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This is the exact reason Whites should have done a full recall. All dealers and distributors need to open every box and make sure the SAT goes to 8 and check for cracks. Whites does not give refunds and as soon as I get my replacement and make sure it's upgraded and works right I'll sell it at cost and move on.

When I saw a video showing the Makro Gold Racer recovery speed using two nails and a gold ring, it caused me to reflect on the various internet nail tests. Nearly all employ modern round nails, when these items rarely present issues. The common VDI (visual discrimination scale) puts ferrous items at the low end of the scale, and items with progressively increasing conductivity higher on the scale. The problem is the size of items also matters. Small gold is low on the scale, and the larger the gold, the higher it reads on the scale. A silver quarter reads higher than a silver dime, etc. All manner of ferrous trash including medium and smaller nails fall where they should when using discrimination and are easily tuned out. The problem is large iron and steel items, and ferrous but non-magnetic materials like stainless steel. Steel plates, large bolts, broken large square nails, axe heads, hammer heads, broken pry bar and pick tips, etc. all tend to read as high conductive targets. Usually it is just the sheer size pushing it higher up the scale. Detectors also love things with holes, which makes for a perfect target by enabling and enhancing near perfect eddy currents, making items appear larger than they really are. Steel washers and nuts are a big problem in this regard, often reading as non-ferrous targets. Oddball shapes cause problems, particularly in flat sheet steel. Old rusted cans often separate into irregular shaped flat pieces, and roofing tin (plated steel) and other sheet steel items are my number one nemesis around old camp sites. Bottle caps present a similar issue in modern areas. These items produce complex "sparky" eddy currents with both ferrous and non-ferrous indications. Many thin flat steel items produce remarkably good gold nugget type signals in old camp areas. Two general tips. Concentric coils often handle ferrous trash better than DD coils. A DD coil is often the culprit when dealing with bottle caps where a concentric coil often makes them easy to identify. Another thing is to use full tones. Many ferrous items are producing both ferrous and non-ferrous tones. Blocking ferrous tones allows only the non-ferrous tone to be heard, giving a clear "dig me" signal. This was the real bane of single tone machines with a simple disc knob to eliminate ferrous objects. You still heard the non-ferrous portion of the signal. Multi tones allows you to hear the dual ferrous/non-ferrous reports from these troublesome items, helping eliminate most of them. Certain detectors can also show multiple target responses on screen at once, like the White's models featuring the SignaGraph (XLT, DFX, etc.) and CTX with target trace. These displays show target "smearing" that stands out differently from the clean VDI responses produced by most good items. A machine with a simple VDI numeric readout can only show you one number at a time and the only indication you might get is "dancing" numbers that refuse to lock on. Usually though the predominate response overrides and fakes you out. This is where a good high end visual display capable of putting all VDI response on screen simultaneously can really help out. the bottom line is there is not a clear line between ferrous and non-ferrous, but an overlap. Many detectors offer a variable control to deal with this - the iron bias setting. Higher settings eliminate more ferrous, but also runs more risk of missing the desired non-ferrous. Conversely, lower settings reduce the risk of missing desired targets, but you dig more trash. I have been collecting these odd iron and steel items to practice with and to help me evaluate which machines might do best in ferrous trash. The main thing I wanted to note here is contrived internet videos with common round nails often present a misleading picture. Many machines do very well on nails yet fail miserably on flat steel. Steel Trash Testing Tech explanation from Laurence Stamatescu at Minelab:

Tesoro declined to keep sponsoring the Tesoro Forum on Findmall so it has been renamed the Relic & Metal Detecting Forum The explanation was posted here.

We decided to detect the high country with the idea that we would be out of the smoke from the Trailhead fire that was burning near Foresthill. We arrived at our destination with clean air and blue skies, yahoo! I started the day hunting the trashy areas with my discriminator. After a few hours and only digging bullets, I was getting a little worried about the possibility of a skunk. Next, I brought out the GMT. This is my anti-skunk machine! I detected an area that I knew had an abundant of small gold. Again, after a few hours, nothing but hot rocks and one bird shot. Wow, not looking good and now the smoke is beginning to fill the valleys. I really don’t enjoy the two hour drive home when I don’t have any gold in the poke. Finally I decided to finish the day with my 5000 and the Sadie coil. Normally I like to hunt with a large coil, but I had left that coil in my car which was parked in Truckee. So I detected my way down the mountain finding two nails and half a bullet, about 6" deep. It was now 4:00pm, and time to head back up the hill when I came across an area with a lot of small quartz rocks. I thought to myself this area looks really good. So I began detecting the quartz and immediately I got a huge signal by a tree. I thought to myself, must be a nail since it’s so loud. I scraped the ground with my boot and the target moved, so I knew it should be an easy recovery and probably trash. Well, after an embarrassing recovery that took way to long, I had a 6.9dwt quartz and gold nugget in my hand. The nugget was basically on the surface and had two friends below it. I detected the area only to find one square nail, but I think there is definitely more gold there. The hike up the canyon is never fun but the drive home was great and the wifee was super happy. I whinked the gold for three days and now the nugget weights 6.3dwt, but it’s much prettier now.

I was charged $32 to have the MXS shipped to me from my distributor that is just 258 miles from me. As a dealer selling a discounted machine there is not much profit in a mid range machine. The lower end machines are even worse. I always push the M6 and all flavors of the MXT's because they never had any issues and just worked. I thought the MXS was going to be the machine I would now push - but I cannot. I will wait to see what guts they put in the next MXS's frame. But for now I'm done with the MXS's.

Merger seems unlikely unless a Chinese company wants it. Their technology is old, their dealer network is almost gone. Heck, even Whites is not worth much to anybody else at present.

Fred I know what your saying. I don't why when it rains you get more of the same. Then you find yourself asking will it ever stop. The only thing that keeps me going and I say it again it's a great detector. The Best! Chuck

the social nazis will never stop they want to control every aspect of what you do and make you pay for the right to do so.

The Clean water ACT has created an entire legion of Storm-Troopers...give a "crat" rule to enforce and they will make Isis look like moderates... fred

Well written. Thanks for sharing the story. A hunt is not over until it is over. Mitchel

I posted here because White's is following this thread as well as consumers/users. Perhaps this could help them and their distribution chain communication. Also, they are just now open in the last hour or so I thought I may get some insight sooner posting. I purposely waited a couple months to add the line in hopes all units would now be current in all distribution channels but no...not the case. Sigh...

Interesting how white's is responding to this problem with the software and are not willing to do a "TOTAL RECALL" of this MXS Metal Detector, as this will affect the resale of the machine if they don't do a TOTAL RECALL who would want to buy a second hand MXS Metal Detector not knowing whether they had one that was fixed or not, certainly not me that's for sure. If a car company only fixed a few of their faulty cars that the owners wanted fixed instead of a "TOTAL RECALL" to fix the problem so to back up their BUSINESS NAME in quality built cars, a "TOTAL RECALL" would be the only solution to amend this problem to any problems a rising in the future.