X-Terra 705 Help

[Ronjas]

One year ago My husband and I decided to try our hand at metal detecting.We were total newbies with a steep learning curve. We purchased a used Xterra 705 for our starting machine. We downloaded and printed Randy Horton’s Xterra guide and have read it many times.  It is a valuable tool for any Xterra owner. We spent the last year educating ourselves on the basics of metal detecting and getting to know our machine. 

We are feeling pretty confident about the Xterra except for one issue.  I am looking for advice on any errors we are committing or if we possibly have something wrong with our detector.  We have contacted minelab, but they never got back to us about our issue.  So here goes...

We are having an issue with TID numbers with in ground silver. We have several old silver coins we use for testing.  They air test  perfectly per published Xterra TID charts. When we place a coin (dime, quarter or half dollar, doesn’t matter) in a dug plug and cover, the coins register as ferrous (-8, -6 or -4) every time regardless of the coil we have installed.  We have the stock 9” 7.5 kHz and the 6” 18.75 kHz Double D coils.  We cannot get silver to register as anything but ferrous in the ground.  The depth does not matter.  

We usually run in all metal or discrim 1 on occasion.  We go through a set up each time we arrive at a place to detect that includes noise canceling, threshold, sensitivity and manual ground balance, although we usually detect in auto ground balance. We use 99 tones and silver in the ground has a ferrous “thunking” sound to go along with the TID numbers.

We have reset to factory setting several times in the hope of solving this issue to no avail.  We are out of ideas and possibly need service.  Thank you for reading this far.  Any advice or suggestions are welcome and appreciated.  

 

 

[bado1]

You guys have an excellent detector. It sounds like something is wrong with the machine itself since you have used different coils. I would contact ML. Good luck!

 

Dean

[Skeleton Coast Hunter]

I concur with Dean, am using one myself for couple a years now and as he's said, an excellent machine which should sniff-out the silvers chop-chop with solid TID's, even in challenging soils....

Yep, maybe its time to send the baby to hospital for a quick check-up.....

[fredmason]

Send it in....

[Ronjas]

Thank you for the replies. Finally heard back from Minelab this morning and opened a repair ticket. Appreciate your input.

R & J

[Nuke em]

I never found the Terra's very deep in hard ground but on airy ground and beaches quite deep . In hard ground i also find that the numbers change quite a lot though the tones stay around the same . Maybe your soil has Iron in it to make it do minus numbers ? That happened to me and others using the older 70's back in 2006 on a Roman site , that sort of site put a lot of people off the machine in that club . Only in 2011 when i started using the 705 on the dry beach did i find its real hotspot . Then it turned into a coin hoover. Gold rings too.

[Ronjas]

Nuke em, thank you for the feedback. We are in the US Pacific NW.  I don’t believe we have a lot of iron in our soil, but areas can be quite heavy with clay.  Our Xterra is on its way to Minelab for assessment. Good to know about the beach detecting. We are at the beach this weekend.  Wish we had it with us to test beach performance.  

 

R & J

[Nuke em]

Its only good on the dry. Not the salt wet.

It is also possible that with clay you might not have anything deep anyway.

[fredmason]

Nuke em;

I found good stuff in wet salt sand and shallow surf with my x-70....but not with the stock coin coil....it was the dd -e coil for gold hunting.

san diego beach sand have tons on iron in them....btw.

fred