can do very well in the right conditions with a much cheaper detector.  Entry level detectors these days are pretty awesome machines.

It's not all about the magic wand, the Wizard swinging it has a lot to do with being successful.

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4 hours ago, phrunt said:

Yes, I'm by no means saying the Ace is better than the Nox, I'm saying given the right conditions with the 13" coil it can pass the Nox and 11" coil with depth on a silver coin, I don't know if it's because the Ace has quite a low frequency which helps on the deep silvers, or if its slower recovery speed helps, it certainly seems like it has a slow recovery speed.  I could probably tweak up the Nox to match it by fiddling with settings, this is just in Park 1 with the sensitivity cranked up, and the Ace in default coin mode with sensitivity cranked up.  

My whole point is it's likely the coil being bigger making the Ace do so well, If I put the bigger 15x12" Coil on the Nox then it pulls ahead and beats the Ace with 13" coil.   For me in this situation the coil size means more than the detector used for the depth.

It's other features like the Target ID stability and big coils that keep me picking up the Nox/CTX.  If I was a dig it all kinda guy and on a budget I could just use an Ace with Tornado coil and do very well in my milder soils in a park/field type situation.  I say dig it all as the Ace 350 I like the most for silver coins only has 12 target ID segments, a lot of targets fall into the same segments so you can't overly cherry pick like you can on the other detectors.  The Ace 300 I have has target ID's and they're pretty stable, not quite at Nox/CTX level though.  For me it really comes down to bigger coils, I'd like to try a 15" Nel or something on an Ace, I think it'd do so well here.  It's hard to justify buying a coil that costs more than the detector did 🙂

I think too much focus is put on the latest and the greatest detectors when someone can do very well in the right conditions with a much cheaper detector.  Entry level detectors these days are pretty awesome machines.

It's not all about the magic wand, the Wizard swinging it has a lot to do with being successful.

When I said apples to apples I actually meant Nox/CTX both with 11" coils. Not the ACE. You said these were clean spots and mild soil. Have you tried lowering the recovery down to 2 or 3 on the Nox? Have I not read anything faster than 3 is just done with the audio on the Nox? 

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3 minutes ago, longbow62 said:

When I said apples to apples I actually meant Nox/CTX both with 11" coils. Not the ACE. You said these were clean spots and mild soil. Have you tried lowering the recovery down to 2 or 3 on the Nox? Have I not read anything faster than 3 is just done with the audio on the Nox? 

I honestly don't remember, it's been a long time now since I compared the Nox to the CTX on a deep silver coin in the wild before digging, I know I spent quite a bit of time fiddling around with the Nox to see if I could improve it's performance on the deep little silvers when I was comparing them.  I see no point me doing it with 11" coils as I have no intentions of using 11" coils to look for these deep silvers, so the closest apples to apples I'll be comparing for my needs is the 17x13" vs the 15x12", if Minelab won't provide a bigger coil for the Nox well then that's it's deepest apple.  I would buy the Coiltek 15" if anyone would confirm it's deeper but that doesn't seem to be the case unfortunately, even a semi local guy with one said he wasted his money as it was no deeper than the 15x12" just a lot heavier with no real extra ground coverage.  It seems on detectors there is a certain coil size that maxes out their depth, anything bigger than that size adds no depth at all.

I'll test 11" vs 11" on a buried coin and some point soon and see if lowering my recovery down helps at all but I'm sure I would have done that at the time.  My soil is very mild, on my T2 the mineralisation bar is nothing, and detectors like it just run, I don't need to ground balance them although I do to try squeeze a bit more performance out of them.

One thing I've noticed that seems to be quite different between the Nox and the CTX is the Nox will hit for example a 7" coin easily, it will hit an 9" coin OK, if you go back to the 7" coin and lift the coil 2 inches off the ground you lose the signal even though it detects it at 9" fine in the ground. It likes the coil to be very close to the soil,  The CTX doesn't do this on that same 7" coin you can lift the coil 3 or 4" off the ground and the target signal is fine with a good ID.   I'm not sure why this is, but it makes the Nox less effective for hunting in longer grass as swinging over grass creates this same air gap that hinders performance.  I believe that's why the T2 and F75 have a boost mode, I've not got a boost model T2, mines the Green without Boost, I'd like to try boost though and see if it works.  Perhaps its something that will be improved on the Equinox 1000.

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