argyle

These are the things I'm concerned with as well Gregg. Digital mimicry of the MXT and small coil must have. Treasure Pro's were a rushed mistake when compared with ID units in that price range and lower. Really hoping these new units are as operationally as close to perfect as Whites should be able to produce, as I love the ergonomic look, digital, backlight/frontlight ect. Here's hoping...

Romantic Myth my ar*e Vic.... Sounds like you were playing in that fluffy NSW, WA and QLD dirt in those 2 years...

Straight shaft = great, should be very well balanced and ergernomic. Hidden coil lead and can be shortened for transport/carrying in the bush. Notice the new iSAT like the new ForsGold+, this Impact will handle and track through heavy ground much better than all previous Makro/Nokta units and should be a beaut gold detector.

Steve's quote.... ****Here is a sad little story. Coiltek came out with a 6" coil to work with the Eureka at the 60 khz frequency. The machine had always lacked a small high frequency coil which held it back from ever getting mentioned in the same breath as the Gold Bug 2 or GMT. I made noise about the need for one for years. Last year when Coiltek came out with the coil they offered to send me one free to try out. I had to inform them that neither I nor anybody that I know had a Eureka to try it on! To this day I am curious how the Eureka with that coil stands up next to the Bug2 or the GMT **** While I lost my interest to small gold many years ago, when I'm tired and need a spell I still like to take light VLF units out and hit shallow ground, or simply run them on a 'test bed day'. As NVChris mentioned, it was mad of Minelab to discontinue the 6" white coil made for the old 5 pins. Jeez they used to pull some small gold for us with the Dual Ace and the GT/FT even in 8kHz. That was the best small coil made by anyone at that time! Here's a direct comparison to that Coiltek 6" coil on a Eureka Gold running in 60 kHz (and an early model XT18000, not a late model 18000 as the 60kHz was a touch dull on them) to a Gold Bug 2 with stock and small coil, and a GMT with 5"x10" coil (I never liked the smaller 6x4 on the GMT so never bothered with it) To be fair, because the Bug2 wasn't made for fair dinkum hot ground and the Eureka platform was, (it doesn't matter for the GMT as it can be set up to cruise on hot ground) this is on nice Mild gold bearing ground in the Central Vic Goldfield's, firstly on a southern piece of flat natural ground adjacent to a surfaced area, secondly on a quiet surfaced area 3 miles away, and in a quiet dry not running old creek bed nice and moist after heavy rain. The Eureka and early 18000 and Coiltek 6"coil, when run with the correct Enhancer/Amp to hear the internal tracking working, will hit on flake gold, you know, speck gold we pan. The stock 10"x5" does it too. But don't use the signal settings Boost or Fine, they are both silly and upset the Tracking. Normal is cool. Very slow coil movement needed. But who really wants to detect speck gold, you can pan 10 times the amount in the same time. The Eureka's internal workings are far different than both the Bug and GMT. The Eureka in 60kHz with it's auto balancing/tracking (neither the 18000 or Eureka will ever track out a metallic signal, no matter how small) and full 'True' threshold 'tickles' it's signal into the ground, around every grain of sand and tiny speck of stone. As everyone knows both the Bug2 and GMT operate at a much higher gain output and with a less "truer" threshold. They like to 'spark off' at tiny metallic signals and can be swung at a slightly faster speed than the Eureka. They can both hit on tiny gold, the best being the Bug2, but neither can hit on speck gold an inch into the ground like the Eureka. So the Eureka hits smaller gold, that's fact, But, both the Bug2 and GMT will hit small gold deeper than the Eureka can, and hit it with more spark to boot, on these types of ground. I kinda like swinging a Bug2 mounted on a straight shaft in front of the handgrip, with the 14" elliptical coil on it, running noisy, swinging quick and riding the ground balance knob. Like the GMT, on hot ground too, but detest the unergernomic shaft that leaves me with a sore forefinger and tight lower back. Love the Eureka, but only on hot ground, there are far too many VLF's out now, both the above two and more American and Euro units that can really push a high amount of gain through them, especially when running a large coil, only over very mild ground, that they put both the Eureka and our PI 's to shame. On hot ground, real hot ground, the Eureka will still hit on the speck gold one inch under. The Bug2 won't operate here, the GMT can be made to cruise and will hit on pretty much all small gold the SDC can touch to the 4" mark. The GMT tapers off at this mark, that's its limit when the correlation of gain, threshold height and SAT speed are set to work this ground type ( Warning,, the GMT will and does track out small metallic targets, better to use that lovely manual GroundGrab and keep tracking off, it cannot track through hot ground anyway, gets confused and falses extremely often) To get off track a bit, the Eureka starts shining at depth when hooked to an 11" round in 20kHz, and sticks with all SD's in 6.4kHz with the equivalent 14"DD coils on both on any ground type, fingernail size gold and up. The three in the GP range kick it up a notch then on in, both on small and deep gold.

While Loner's are great to find, I must admit they can turn into a real hindrance at times if on the small side. Not only do you go over the immediate area with the combo your running, but you head in what you think is most obvious place for that shed, all the way to least likely. Then it's daily trips back with every detector combination you have.... and not another nugget or specie within hundreds of metres. The surface loners I don't mind so much, but any past the 6" mark to 10" mark really tick me off!

Hi John. We'll stick to the MXT (you have the All Pro?) and GMT since you own and use them. If you want a heads up on other brands with tracking, or units that will not track out a target, or units that have tracking which really do not track at all, give us a hoy. The ground changes far too quickly here and with too high a mineralization mix for both the MXT and GMT to operate in tracking, even on a single two foot swing. The tracking on both units is not a well engineered tracking system, period. The Ground Tracking on both can never be trusted on our fields. Deep whispering of actual signal responses (heck even close to surface good responses on small nuggets) will be tracked out third time passed instantly. At around the same time it takes for us to check non repeatable ground noise or repeatable hot rocks. Never sight the screen on either, for visual ID or Iron Id, they malfunction on our ground and all deep gold is relegated to Iron, not just by Whites units on hot ground, but by every detector ever made, Minelab coin units do it too even over fluffy dirt if the sig response is just at or slightly above a good detection level depending on settings used. The good news however, the really good news, is that the manual GGrab on them is spot-on, almost instant, and can be trusted more than your best mate. If you are running your Gain, Threshold Hieght and SAT speed at the levels that match and don't mess with each other on the hot ground you are on, you can detect quite a distance before re-grabbing again, which is so quick to do on the fly. Both are extremely underrated units here, and can handle hot ground and be worked extremely well by those that understand them. While I have a liking for the MXT pro and love my lower freq vlf's and feel the 14kHz is ideal.... I do tend to place the GMT well above it in overall hot ground performance. In fact my SDC has been relegated from two jobs in favour of the GMT. Your 2oz nugget scenario 8" under could have hundreds of different outcomes between the two units due to ground types. Funny enough coil for coil (10x5 or 14x8) on both machines, I'd favour the GMT even at the higher 50kHz, because I believe the units correlation of settings behave better than the MXT's do. (You'd be surprised how many GPX's wouldn't even murmer on an 2oz piece at 8" in certain ground) so don't ever get deflated if your Whites cannot.

My thoughts too.... It's a pleasure to go back actually 'listening' to the ground again as opposed to moans and groans of the GP, GPX. It took me well into the night after the first day to fully understand the ground balance reacting to certain and changing ground types. By sun up I had dozens of immediate local hot rocks and shiny liver slate buried five to nine inches in undisturbed ground to what I was calling 'running in' the balance to each particular spot. I really should have bought it (8grand) only a fortnight after they came out. But I guess I were tired of the preparation each set up time.

ha... me too on my little phone keypad. Since I had a 'keyboard update' come through a couple of months ago on this android phone, I've had major trouble with the spellchecker pre-chosen word thingy, starting with P words. If I type the word 'practical' for instance, it comes up with 'poo poo ractical'. It does it all the time. Anyway a few weeks ago I joined a Dating site. A lady said hi and we got chatting about life, really getting along, and she eventually asked me what type of woman I was looking for in a partner.... So I messaged back the type of gal I'm looking for as a long term poo partner. She never replied all day and I couldn't work out why until I read back my last message to her. She was a stunning brunette in her late 40's too.... What a shambles! Good thing I never invited her to a poo party anyway, she'd have probably rung the cops. No point in wasting a Zed Thread though. I was offered on cheap early unit by an old mate and after a couple of days use I didn't take him up on his offer. He couldn't sell it in the end, luckily he reckons as he grew to like it. So we are hitting soaked deep gullies here together starting Sunday. The only ground I haven't worked one on here yet as the rain has really been soaking into the ground last month with more to come this week. Really looking forward to it, armed to the teeth with local hot rocks for balance setting. Who knows, I may become a Zed Head yet...

Cundy....??? Nice one Steve...

How's it going Dean. There is something definitely wrong with your concentric coil I think. I've never had a bad XTerra coil, but have spoken to a few that had a bad coil. It can happen without coil error (CE) flashing up. The nickle and penny should be hitting in hard at nearly twice that depth with that coil. In the real hot ground I was in yesterday afternoon, the concentric coil would hit a low conductor 2 gram nugget at past the 4" mark in both coin and prospecting mode (on this exact ground the SDC cruises at 2, with a touch of falsing coming through a level higher) The ground balance numbers I never look at, they have no real bearing. I notice them though as I have to sight the - and + keys to manually balance, and for perfect balance the numbers will come in anywhere between the same you've been getting on both coils. Sensitivity anywhere between 16 and 24. I like to run the 705's sensitivity in hot ground at the stage where I'm getting ground noise in the form "thumps" which are very similar to the Fisher/Tek units on that ground (which are totally different to the ground noise of the Eureka platforms pips n pops) at least every four feet or so using 3 feet wide slow swings. It just let's me know I'm still running a touch hot for depth but not over the top to be annoying/maddening or allowing the processor to be swamped. Running in Coin Mode these thumps come in as -8 falseing. If you ever want a quiet-ride while prospecting, run the unit in coin mode all metal with the Sensitivity set to allow nonrepeatable -8 falseing coming in every 4 to 5 foot forward. I've probably knocked the 10x5 a little too harshly, as they are a very well balanced coil on the XTerra's and glide along the ground very nicely. Fantastic to use on rounded mullock heaps (tailing piles) and very srnditive on dead quiet ground. They can be a pain in very trashy areas though. One thing I forgot to mention to Paul also regarding Tracking. When you set the ground balance either manually or auto, the Ground Balance on the XTerra's are extremely forgiving and you can detect quite a distance without falsing or loss of depth at the pre-set you've chosen. On a lot of days I prefer to run them this way with tracking Off. Another thing you'll teach yourself is when to run the unit in a negative balance to negate ground when you feel it shallow. Same goes for a manually set positive balance in deep quiet ground or conductive moist hot deep ground. I find manually setting it this way rather than using ground balance Off-Set in Tracking, it runs a touch smoother and brighter (less processing again) If there was one thing I'd like to see on the XTerra it would be that nice instant GroundGrab button the Fisher/Tek's and GMT's have. Just to save a few seconds of time.

Yeah, coils aren't cheap. But in all honesty, your concentric is only slightly shallower than the 14.5" Coiltek and heaps easier to swing being better balanced. I'd only outlay money on the big 14.5" if you were consistently hitting deep conductive gullies after a good rainsoaking. You may gell well with a TDI and appreciate every aspect of them. I prefer the ATX and stock coil to them but hate the sound of them. But the SDC should keep serving you well. I've relegated mine for one use only now, which it excels at, and will never sell it because I spent a lot modding it to my audio specs. Re sale value of them here is getting so low they aren't worth selling unless your broke. Plus I appreciate the units capability for the purpose they were made for. But if you sat a TDI, ATX,SDC and 705 on the ground together on any given day ...I'd shoulder the 705 in a heartbeat.

Thanks Paul, I'm really looking forward to because I've been rained out all this week. Yep, the 7.5kHz stock concentric coil you have. Best coil on the XTerra, it and the 14.5" Coiltek in 7.5khz in that pic. The 18.75 kHz 14.5" hits better in air tests, but that is reversed in the ground where it counts. All the Concentric coils are waterproof, as are the 14.5" Coiltek's. The elliptical is only water resistant but you can still hunt in the rain with it. The older model 14.5" Coiltek had only the outer ring and a straight line down the centre and were very well balanced and never falsed. The new ribbed version in your pic feel more unbalanced and because of the thick oval shaped handgrip on the XTerra, you can get a sore wrist and elbow, even when hooking your unit up with a bungee. But they are top coils that do not false and in conductive ground are almost as deep as the Eureka gold with that coil on.

I feel for you ajr.... I know you'll always remember your friend Zoe. I had an old mate, a bull terrier x doberman - bull terrier x doberman . He was my best mate. I had to put him out of his misery myself just like you, I know how your feeling and understand the straight up no-nonsense morality of what we had to do to ease their suffering. 23 years ago, and I couldn't bear to love another dog again...

I'm heading out at 4am tommorow for two weeks solid detecting with a couple of 705's. Firstly on some mad ground, then onto a large surfaced area, the rest of the time along the side of 10 miles of railroad track 50 foot either side, as the tracks here are on the flat and follow the main old gold leads between old goldfield towns. 705 country due to the amount of junk.I'll be coming into town every 3 days or so and will post up a few pics on your thread here. My brother has a great video camera, umbrella and lights and top audio, I'll see if he can take a day off and do some filming. He know how to upload to utube, and it's always good to hear as well as see a detector working at it's best.

Always a touchy subject, mods, especially Woodys. Earlier mods on the SD's done by others were brilliant in the early days, Johnson's, Robert's and later the Sakina being the most advanced. Then again a stock 2000 has it's admirers including me for outright depth. Woodys mods are legit, and in no way bogus. They are however very theoretical and only produce improvement when set up on planted targets. Many, most, units modded by him become incapable of working actual ground, especially hot ground, that the original unmodded unit could handle. Very expensive to boot. The real world is so different to theoretical testing. I'd steer clear of any unit modded by him, and the anti filter, and the cheap feeling badly made battery and amp set ups.

Hi Paul. Good on you for going for the 705. They are the best prospecting allrounder ever built and oh so lightweight. Once you get used to the menu, and it'll come to you real fast, you'll realize the menu is so quick to manoeuvre with common sense precision that the changes of settings and the dialing in of functions very simple to use on the fly.. Probably the most important thing with the 705's is that the less processing the unit has to do, the more it will run with excact presision, depth and stability. This means any extra processing at all, wether it's using Iron Mask in Prospecting Mode, Ground Balance Off-Set during Tracking, any discrimination segment bin rejectment while in Coin and Treasure Mode, all the way to the frequency of the coil used ...will force the unit to behave below it's potential. All 6 XTerra's were made for the mid-freq 7.5kHz. The 18.75kHz and 3kHz coils are a 'fake' frequency that merely tells the unit to 'act' like that frequency, thereby messing with the processing again. You will always obtain a truer Ground Balance, Auto Tracking, Bin segmentation in Coin Mode an Tone ID, plus real in-ground depth, by using a mid freq 7.5kHz coil. And on all ground types from fair dinkum hot ground to the quiet tailing piles you'll mostly be detecting (quiet with the exception of hot or cold rocks) and every bit of mushy ground in between. Except for saltwater. Dry sand of course is fine. Thankfully the stock coil 8.5" with a nice fat 4.5" inner ring which you already have, the 6" 7.5kHz Concentric and 7.5kHz 14.5" Coiltek all terrain are ideal combos for the 705's. The Auto Tracking on the 705 is excellent. I never let the units Auto Balance before Tracking, and prefer to manually balance the unit then set it to Tracking. More often than not I feel the Auto Balance just doesn't get it spot on. And if you can manually balance it spot on, the Tracking will take to the ground better. When Tracking is initially utilised, make sure the coil is on the ground and swing very slowly for a few seconds as the Tracking works faster initially in that time, after a few seconds and with the right type of headphones or ear buds on you can hear the Tracking slow down a touch and bite into it's normal speed, that's the cue to start hunting at it's premium. If you ever break the balance by raising the coil, tilting it too much, or after a dig, it'll through the tracking out and won't recover to the correct timing in that ground as it was before the break of balance,..... so manually balance and set the Tracking on and go through the Tracking routine again. Once you have the Menu downpat it only takes 5 seconds. Very important if you wander off the tailings and onto solid ground. Any time you see the ground in front of you changing ie: coming up from working a gutter over onto flatter ground, or coming down off from a tailing pile to undug ground, ...always go through that quick manual balance to tracking regime. Same goes for really hot ground that changes dramatically every 10 feet or so. A bit like hitting the GroundGrab on the GMT or Fishers, only they cannot Track afterwards.... well the GMT can but it's untrustworthy. Using discrimination (or Iron Mask) is no good on all units prospecting, including the 705, as it can place specimens and nuggets into the same category as junk. On the good side of things, pinpointing junk is a breeze and it's quickly dug and removed by two fingers...as opposed to our SDC's which as you know, can take forever. In regards to the TDI comparison, I can run a 705 anywhere a TDI oz series can travel. Same depth, better pinpointing with the 705. Much slower swing speed with the TDI is needed (though the 705 requires a slow swing too) Most of us got sick of running big coils on the TDI due to the deadly slow response on deep targets, most of which won't even come through with a hint if that swing speed is even a tad faster than super slow. So we end up putting small Sadie's, 6"s and 10x5"s on them searching for shallow gold. Which places the 705 and mid freq concentric coil and 14.5" Coiltek much deeper. Forget what you know about concentric coils when it comes to the 705's, they handle hot ground well and kill the 10"x5" elliptical hands down for depth. The 10x5 is only more sensitive to small gold in air tests, as is the 6"18.75kHz coil, but in the undug ground the Stock concentric is just as sensitive. My thoughts on the 10x5 are they suck in heavy trash due to the 10" blade hitting/confusing on too many targets, and in the depth department they suck due to the elliptical shape coning back too sharply toward the centre of the coil midfield underground, causing a hollow spot. The Concentric gets through trash like a champ. Hope a bit of this helps any....

I didnt think the pink camo was a good idea though. And speaking with a few Dealers they just couldnt move them, even the girls didnt like them.

I reckon that maple type camo on the limited F19's are the nicest camo design, certainly the best ever put on a detector. As only the coil, unit housing and armrest were the only hardware camo'd up and the shafts remained black, it wasnt overkill by camo. I love the F19's operation, and the camo coil is great to look at and easy on the eye's when your staring at it all day long, much better than a whiteish coil - too hard on the eyes in the sun. Best armrest I've ever used too, Fisher should have placed an armrest strap into the package for us though,,, they got a bit skint on us there. I throw away most s rod shafts, and the short child size cheap one on the F19 got the boot pretty quick. Most units end up on a straight shaft. I nearly always wrap the rubbery cohesive horse bandages round the shaft, not the lower shaft, because the sponge feel makes the detector more comfortable when you shoulder it hiking in, or just carrying one handed. You can get them in every colour but I use black and yep ....ya can get em in CAMO ....

Yep, solely set for the ground conditions Dean, and in conjunction with the set-up you run, and any gain level change usually needs a threshold level change for clearer running. The threshold levels on the SDC are also dependent on how you set the unit up, wether it's own speaker, the type of headphones you run that you feel give you clarity at certain threshold levels, if you run a nicely suited Amp in conjunction with those headphones or Speaker, and the quality of Amp or Speaker in regards to white-noise produced by some of that gear. Some Amp's and Speakers certainly don't match the 2300. (You seem to be doing quite well with SDC anyway, but if you can, find the right Amp/Headphone combo so you can really concern the Threshold and Gain compatibility much better. Hunt up some old headhone jack Amps as they are much better suited to the SDC than most new ones on the market at the moment, and try some old 8ohm, 16ohm and 32ohm headphones with it, as well as new higher impedence phones) I have an old Amp connected to a speaker permanently set up on mine so I cannot collapse the unit. It suits me because of the miles of walking I do and I'm not tied to unit, but I would be better off with headphones. I run my levels of gain and threshold at the high edge of stability but never over. I never worry if threshold is a little too high on these units and prefer it, as long as I'm just past smooth I'm happy. They aren't a particularly deep detector anyway and I gave up concentrating on deep whispers long ago as the SDC's aren't exactly engineered to nice deep whisper responses. If I'm on ground that needs/warrants a gain of 2, I won't work that ground with it and prefer a couple of VLF's and a couple of PI's over it for better depth and the same level of ground handling ability at that level 2 gain. I like the SDC, love it sometimes, and don't think I'll ever sell it as I've spent time and money to set it up well and with the re-sale value dropping every month, but it does dissapoint me in a few ways.

Yep I concur here..... As long as you know the machine, "using what ya brung " will always beat using nothing. I remember foxholes, middle of winter, 1985, frostbitten toes for those that left their boots on against orders, ration packs confiscated. Cold beans woulda been a godsend Rick.

Just the opposite Steve, in fact I bought another new grey one last week. They are my favorite unit for dry creek beds after a day or three of soaking rain. I find the sef coils deadly on them and use the large 12" because of the depth achieved through that saturated quiet ground, or a moist gully that holds at least a foot of deep wash. But their tracking still sucks. I'm a VLF nut, not a PI nut.... they sh*t me to tears sometimes. I swear to god if another one of my VLF's outshines my SDC again I'll sell the 2300.

And it's that Ground Grab on the F19 and GMT that I trust so much Rick. It's instant and excact! Once you have the correct correlation between gain and Threshold running together on the F19, and the same with the GMT only with the height of the SAT speed dialed right, you can work some pretty hot ground! Unfortunently the tracking on the Whites simply will not keep itself anywhere near the precision of the GroundGrab, so most of us tend to detect with tracking off, and ggrab quickly when needed.

Those responsible for the terrific GroundGrab on the Fisher, F/T, Mxt/Gmt should be commended, most excellent! But those that designed the Ground Tracking, especially on the Whites units, ought to hand their certificates back in. As for First Texas actually ever designing something revolutionary, ain't gonna happen .... it's May 2015 and the units are all still like the Country music songs from 2000 onwards, it's all the same bloody song and the same detector. (As opposed to good old Country and Western music... now They new how to change it up a notch)

Maybe Dave J should have put one of the other six ways of ground tracking on the Lobo st. Because the one he chose wasnt worth a half a can of cold baked beans.

It astounds me that that the Chinese (even though most of our units are made there anyway) haven't actually made a really good decent coin/relic and a separate gold detecting unit yet, dirt cheap. They wouldn't even have to break any patent laws, merely just copy "near enough to" units like Fishers that other makers seem to be doing. To produce a good straight -out all metal Threshold based vlf must be the easiest of units to put together. Even a tone and numerical coin unit is simple.