Daniel Tn

I hope this falls under the guidelines as general chat. Fishing has always been my #1 hobby. You all know me from Civil War relic hunting and such but that's always been 2nd or 3rd tier for me. I live in the foothills of Tennessee and North Carolina...trout fishing was huge in my life growing up. So when my brother inlaw tried to get me to go to Arkansas to fish for trout..my first thoughts were...WHY? Why drive 10 hrs one way, to catch fish I can catch 20 mins from home? After nearly 3 years of begging me, I gave in and off we went to the White River. Now lemme tell ya...up to the day we left, I wasn't exactly giddy about this trip. What in the heck is in Arkansas? And why am I wasting a weeks vacation to go there. As soon as we got past the flat terrain and into the hills and ridges of Central Arkansas...I saw why my brother inlaw likes it so much . It looked like it does back home....minus the subdivisions and housing market explosion. It was like taking a time machine back to how it was back home, 30+ years ago. I was liking it more by the mile. Then when we saw the river...ohh yeah. My kinda place. We arrived with just a couple hrs day light left. We got our licenses and went to fish from a public spot on the river. My first cast from the bank...and I was holding a rainbow trout equal to the size of my biggest back home. It was just the start of what was to come. The White is known for big brown trout...something I had only caught a few of back home. The next day has us up early waiting on the fishing guides to pick us up. After introducing ourselves, we shoved off onto the river boats. First cast later, my wife was holding a 22" brown trout...her biggest trout and I had never seen a brown that big in person. Before I could get my phone out...the guide slid it back into the river. He said "I promise...they get a lot bigger". I couldn't fantom that. But he was 110% correct. By the end of the day we'd boated 19 brown trout and a half dozen rainbows...and that 22 inch brown was the smallest. The next day we woke up to 19 degrees with a 20 mph wind. I was about froze...my fingers numb. And it was a slower start than the day before. A cold front had came in and we didn't really get on a strong bite til after lunch and still managed to boat 12 browns, including my biggest to that date, a 25" five pounder. I said my trip was made with that. The next day...started with my wife putting every fish in the boat up to lunch. She had me at 8 to nothing including some really good 25-26 inch fish....5 and 6 pound browns. Then...about the last hour of the trip, I hooked into a big brown...28" and 8 lbs. I was grinning from ear to ear. And ready to come back before we even left for home! I can't believe I'm saying it...but within the next 5 years, we'll hopefully be leaving TN for Arkansas. I loved it that much. I'm not a people person and like solitude. Tennessee has become the opposite of that. Go figure...a trip I wasn't even wanting to go on, has me ready to move haha.

Sure, other companies have put out newer models onto the market. But it seems like we've went backwards instead of forwards. 4 AA batteries in a T2 will last 40 hours of use. Detectors today won't last 8 hours with their internal batteries. They are supposed to have more power which increases battery consumption but that's not translating into more depth/performance. In fact, put a 11" size round coil on a T2 like these newer machines have on them and do some comparisons. The biggest advantage the others have is: waterproof? That's only for situational hunting; not everybody hunts in the rain or water. The other might be SMF but that really only shines in salt environments. It would be nice to see some signs of life from them but hey, what they came out with in 2007/2008 is still hard to beat.

Nokta has always been quick to come out with new model machines. You could say, this is one of the negative things about them. The Simplex+ hasn't been out all that long and now it is being replaced with new hardware, etc. For dealers, that means they have Simplex+ machines they will have to practically give away and customers that might have the Simplex+, will also be hit with low resale value. Especially if Nokta comes out swinging with even lower prices on the new units to combat the XTerra Pro.

I've not had any other NEL coil besides the Tornado. The SuperFly is much thinner and lighter than it for sure. On my T2, it air tests a minie at 18 inches in all metal BP mode activated, and 16ish inches with regular all metal. In ground, in my 2 bar dirt at home, I don't have anything buried in my test garden that is beyond what it can hit and also correctly ID. I like this coil size because now days, every detector out there is coming standard with the same size coil and that makes it easy to do comparisons. The dirt I found the dropped minie in (in the picture) was NOT 2 bar dirt. It was actually 4 bars and creeping into the real hot dirt zone. The Manticore and Deus 2 were very chirpy there and I had to back them off to get them to smooth out. Same with the T2...but at 70 sensitivity, I was still digging stuff deeper than my pinpointer is long. The dirt there has been "turned" or back filled in some spots. I got a sweet 70s signal that was right at 12 inches down and pinpointing right in the bottom of the hole. I would have bet $100 it was going to be a deep minie ball. Nope. Screw cap to a liquor bottle. 😄 I'm fixin' to go hit a spot on our property that my dad cleared out with his Bobcat. I noticed he kicked up old brick and blue feather rim china in an area clearing out scrub brush and stuff. The little 8x6 SEF is about to get a work out...and maybe the 5" round coil too.

You better edit that. The Nokta lady will go ballistic on ya for speculation without having an X-Terra and Simplex 2.0 in hand to compare.

That Iffy Signals video made me say "nope".

Same here. 100+ head of cattle in the same fields for 100+ years definitely has an impact on it. Just look at the ground where their hay rings are and such. One local farmer has ran Jersey cows his whole life. He owns 1200ish acres and is 83 years old...his daddy did the same thing on the same farm and so did his dad. Those fields are some of the hardest to detect of anywhere I go locally.

Super Fly feels balanced to me. I also have the DeTech SEF 8x6 but I thought it felt heavy for its size. All I know is...after putting it on the measuring stick, I was all smiles. Whoo-doggies!!

The F75/T2 is still one of the best platforms on the market. Without getting into pulse machines, there's nothing I've found that is deeper. It all still comes down to what you look for the most when you hunt and selecting the best tool for the job. For deep coins and relics in the US...especially in bad soil...you're not going to find a machine to beat that F75/T2 platform without getting into pulse machines. As far as the XTerra. I would hope the selectable single freqs work better than other machines with the same offering. I've always found the selectable freq machines to be lacking when compared to the straight forward single freq machines of the same kHz. The Simplex machines will already have the market in that arena due to already having coil options for everybody's liking.

Yes, that is the Super Fly coil.

Well it likes dropped minies.

Got home and just put the T2 on the measuring board. Moment of truth....motion all metal. 95 sens. .58 cal minie ball = 14.5 inches loud and clear. If you wanted to go by just a consistent whisper, you could say 15 inches. This is on par with my buddies pre DST unit. If I put that bad boy in BP mode and flip over to all metal mode, it gets it at 16 inches and a very nice bass thump at 14-15. Very impressed and happy with that. That's how it should be. Chase -- My first few trips to Culpeper was with the F75. I can tell ya...nothing is going to read right. Almost every target I dug had an iron ID. Seemed like the numbers were 11s and 13s most of the time. I dug a breast plate just 10 inches or so deep...total iron signal til it was out of the hole. I think I had 80 something dropped and carved bullets, 20 or so buttons, a plate, and other odds and ends like j hooks, bayonet scabbards, etc on my first hunt up there with it. But...my buddy had a TDI and he came over to the little spot I had found and was pulling stuff left and right after I had pounded it for 2.5 days with the F75. I had a TDI by the next hunt lol. That was my intro to pulse vs vlf. The next hunt there (Coles Hill) I went back to that little camp to get leftovers and never left it for 3 days. I pulled over 100 minies out of it, close to 50 buttons, and another breast plate. I never got to hunt there with a GPX.

Chase -- Are you referring to the newer 12" weird looking coil by Fisher? I have one for the F75 you can borrow if you don't have one. No sense in paying $200 just to try one. I did not notice any real difference in depth over the stock coil but it certainly is lighter weight. I ordered the Super Fly coil for the T2 last night. I really liked those machines paired with the DeTech Ultimate 13 coil...but that Super Fly looked bad to the bone.

The F75 I have is just a standard one with DST. It doesn't have boost or cache processes. It is quiet in both 9.0 and 9.1 all the way to 99 sens. The older F75s seem to have an amplified/boosted audio signal in all metal. The hits are much more of a "thump". But you'd never get one of those to 99 sens without it going crazy. Fortunately all you needed was 70-80 and that is better than what this newer one does at 99. Minie balls are 1/2 oz lead, .577 in diameter. They ring up between a round pull tab and zinc cent on most ID machines. I received a black T2 that I traded for today and just got about 15 mins to play with it before work. When I saw the box, I died a little inside. There on the box was the logo showing it is a DST model. Ughhh. Oh well. I put it together and ran outside for a quick check. To my surprise this unit gets chatty at about 95. No bad but a little bit. The biggest surprise was the all metal thump is there on this one! This one behaves much closer to the older models. I've not put it on a ruler yet but all I really needed to see (or hear) was that it successfully grabbed every target in my test area and did it rather well. Even in disc mode I was getting a 10" dime with correct ID. Dirt at my house is just 2 bars though. I'm tikled with that result. This T2 does have BP mode but I didn't even try it. I'm definitely keeping this one and sending the F75 down the road.

As deep as possible. Remember...9 or 10 inches in the air does not equate to the same in the ground. It will be a lot less, especially in mineralized ground. My Buddy's non neutered F75 can detect every signal in my test garden and even IDs the deepest one correct. My neutered F75 doesn't make a peep on 3 of the same targets. It wouldn't be any different "in the wild" either.

Yes, that is correct. On this F75, 9.0 seems to be OFF and 9.1 is ON. I say that because 9.1 is even weaker. You lose about another 1.5 to 2 inches from 9.0 to 9.1. Despite it supposed to be "off" there is still something going on behind the scenes. Yes, that is also comparing the two with the stock coils. We even tried swapping coils to see if maybe the coils had something to do with it....didn't matter.

Something I had forgotten about since last having an F75: the newer DST model F75s have been neutered from what made them great. They have a VERY weak all metal mode now. To get a good one, you'll have to find one that hasn't been updated and is a non DST model. Just an example for you...the F75 I recently traded for is a DST model. With it at 99 sensitivity, it will only AIR TEST a .58 cal Minie ball out to 9.5-10 inches in all metal. And you have to really be listening to hear it. By comparison, we tested my buddys original non updated F75 on the same minie ball and his unit sounds like it has an audio boost enabled in all metal and is much more powerful. We couldn't get his to 99 sens due to chatter but with it on 80, it was calm and could detect that minie out to 14 inches. Yes, that's a 4 inch difference. Whereas the newer one was weak and barely hearable at 10 inches...his was a "no doubt about it" signal at 10...very pronounced. We could actually turn his sensitivity down to 60 and 70 and still get better distance than the neutered F75 at 99 sens. I traded a CZ70 Pro with George here on the forum for a T2. I'm hoping like crazy that it's a non DST model lol. Or at least isn't as badly neutered as the F75 I have.

I certainly am guilty of buying the latest things out. I guess my quest is more to find the best "jack of all trades" machine out there. The problem for me has been, these multi task machines still fall short of the solo detector kings...the ones that may only do one thing REALLY well, but nothing else can beat it for that purpose. For me, I relic hunt and freshwater beach hunt, and maybe once a year, I will saltwater beach hunt. I'm right back to the F75/T2 myself. For hunting fields and woods...hard to find one to beat them! The beach scenarios...are not the F75/T2 Forte and will require a machine better at those tasks. Edit: The DST models SUCK. The F75 I traded the ammo for...well I would rather have the ammo back. My understanding was the DST could be turned on or off. Well it can...but it's NOTHING like the original F75s without it. They've neutered it so bad it's not worth having now.

Keith, I was trying to buy my buddies T2 while we were hunting but he wouldn't part ways with it. Luckily, one of my other buddies said he had a new in the box F75 he'd part with. He wanted $400 for it but I traded him some 5.56mm ammo for it and so now I have a F75. Even though the T2 and F75 are similar...I always favored the T2 for some reason BUT for a few boxes of ammo in trading even, I will gladly take the F75. The very first thing I did after getting it was order the Fisher 5x10" DD coil. After my Arkansas fishing trip, I will start saving for an Axiom and between the Axiom and F75, I should have all my local hunting covered. The only wild card would be not having a water machine for the beach. For that I will probably buy a Manticore again when they become more available down the road.

I have a guided trout fishing trip coming up in March. After I get back from that, I'll start squirreling away $ for either a used GPX or new Axiom. Heck at this point I'm thinking I'll just go for the Axiom since that gets me away from a harness and battery. Those Diggin in Virginia guys usually unload machines after a hunt and they have one coming up next month. I think it and a machine like the T2 would handle nearly 98% of all the hunting I would do. Of course if you've followed my posts for any length of time, you know I am like a revolving door with hobbies. I don't ever keep anything for very long, in order to fund new adventures. And fishing is always my #1 hobby. I'm just seasonal when it comes to detecting.

I think the Axiom may be my next machine. I've ran the GPXs from the 4000 thru 5000 but hate being tethered to the darn thing. I've seen a few videos of folks relic hunting in the red dirt like I have here and doing well. I don't have to have 100% GPX performance...I think any pulse is better than the VLFs in bad soil so I will still be winning. I just wish they were a little cheaper priced or at least let a man choose the coils. I'd rather have the two DD coils vs a DD and mono. I have a while to ponder on it.

So I wasn't loopy?! Haha I figure somebody that's not hunted bad dirt would have a hard time believing my post. Thanks for the reinforcement!

I will first say, your mileage may vary, and you may never in you detecting adventures, encounter soil quite like this, or this bad. I'm not an expert detectorist and I don't claim to be. My friend joined me at the bullet site and brought his T2 and GPX along. Hands down, it helps a ton when you have a pulse machine flagging signals there. The GPX always does flawless at this place, as is always the case with a pulse machine in hot dirt. He marked approx 50 bullet signals. We left some in the ground that we never got to test over, or to dig. Save em for another day. He marked signals and I lugged the other detectors around. Deepest bullet dug was around 14 inches. Average was 8-10 inches. The objective at this site is to try to learn machines on real world targets. If you saw the picture, there's not much in the way of trash there. The occasional shotgun shell hull, and 1 horse shoe half, and a stupid 1888 V nickel. The rest of the signals are pretty much always bullets at this place. The biggest part of the whole scenario is just getting *a signal*. It's *not* signal interpretation, where you are getting a signal and trying to decide whether the ID is good enough to dig or not. No...we're just going for: Does it give a signal at all. If so...is it iron or non iron? The bonus is always if it does give a good ID. And then from there, what modes/settings can we try to get a better signal out of it? Keep in mind all detectors will eventually give an iron ID on non iron targets. The more mineralized the ground, the faster this happens. Some detectors are better than others at it, but they ALL eventually do it. With that said...today was fun. Great weather. No time restraint. We spent about 5 hours there. 1. Teknetics T2 -- Obviously it does have a true all metal mode. The ID does work in all metal and from that, bullets would come in the 70s-80s range down to about 6 inches, and then would transition to a iron/70s ID bounce. The audio always stayed solid, all around. There were only a few bullets we marked with the GPX that the T2 couldn't get a signal on, and those were the ones 12+ inches deep. Since most were in that 8 to 10 inch range, they were easily picked off by the T2 and dead giveaways with that "bounce" ID. It has been years since I have had one of these machines in my hand but still yet, that has to be one of the best balanced machines to ever hit the market. I tried to buy this one from my buddy but he wasn't having it. Its just a plain ole T2 without boost mode. As far as ID goes, it was right there with the D2 but the magic is in that all metal mode. If not for it, and relying on Disc mode, the D2 and it would be very close with the edge going to the D2. We've ran boost model F75/T2s there in the past and the boost mode is counter productive by a large margin. Too much blow back. 2. Deus 2 with the 9 inch and 11x13 inch coils. I wanted to play around a bit here with some setting and modes. Last time I was there, the D2 did better than the M-Core, and since then, I had played around and thought I had came up with an even better program. Started with a custom program based off Sens FT factory mode with no discrimination (-6.4) and Audio Response set to 6 so that I could hear things a bit better without modulation, reactivity at 1, and sens up in the mid 90s. That was a starting point...in my test garden at home, this done extremely well. At the bullet place...not so well. I tried a number of things actually...from increasing the reactivity speed, lowering sensitivity, different programs, etc. I did find out that if you go too low on reactivity, you actually LOSE the signal in this dirt. Going higher/faster in reactivity seems to give a better signal...there is a sweet spot and if you go too high with it, it also washes out the signal. I could do things to make it worse, but nothing to really make it leaps and bounds better. Deepest obtainable bullets via just getting a signal with it were down to about the 9 inch mark. With ID, about 6-7 inches. This machine, once it transitions from non iron to iron signal...really falls off after that to where you don't get a signal at all. The 9 inch bullets were VERY hard signals to get and I certainly feel that had we not had them marked I would have walked right over em. Coil control was critical to even get *a sound* on the deeper ones. I was actually surprised to learn that the factory Relic mode was one of the worse performing modes I tried on it, even just using it as a base program and tweaking on the other settings. If you recall from the previous trip to the site, Relic mode was the one I was actually using and then jumped to a different program. As you might expect...or might be surprised to read (depending on what camp you're in)...the coil size differences didn't matter much. The 9 inch wasn't bad and the 11x13 wasn't an improvement over the 9....they were really about the same. The 11x13 didn't locate any bullet that the 9 inch couldn't also locate. If you ran the Audio Response to 6 or so, they were about the same as far as signal strength. 3. Manticore -- Probably the machine most are interested in right now. I've hunted with it in mild soil and this bullet field is probably the worse of the soil I will ever hunt in with it. In better ground...I've dug these same type bullets 9 and 10 inches deep with no problem at all. Solid 50s ID and great 4 way tones, and could probably get them 11-12 inches. At this place...no matter the mode. No matter the settings. Once the bullets get past 6ish inches...you're not even going to know something is beneath the coil. Like I said though...in better soil...it rocks. Very much like the CTX in that regard. In mild soil and the beach...look out. Probably one of the better machines to come out since the CTX. From the last hunt at this site, I knew some of the bullets I had found were coming in above the center line in that upper ferrous range. So I tried opening that completely up. I wouldn't advise doing that. I was actually happy to see another post about how running this machine with some disc is better than the open screen. That's what we ran into as well. Any signal at all gets lost in the barrage of low grunts from the ground if you have no disc aka all metal enabled. The Goldfield mode with prospecting audio was the closest I figured the machine would have to "all metal". I wasn't a fan of that at all. I even tried single frequencies close to what the T2 is, to see if that might make a difference. Nope. Somebody out there might come up with the secret sauce settings for bad dirt...it sure wasn't me and my buddy today. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I'm drawing a blank on what else could be done. All Terrain General was the best of the modes tried, with a somewhat faster reactivity of 6. Of course everybody is still very much in the learning phases of the Manticore. I could go to a different site with better soil and all of this be totally thrown out the window. Anyway, yall have a great day. Abenson was right on the money. When I read his post I just grinned because he nailed it. I already had this typed out and saved...was just going to wait for a few more to see the post and make some guesses before posting it.

With a GPX leading the way marking bullets so that we could test...which VLF would you say did the best? T2 with stock coil. Deus2 with 9 inch coil and 11x13. MCore with 11 inch coil. All Metal modes on all 3 machines. Deepest bullet was 14 inches. Most were 8 to 10 inches. Take your best guesses and I'll do a write up later.