Desert Dawg

I highly recommend this Compadre for tot lot hunting for beginners to experts. It gets the goods. Thin gold Chains, etc, my compadre has the 5.75" coil. Its a great grab and go vlf. Not recommended for deep hunting, its good to about 6" depth.

I really like and recommend the GPX 4500, fair learning curve but once you got a handle on it, its a very very versitile machine. Does well on small gold with the new Elite and Evolution coils, my favorite coil on this machine is the NF Evo 14x9 its so sensitive I can get a #9 birdshot at 3" with no problem, my best nugget so far is a .55 gram at a solid 8" in medium ground with the 14x9. With my round solid 14" Elite Coiltek coil I can hit a 1.3 gram nugget at 12"-13" in mild to medium soil, I keep it simple with the two flat wire wound coils and a factory  DD 11" along in case of emi or wet ground.

I am an avid MXT user, am on my third MXT since 2002, its a MXT Pro,  I find the machine to be very adequate for my coin/jewelry hunting, using a combination of sound and vdi readings its a great jewelry machine. There are a lot of coils available to use on the MXT, I found that the 4.5dd Detech excellerator, 6"dd Detech excellerator, 5.3 eclipse and Detech 8x6 SEF are great coils for coin/jewelry hunting. As far as a nugget  machine it does work decent, I run mine in Relic two tone for nuggets and it will get a 2 grain nugget down to around 2.5" deep with the 4.5DD the vdi is pretty useless in gold country. But its only a backup machine for me when nugget hunting. Overall I think its still a viable very versitile machine compared to the newest vlf machines on the market.

I have and use a MXT Pro, it still is pretty much on top of the vlf pile for coin/jewelry for me, I have tried some of the latest machines and gone back to the MXT Pro every time so far. Most my park finds are in the first 5" of soil, not worried about the latest and greatest, its very good on gold jewelry due to the khz freq, even with the 5.3 eclipse coil I can hit 10" on a coin if needed. The gold mode works well down to about 2 grain wt nugget, is limited in depth due to vlf but is a decent gold machine in some areas. Very wide range of coils makes the MXT very versitile.

This Gold Bug 2 is very effective on grain size gold to 3" depth, working the manual ground balance in alkali areas can be tedious, but overall I highly recommend this detector for tiny gold cleanup on patches.