jasong

Is that something you can share once you find out? Or official Fisher business?

I'm just curious, anyone have a rough idea of what it would cost to buy out White's patents, trademarks, tooling, supplies and other business related stuff aside from their real estate if they did shut down? At this point, it's too late in the game with too many competitors moving the right direction already for me to be interested alone. But I'm just curious, because 5-10 years ago I might have given it some serious consideration, and having not been a business person in my lifetime with experience in such sales, I'm curious what such a purchase would cost?

Yep, that last name sounds familiar now that you mentioned it, I'm sorry to hear he died. He was the first person I met who also detected. I actually met him a number of times and I would run into both him and/or his buddy fairly often since I detected in the mornings mostly too (I couldn't risk looking uncool detecting as a 20-something in front of the ladies during class hours haha). His buddy actually used a Fisher machine, go figure. I had an Ace 250 (my first detector), which had just been released that month, and Bob saw me detecting with it and came over to look at it. He gave me his personal Bullseye pinpointer, said he or someone at White's had modified it to go deeper and it was one of a kind. Largely because of talking to him I bought a GMT, my first gold machine. Serendipitously, that GMT ended up a decade later making it's way to another White's tester, Reg Sniff who I sold it to, and who's brother I know from when I moved from Oregon to Colorado. Circle of life.

I both called on the phone, and I visited the front office in person later too, both with identical results. I didn't demand a higher up though, I was young at the time and took people at face value. I had met a White's product tester on the OSU campus who detected the campus early in the mornings and he told me to speak to someone at White's about leaving a resume with them, a guy who's name I forget now, and that's who I spoke to on the phone. Then I spoke to a guy in the front office later on my way to prospect for gold in Quartzville. It's been 16 years so I forget who they were exactly, or if they were the same person. It kinda breaks my heart to learn that they did accept interns, if so. I was practically pleading with the guy to let me work for free, just to get a foot in the business, when I showed up in person. White's was my #1 job choice, I lived in Corvallis right near them and was an active detector user already, and I figured I'd have a sure shot since everyone else was vying for positions at Intel and HP at OSU after graduation, and my field of research was literally E+M and applied physics which I thought would be a shoe in for detector work. When I couldn't even get someone there to look at my resume, I wrote them off and never looked back.

I'm honestly surprised they lasted this long. In 2004 they told me they didn't accept resumes for engineers at all. I offered to work for free, just to get experience in the detector industry after I graduated and they told me they didn't take interns either. At the time I had some ideas about updating detector design, especially moving to digital and incorporating signal processing capabilities of rapidly advancing MCU's, some of which have now become more or less situation normal in the industry for upper end products. This, with 2 research level universities within a stones throw from Sweet Home graduating plenty of inexpensive tech workers. Not to mention a massive number of engineers loosing their jobs to globalism at the time and competing with each other to work for below living wages. HP had a manufacturing campus right across the interstate where I lived in Corvallis, Intel in Portland, and a slew of compiler, gaming, database, and internet oriented companies between Eugene and Portland. All of which were bleeding engineers as outsourcing was speeding up to India and China. Whites was positioned in one of the best places in the world to develop and grow as a tech company, outside maybe Silicon Valley or Seattle, both of which ironically were also not exactly really far away. Meanwhile, I do notice Minelab hired on a new generation of engineers and scientists to keep moving that company into the future for some time. It sounds like Whites had equally deep problems with their overall business/sales model. But just based on their response when I tried submitting a resume, I assumed they would be gone in 10 years or less since it was a time of some of the most rapid consumer based tech advancements in our history and they didn't appear to be interested in joining it. I hope the other US detector companies don't make the same mistake of ignoring the next generation of engineers and scientists.

It was the only free FE software I could find on the internet back then (2004) called FEMM (Finite Element Method Magnetics) which amazingly is still around it seems: http://www.femm.info/wiki/HomePage It was a static modeller but had a scripting language which could make it calculate a series of hundreds of static "pictures" to get a rough idea of what was happening in dynamic systems numerically where the math was too complex to calculate by hand. It'll calculate B, H, force, etc at every point in a 3d system with a little creativity using 2 cross sections. Problem was non-axially symmetric coils were not possible to model, maybe that changed now though.

Relatively speaking, yes there is a simple relationship. At least for PI's. B = Φ /Area. Where B is magnetic flux density and Phi is magnetic flux. Notice this is a linear relationship as long as Phi remains constant, Phi may change non linearly when other stuff starts changing though, but I assume detectors keep energy to the coil constant no matter what coil you use. This probably applies to VLFs too though. Ignoring the detector electronics and just looking at a coil loop, sensitivity is a function of flux density since more flux cutting a target means more inductive effects. If the total energy of the coil stays the same (IE, the impulse or driving current stays the same) when you change coils then the flux density must increase or decrease in different parts of space around the coil since the total flux stays the same but area is changing. This is based on conservation of energy, which is an immutable law, however detector electronics can be more or less efficient and cause this relationship to be non linear between different machines. When you increase area, the flux distribution (magnetic field) increases in size. Since the energy in the magnetic field stays the same, what this means is the flux density which is concentrated around the windings gets scavenged out to provide flux further away from the coil as the loop area increases. This is why bigger coils get greater depth, but experience less sensitivity to tiny targets close to the coil. Conversely, small coils have a smaller overall magnetic field size, which means the flux density is greater closer to the windings. This means less overall depth, but more overall sensitivity to small targets close to the windings. In dynamic EM systems often the only way to see what's happening is via numerical analysis (think, creating a model, not a formula). I modelled this all and produced some 3D plots to demonstrate this effect (and also disprove the "V" shaped myth, which is actually more "U" shaped) in a finite element analysis program. But some childish mods on the Nuggetshooter forum deleted my account and years worth of posts so it's unfortunately gone now. I've forgotten a lot since then, but at the time I was more or less fresh out of school where I did my research, coincidentally, on modelling dynamic EM fields in solenoids for the purpose of creating mass accelerators to transport ore from asteroids. I did this with mono coils (mono coils are basically very skinny solenoids) and PI detectors in mind. But I think the general principle can be applied to VLF's as long as one compares like coil geometry to like coil geometry (ie, no concentric to DD). But I don't know enough about VLF's to say for certain there. Also, as you mentioned, the actual windings may differ from manufacturer to manufacturer, so it's just a rough gauge. Simply put - for non-extreme cases of ellipticity, and using the same detector, one can get a pretty good comparison of coil performance by comparing their total areas, which isn't far off from what it looks like you also determined experimentally.

Another update the sheriff dept conveyed to me: If anyone had (or knows anyone who had) any mining equipment stolen, deputies have recovered a bunch of mining gear and its stored at the annex. The thieves and/or their associates were running some sort of mining operation which the sheriff dept described to me as "digging out a big hill" back apparantly near where my ATV was recovered. It sounds as if most of it is wet washing stuff (sluices, pumps, etc) or maybe a small washplant. Also good news is for general crime control, they will be doing patrols when possible down Gregg's and environs. There was also cartel involvement with this thief ring, though mostly on the meth distribution side of things. Sounds as if it's been dealt with, but be aware on those remote backroads as that is what they were using and who knows if they might be back. If there was any question about the seriousness of the crime back there, the scale, or the danger, it was justified. But it sounds like they are confident they have eradicated the "big dogs" now, even though arrests and investigations may be ongoing. Mitchel, was that deputy in his 60's? If so, I forget his name (Brooks?) but he used to patrol out there and then retired. He was awesome, old school law enforcement guy.

The GM 1000 seemed to run a lot quicker over variable ground when I saw it in action and I'm ready to stop twisting knobs so much if i don't have to. Also seemed to be a little more sensitive despite being lower in frequency when I compared it to the GB2 on micro and disseminated stuff depending on the ground. Speed means a lot to me, figured it was time to upgrade since I'm using a vlf more these days than I used to.

No idea but I'm guessing when they commit 35+ burgalaries in that short of time, that they can't sell everything, and so stash it. The deputy told me there were at least 4 stash houses/lots and they were still finding more as they unravel the theft ring. My ATV had already been sold by original thief and transferred to another thief who was stripping stolen stuff on a vacant, hidden lot. They probably stash stuff, let it cool down, and then try to find a bulk buyer in LA, Vegas, or Mexico and then get rid of it all at once. The sheer amount of stolen items they had would overwhelm all the pawn shops and swap meets in Kingman, Bullhead City, and Lake Havasu combined if they tried selling it at once. Not to mention, it's the first place people like me start combing to find my stolen stuff and they'd get caught quickly. So clearly they have some other network to get rid of the stolen stuff. My impression was they were stealing RV's like basically every day, or whenever they found one that no one was looking after daily. That's a lot of stuff to store. I am looking at a few of their residences on Google aerials now that I have names, and their houses are already full with vehicles, ATVs, and RV's. So, they probably steal stuff then dump it off on an abandoned lot while they work to get rid of it. There are thousands of abandoned lots out there, many with buildings on them. So they can just stash stuff for free wherever they want and the odds are very slim the owner will ever show up, most of those lots are owned/inherited by absentee out of staters who've never seen them, and a lot are owned by Chinese investors who never will step foot on them. I have the lat/lon my ATV was recovered at, and this appears to be exactly what happened with my stuff. There is a well organized, large network of thieves there in Dolan Springs working together to steal, hide, and fence stolen goods. And that says something when you realize how few people actually live there, the number of crooks there on a per capita basis is off the charts. It makes sense though when you look at how few businesses are there and wonder how these people actually support themselves or make money. Drugs and theft is a huge part of it.

Interesting. I am about --><--- that close to buying a GM 1000 and hanging up my GB2 finally. Now I'm giving some renewed thought to the EQ 800 again since I'd like to do some yard/abandoned homestead detecting again along with gold. I'm guessing for hard rock type tiny stuff there is still no substitute for the GM 1000 though?

That's great news, I hope they arrive in the US in June too, has any NF dealer in the US heard an approximate arrival date here? I'm curious if the very long development time means potentially some small increased performance or new incremental development ala spiral wound coils when NF first released them, or if it just means a lot of time was spent getting the license for the chip and/or conforming to rigid ML engineering standards? Either way, good to see an aftermarket coil that (presumably) doesn't need the snip n solder.

Thanks for the heads up, I am checking into laws regarding towing and recovered property in AZ right now, if I have some way to pursue it, I will do it. I've had so much stuff stolen from me the past few years that I'm going to pursue any thief, claim jumper, and general crook until my last dying breath with every legal avenue I have, for as long as it takes. Companies or individuals. Thankfully my detectors were in Wyoming with me when my AZ property got hit so I still have all of them. Definitely lock your vehicles up out there, even if in sight. The yucca harvester guy on the Mardian Ranch told me they stole his sons truck 15 minutes after he parked and walked over the hill to say hello to dad. He's out behind Gold Basin and carries a rifle with him now. The thieves are all armed and obviously not afraid to get in shootouts too. There was 2 shootouts on the same freakin' day in nowheresville. What are Dolan and Chloride combined, maybe 1000 people? Then of course that murder down off Gladiola and Gregg's. These people are crazy. It's an unfortunate situation out there, the Sheriff really needs to do regular patrols 2 or 3 times a day down Gregg's Hideout. They do have a permanent deputy in Dolan now, so that's some improvement. I spoke with Deputies Loi and Williams and they seem like they actually care about the remote areas, unlike the last joker deputies who couldn't even be bothered to return my calls, emails, or investigate anything because they didn't want to make the long drive.

The sheriff invited all the thievery victims to sort through the recovered items in the warehouse. They "forgot" to call me, and of course all the stuff was claimed by now. So all my stuff basically got stolen a 2nd time. I submitted a long, detailed list of almost $20,000 worth of stolen tools, prospecting equipment when the burglary happened, etc and they said they "lost" it. I said BS, I emailed it to them a number of times months ago and then magically they found it 15 seconds after I said I would find it for them. Still, too late. They did recover my ATV and no one else could claim it since it has a unique VIN in the stolen database. But no one told me they recovered it and the towing company which the sheriff hired to remove it is charging more than it's worth now in "storage" fees. The towing company never told me they had it either, despite having my name, address, and phone number. So, they now own my ATV via what looks to me an aweful lot like legalized extortion. So, even though a lot of my stuff was apparantly recovered, other people apparantly have more rights to it than me. Or something. I'm not too happy about any of it, but I really can't do anything about it, so whatever.

Caught and killed. Mohave County sheriff just informed me this guy was responsible for the burglarly at my place in Gold Basin, he got in a shootout with a neighbor on another burglary. According to the deputy I just spoke with apparantly he was involved in 35+ burlaries and there in the Dolan/Gold Basin area at least 3 or 4 more people/safehouses involved in the ring as well. They recovered so much stolen stuff it filled a large warehouse, and they still have more. A prospector came up to my land this winter and told me their buddy just had their drywasher stolen in the 30 minutes they walked back to their pickup for a sandwich. Virtually every one of those houses off Gregg's Hideout and Rubicon road has been hit too, when you start talking to them. It's epidemic levels of thievery out there and the sheriff is not inclined to spend time curbing it from my experience with them. Be aware out there, it looks peaceful but there exists an underbelly of meth fueled scumbaggery, and it's getting more brazen. Anyways, just wanted to give an update as this case is now closed. There were 2 other parties involved in seperate phases which the sheriff has been presented evidence against and who he is monitoring, but this guy here and his buddies are who stole most of my stuff by the sound of it. I can say now that they picked all my locks and so are experienced crooks (4 supposedly hard to pick padlocks and a hitch lock), not cut, and they work the Gold Basin area as they got into my property by offroading during the night, a way that requires knowledge of the area. They are/were quite experienced thieves and some are still free and out there. They appear to drive around and stake newly arrived property out, then hit it when they think people aren't looking or are gone (or at night time).

Do shots make you nauseous and pass out? They do for me if I look at them. Cholla spikes used to do the same if they got in real deep, about 5 minutes after I'd pull them out. Doctor told me it's a vagus nerve response and is subconscious for some people when they see a puncture or wound in their own body. Oddly, same thing happened when I watched my vet pull porcupine quills out of my dogs snout, even though it didn't affect me when I tried to pull them out myself earlier. Had it happen when I broke my collar bone, then when I broke my hand, then when I broke my foot, I can't help it and it's really frustrating because its times like those I need to be conscious and helping myself, not passing out. You might have looked at your hand as you drove after adrenaline (hence no pain at first) or low grade shock wore off and then had a vagus nerve response? No idea, just sounds like what happens to me when I look at a wound, I'm like a fainting goat.

This is a Midget Faded Rattler, and was taken in 2016 in Central Wyoming. I swear these things are virtually identical to Mohave Greens, even the white markings under the eyes, they are so similar I literally cannot distinguish them while staring at them. Makes me wonder if the venom might be very similarly deadly too as they appear to be closely related. Unfortunately this was taken on a potato-level quality $50 Walmart phone I was using to make videos at the time. Sorry Clarke didn't mean to make your gold thread so much about snakes.

Do you mean the Midget Faded rattlesnake or is there a pygmy one here too? I kept seeing rattlers here in Wyoming that I swore up and down were Mohave Greens, I finally got a few photos and took them to the Game and Fish, they said they are likely Midget Faded rattlers. I've never seen a place anywhere in the US that has more rattlesnakes than Wyoming, I have trips where I'll run across 15 or 20 a day. I've only seen 4 Diamondbacks in 10 years or more of prospecting Arizona, and maybe 1 Mohave Green but I wasn't absolutely sure. They are definitely found in Gold Basin though, just rare. The Mohave Green Rattlesnakes are as lethal as some of the nasty Australian and Asian snakes. They are one of the most venomous snakes in the world, and in many places where you are more than 1 hr from town, your chances for survival can be in question. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crotalus_scutulatus

What Goldhound said. For gold prospecting most of the usefulness to me personally is in tracer elements. Arsenic for instance is a very common one. My main interest is in locating hidden/buried hard rock deposits, and tracer elements are a great way to do this. Once assays show what is consistently running with gold, then you can use the XRF not to look for gold itself, but to look for whatever element is associated with it. An XRF isn't a substitute for an assay. But assays are expensive, take a very long time, and all the samples are cumbersome. It's much easier to use an XRF in the field to do a quick, qualitative analysis in order to determine if samples merit collecting and sending in and paying for the assay to get a quantitative measurement. Soil assays are definitely the way to go over an XRF, a gold pan is still more useful to me if it's gold itself I'm tracing. Gold is bad element to chase with a XRF, for a number of technical reasons the threshold of detection for gold is fairly high and kinda useless for most prospecting endeavors if only looking for the element gold itself. This can also apply to certain PGM's or silver, since the elements are often used in the electrode and thus interfere with measurement and require higher thresholds. XRF's are also way useful outside of the gold prospecting realm. For instance, you can tell the difference between serpentine and nephrite with an XRF, even when the two are very similar in macro composition, it's quicker than thin sections. Also, I am looking for a lot of other non-gold stuff that I can't really go into here on a public forum, which I've found an XRF to be an extremely useful tool for. In summary, an XRF isn't really a great tool for a gold prospector looking for placer gold. It's an ok tool for gold hardrock exploration. But it is a great tool for a general prospector or exploration geologist who has a clear idea of what they need out of it and the limitations and power of the tool in specific applications.

There aren't really any known tellurides in the Gold Basin area that I'm aware of, the first sample is more likely to be feldspar and muscovite. There may be some quartz mixed in there, as pegmatites are common intrusive features in the area. Felsic dikes and sills are one of the main features I associate with nuggets out there. The gold associated with these rock types is often free and visible, does not require roasting. If you find softer pieces that feldspar will scratch, especially if they develop a slight green hue, that is sericite which is an alteration product of the mica, and indicates the pegmatite was in contact with a hydrothermal fluid bearing fracture, a common source of nuggety gold out there and something to look for. The second piece is a piece of ore containing quartz and maybe some calcite, and the shiny bits are probably a sulfide of lead, iron or something of the likes. This type of ore does require roasting after crushing. I've been watching MBMMLLC on Youtube quite a bit during this Covid break, his videos on roasting, smelting and assaying are pretty well done and easy to understand for anyone interested in that whole process. He's showing quite a few different methods and covering a lot of bases that I never heard of. https://www.youtube.com/user/mbmmllc/videos

The few people I had interested in buying a couple ounces disappeared after the economy went bad. Now that gold seems to be decoupling from the equities market again and acting more normal, has any US demand for gold returned outside of the ultra premium collector type stuff? There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of buyer demand right now on the forums. Ebay seems to have quite a lot of bidders on average type gold lots now though, but mostly just on the 1 gram or under lot sizes, which takes foreveeeeer to sell an ounce of gold. There has to be a better way. It's hard to sell bigger pieces or bigger lots on Ebay. I'll sell gold down to 7% under spot depending on size if people are buying in 1+ oz lots here in the US. Or trade for an older XRF (InnovX DS2000 for example) with geochem, mining or soil timings.

Museum quality, nice!

Nice to finally see the place and gold you detect Flak. Great haul!

Mitchel - the trick with going fast is to know when and where to do it. The primary difference is that you are going fast through club claims that are very heavily detected and I am going fast through areas that are much less detected where the easy signals are still in the ground and jump out at me. In heavily detected ground you want to go slow and pick up techniques like JP and JW explain in their posts. The GPAA camp area produced a lot of big nuggets up to 4 or 5 ounces back in the 90's and early 2000's. I'm not a club member as I do not support gold clubs for personal reasons, so I haven't detected any of those claims with the X Coils. It would be a good spot to slow down if that's where you are detecting, and know that you'll be the first with some new equipment there. Chet - Good luck out there, hopefully I'll see ya around next year somewhere in the goldfields again. I'm always down with engineering and science campfire talk. JP - Thanks, I'm glad you enjoy the scenery. It's one of my favorite places on Earth and as much I wanted to share gold, I wanted to share the area too with the forum as it still amazes me every day I go out. I was raised in the country and it's places like this where I feel at home still today. The one thing it's missing is what you guys have a bit of left in Australia, which is the adventure that comes along with being the literal only person out there and discovering something brand new.

Last post. I'm either heading back home soon or going out to my land to be in total isolation, waiting to hear back on a couple things first. It's been raining/drizzling pretty much every day here. The drizzles are detectable, but when it starts raining hard you don't want to be caught in it since it can wash out your road in pretty quickly with flash floods. The sky has dropped to ground most days and there are still very few people out here. A few locals are wandering around doing test panning. A bit of the scenery here in Gold Basin. It's very Jurassic looking to me. Also a lot of old 60's Star Trek was filmed in the Mohave Desert when they needed to show an "alien" planet, so it always reminds of watching those too. Again I'm a bit slim on detecting pics because when it starts drizzling I just put my nose down and stick to detecting, so words will have to suffice here. I was using the 17" again this day, and I decided to visit a wash which had only produced nuggets mostly on one side of the wash. Many of these nuggets were buried only a few inches in the gravel and hadn't yet reached caliche. The last time I came here 2 years ago I had found a 1/2 grammer on the top of the wash bank under some drywasher tailings, and I had just assumed the nugget had come from the tailings. As always, I entered my observations into my notes, and I was re-reading my notes to look for places to revist with this X Coil. This bank which this 1/2 grammer was resting on was on the same side of the wash as most of the other nuggets had been found on. There were no nuggets found upstream in the wash beyond this last one. It occurred to me that it might be worth a shot to detect the hillside and benches here with the 17" to see if there might be a slopewash patch feeding the wash. This sort of thing is not uncommon out here, as the caliche on the hillside often represents older fossilized stream channels, and in places where the caliche is soft or eroding out, the hillsides can often produce nuggets. When you start digging into gravel and it turns whitish, it's always a great sign as that is showing it likely part of what once once a solid caliche layer and any targets within are almost always gold. I used my GPS to go right to the spot I had found the 1/2 grammer on the bank, and I could see the remnants of the same old drywasher pile. I began searching the area and about 15 feet from my original find I got a short, screaming signal. A bootscrape brushed it aside and I immedietely lost confidence that it was gold, but as I bent down I saw the unmistakable glint of a tiny nugget at the side of my scrape pile. It was a ~0.25 grammer that must have been only 1/2" down. A radius of 25 feet produced another 4 or 5 dinks, all almost right on surface and just barely buried. Looking closer at the soil, what was happening was the surface was once an old wash bottom made of caliche, but now that wash bottom had eroded another 10ft deeper leaving this old channel up on the hillside. Over a couple hundred thousand or so years, the gravels of the old channel had eroded back down into the wash and the freshly exposed caliche on the hillside (and old wash bedrock) was now breaking down with exposure to the sun and rain, releasing nuggets as it eroded. I went to wedge my coil in between two larger rocks that were still imbedded in the fossil channel and a boomer signal appeared as my coil neared the rocks. It was screaming by the time I got the coil edge in. This photo doesn't show it well since the background is out of focus, but I pulled a channel of dirt out between the two rocks, and then pushed the edge of the coil back in and the signal was still there, so I knew it had to be gold. I reached in the crack which was only about 1" wide at the bottom and as I pushed around the old dirt I saw the glint of gold, and it was this nice 5 grammer. You can see the soil is as I explained in a prior post to Mitchel, it's light grayish on top. But then often will be nice and red when you dig into it. The grayish can be seen on aerials and I use it to prospect for areas to explore. It's lighter colored for three reasons: a higher silica content, a higher content of the grayish/green schists, and a higher carbonate content (from the dissolving caliche). The dirt is red from iron oxides. All of these things are often related to good placer gold ground for geologic reasons I won't go into here. The soils that are red on surface can also produce gold, but often they are too young to concentrate it, and lack shallow caliche. There are exceptions as always, especially in Lost Basin. Anyways, pushing the coil around produced another 5 or so more dinks in my little hillside patch, but no more larger nuggets. nothing deeper than 1" aside from the 5 grammer which was wedged between the rocks. I had found a beautiful 20 gram museum quality piece in this wash many years back so I had hoped this patch was the source for more of it, but no such luck. The drizzle evolved, and rain started falling in blobs the size of the tip of my pinky, so large I thought it was hail at first and I made a mad dash back to my truck with plans to revist the area again with the 10". In all, just over 10 grams for the day. 13 nuggets, I think there are probably a few more left. I call this a cheeseburger day, any time I get over 1/4 oz I go to town to treat myself to a restaurant cheeseburger. Unfortunately it was not to be, the restaurants were all closed, virus stuff. I had a nice bologna sandwich when I got back anyways. One last scenery shot, I can't believe how green Arizona is right now, with all the rain. It looks like the San Juans in Colorado, in a way. Just a lot shorter. The cows must be happy, I've been wondering what exactly they have been eating up until now in the desert. That's all for me, just wanted to share some experiences with these X Coils. Until now, due to work and life, my experience with them has been limited to a few days here and there poking around since life has been crazy the last year. This was the first time I had a real chance to give all of them a solid run. I used the 12" the most up until this trip but I didn't take it with me since I wanted to force myself to use these other coils and I really thought the 17x12 was going to make the 12" redundant. But in the end, my least favorite coil is now the 17x12 due to edge sensitivity issues. I'd say the 12" is back to being my favorite all arounder, followed by the 17" a close second (maybe even 1st in some cases). The 10" and 17x12" are struggling to find places in my arsenal. I did put the 10" to good use in another trip yesterday though so I'm warming up to it but I think I've posted enough. Again just to summarize, I was given the 10", 17x12, and 17" free from the manufacturer and I want to make that clear for anyone reading these posts. I have no relationship with the manufacturer, I think he just felt bad about my early experiences and was trying hard to make things right and he went above and beyond IMO. But, I know I personally want to know that information when I read opinions on any products, from metal detecting to truck mod parts, any kind of products. I have tried my best to give my unmitigated opinion on my experiences with each coil here in my series of 4 posts with them. When NF releases their coils I will try to get one and compare it's performance to the similar sized X Coil, and I can guarantee I'll be using which ever one performs the best. Thanks for reading and to everyone who commented, I hope everyone is staying healthy, good luck all.