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Revolutionary Detectors Over Time?


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For background, relative novice here -- I've messed around lightly with an Ace 400 for a few years, and escalated the hobby with the Equinox 800 and Nokta Legend a few months ago. Tons of fun so far, and I'm ramping up my game finding coins, relics, and [knock on wood] tiny gold. I've also discovered I like comparing detectors and exploring their relative performance/outcomes and features.

Anyways, question for the detecting veterans in this fine forum:

What have been revolutionary detectors for you, and why?

What changed the game after it hit the market? Best/worst quirks? What kind of history do you have detecting, etc.?

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For Me it was the first Computerized Non Analog detector I had, and that was a Whites Eagle 2.

With Analog the only possible target I.D was the sound, and some were good at giving different sounds for Ferris and Non Ferris, But with Computer Analysis of the wave forms it was now often possible to I.D not only that it was a coin for instance, but now often What Coin.!  Now that is revolutionary.  And Whites at it's best.

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4 hours ago, glacialgold said:

 

What have been revolutionary detectors for you, and why?

What changed the game after it hit the market? Best/worst quirks? What kind of history do you have detecting, etc.?

The Nokta Legend certainly ranks up there with  "changed the game after it hit the market."

Since the Legends inception , Nokta has addressed 34 changes.

34 changes, 4 firmware versions, plus a tool to help owners keep up to date, with the updates.

All this since its inception , a short time ago.

Legendary!

 

 

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If you are really interested in the hobby and want to know more about the evolution of the machines Inside the Metal Detector is a good read.  Amazon sells them. People will all have their reasons for what ever machines they think are ground breaking from their successes but end of the day the machines are very similar.

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I think the question was about a detector you have actually owned and used.

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Three come to mind.

For me, the first would probably be the White's 5900 Di Pro. Nothing extremely revolutionary about it, but it was revolutionary to me because it was the first detector that I owned with a Target ID. Even though it was analog, it was still a big step up from the previous machines I had used.

The next one would be the Etrac. I was a long time White's hold out (several XLTs, a V3i, etc), so this was my first Minelab. I had seen everyone else having really good results with FBS, so I finally gave in and tried it for myself. They were right! It was an outstanding detector which was not only a silver sucking BEAST, but also very easy to use. I liked it so much that I upgraded to the CTX 3030 when it came out, and I stuck with Minelab all the way up until this year when I swapped to the third detector on my list..

The Deus 2. I wasn't a huge fan of the original Deus for the type of hunting I do. It had some serious up-averaging issues, and to me, it just didn't work very well for hunting coins in modern trash. Then earlier this year I tried the Deus 2 and had a lot of success with it. All of the issues with the original Deus have been sorted, it has a huge selection of audio options, very descriptive audio, its deep, its super lightweight, easy to swing, and sniffs out coins like a blood hound. A great all around detector which covers a lot of bases.

 

 

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A really great question,have seen many changes in the detecting world and have had a detector of some sort since 1970 and even a few years before that made a breadboard detector with my brother,it worked but only just and had abysmal depth and had one of those single in the ear transistor radio earphones.Progressed as we have done and have used a fair amount of classics over here in the UK mainly Laser the UK Tesoro version,Arado 120b,Whites and many modern machines including Deus and Nox and Nexus and Pulse machines etc.

Still own about 25 detectors and at last count 50+ coils but still my all time favourite detector is my old faithful green T2 with the Sharpshooter coil on that i have owned since 2006/7,this machine has probably found me more gold/silver hammered and milled coins and artefacts as all my other machines put together,its about as simple as it gets to setup,very light and just a joy to use and it just works for me on my UK sites.

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Without a doubt for me the GPZ 7000, I went from struggling to find any nuggets with my other detectors at the time like the earlier GPX 4500 to coming home with nuggets virtually every time I use it.  Simple to learn and operate and just works, I've still not found a better detector at the job and I doubt I will for some time, there isn't a replacement on the market yet.

The Equinox was my other game changer, it's ability to ID deep coins in my soils was a dramatic change from other detectors I was using previously, it did such a good job of cleaning out my local spots of silver coins it only left a small few for the even better IDing detector which I purchased after the Nox, the CTX to get.

I'm quite new to detecting, I think I've ticked over 5 years now, I've not kept count and use my Equinox warranty expiring as an indication 🙂

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No revolution , but a list of evolutions :

My main detectors :

- 1998 Tesoro Silver Sabre Micromax 
- 2002 ML Explorer XS 
- 2007 XP Goldmaxx 
- 2013 XP Deus1 
- 2022 XP Deus2

Of course I have used-tested other detectors , but they were rather second machines , or for testing purposes ( Example : the ML Vanquish 540  )

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