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Hi Al, Welcome to the forum! "I needed a waterproof detector for floating the Salmon River here in Idaho and the AT Gold sure filled the bill." It is the extra features that matter the most when comparing these models. You need waterproof, then you need the AT Gold. The AT Gold has a great 5" x 8" coil that no doubt made the difference in your small nugget. I did at one point take a Gold Bug Pro with the 5" round coil, AT Gold with the 4.5" round coil, and X-Terra 705 with 18.75 kHz round 5.75" coil, and test on a small nugget. The result was so close on an in ground test it really made no difference which unit I used. The mid-frequency machines (12-20 kHz) are all so close in all metal prospect mode that I now have a phrase for the new ones when they come out "Just Another Mid-Frequency Detector". The Gold Bug 2 and GMT though are in another class.

Hi Jack, Instead of using the option to insert an image use the option to attach files at the bottom of the reply box. This allows you to upload images instead of linking to them. I use Safari on my iPad and I can't even see all the editing options that show up on other browsers. There is an app called Mercury Browser that allows you to set the "User Agent" in effect lying to the internet about what browser you are using. It is amazingly effective at getting websites to work that otherwise will not work on mobile devices.

"Is the ATX recovery speed faster than the Infinium? And in non-motion mode do you find yourself retuning the detector often?" I do not currently have an Infinium to make a direct comparison with so I am going from memory. In general I would say the ATX seems to recover from a target and hit another one slightly better than the Infinium. Large items do not seem to grab and hold the audio in the same way they did on the Infinium. But by VLF standards it still has a very slow recovery time benefiting slow, careful coil work. I have not used the non-motion mode near as much as I have intended and plan on really getting on to using both it and the factory reset un-ground balanced modes more in the near future. The ATX holds steady in non-motion mode when sitting still so there is no inherent drift going on. Any retuning would be strictly in response to changing ground conditions, and the one beach I gave it a go on seemed to allow non-motion to be used with little need to retune. However, I also noted no major depth advantage in that short little run. In other words, the non-motion mode did not blow me away but I think that is because the ATX motion mode is so good. This is really making me want to get another Infinium to be better able to make direct comparisons. But given that the ATX is basically better in every way except physically it is hard to justify. All I would be doing is getting a better handle on quantifying just how much better the ATX is than an Infinium, and right now I am plenty happy with just knowing it is better! The ATX does frustrate me though. When I look at it as a waterproof detector it is a home run. When I look at it as a prospecting detector I sense this hot machine trapped in an ugly body. Given that most detector prospectors are in arid regions a waterproof housing and waterproof connectors makes no sense. A machine designed purely for prospecting or at least dry land use would really be sweet. So on one hand I get really excited by the ATX and on the other it is more a case of what could be.

Just remember that ground balance is just another type of discrimination. You are discriminating out the particular ferrous type reading of the ground itself. Now as Paul has pointed out ground mineralization tends to pull target id lower, so almost any non-ferrous item will get identified as ferrous if the signal is weak enough. Not only can gold read just like a little piece of ferrous trash, but some gold reads just the same as a hot rock. The more aggressive the ground balancing, the more chance of some gold also getting tuned out. What I am saying is be cautious with that ground balance window and keep it as conservative as possible.