Makro Racer vs Fisher F75

[mtsheron]

Bottom line these detectors are great and not priced beyond their capabilities. Love my Fors CoRe!

 

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[Steve Herschbach]

One is an unproven toy, the other is a serious/proven gold/coin/relic/silver hunter. The Makro is foreign-made from my investigations, gets no rave reviews (except from those who made it), and no bragging rights yet either. In short, there are very few (if any) laboratory mice or test rats to give an honest review yet. Usually it takes 2-3 years for a metal detector to prove itself, one way, or the other. Personally, I would let someone else be the Guinea pig, $649 is a lot of $$ to toss into the toilet in case it is inadequate. And BTW, the Fisher F75 is at the very end, the pinnacle of the engineering term "the point of diminishing returns". In other words, it is at the very end of the depth potential spectrum and would require a tremendous amount of additional voltage (Like a Nautilus) to go any deeper, and then it would seem to weigh as much as a 7 pound lunch box. Otherwise as regards to being at the very end of a detector's potential the F75 would go deeper than its own self as is, but it can't, and it doesn't, and it would have to run clear down to around 5 Khz consistently or lower too, but then it no longer would behave or run smoothly for relic hunting. Good luck to you..

I have read a lot of your posts Larry and have a lot of respect for you, but in this case you obviously have not bothered to do even the most basic homework. The Racer has been getting some very good reviews from some very hardcore users and the consensus is with its small coils it rivals the DEUS for pulling non-ferrous targets out of heavy ferrous trash. I have been a F75 user for a long time but I have also run the Nokta FORS units and Makro Racer against it and these units match it for performance to within a hair splitting degree. You of all people should know that single frequency tech is old tech and running against its limits, in fact your post says just that. Well, any halfway decent company can make a single frequency VLF just as good as what we have from any other company and that is just what Nokta/Makro has done.

The foreign made thing is such a crock in this day and age. Looks like the French have been eating a lot of US manufacturer lunch with the DEUS the last couple years. Not one of the US manufacturers holds a candle to Minelab in my area of expertise (prospecting) so get over that nonsense.

Racer better than a F75 or vice versa? I have them both and they are just different flavor of the same thing. Some people like chocolate and some like vanilla. My F75 is a favorite of mine and is not going anywhere but my Racer got more use this year. Both will perform in capable hands. People should get over all this more depth thing and focus instead on basic features like search modes, tones, types of discrimination, weight, balance, price, etc.

People interested in some other opinions on the Racer should google Keith Southern Makro Racer or Monte Makro Racer or lowboy Makro Racer.

 

[Steve Herschbach]

A few details from a personal perspective. First off, the F75 is for me the best feeling detector I have ever used. The balance is superb and the grip matches my hand perfectly. Machines like the DEUS may weigh less but are nose heavy. From an ergonomic perspective there is no detector I would rather swing than the F75 or T2.

The F75 also has far more tone and other discrimination options than the Racer, which is very basic by comparison. If you want the bells and whistles, again the F75 shines. And there is great support for coil options with the F75 though Makro has everything you actually need.

Where the Racer beats the F75 is in the audio. The F75 employs a gated digital style audio whereby it decides what the target is, then issues a tone coinciding with that decision. A target will give a ferrous tone or some other tone but it will be a decisive single response. That response might change on boderline targets each time the target is swept but each response is discrete.

The Racer has an analog style blended audio response. You can get a clean ferrous response or a clean non-ferrous response but you can also get both blended on a single target or close adjacent targets. This is far more effective in thick ferrous trash where the gated audio on the F75 masks adjacent targets. This is where XP has made inroads by dramatically improving recovery time to deal with adjacent targets. It is an area where Fisher clearly fell behind and the new update with the FA mode is a bandaid meant to help address the issue. The problem XP has is in no small coils for the DEUS and a Racer with 5" coil and blended audio seriously competes with the DEUS in this regard. Mind you depth is not the issue in a cellar hole, dealing with the trash is the issue. This is where the Racer gets the rave reviews.

Since I mainly nugget hunt this is very important to me, but I have also noted that the F75 has a slightly stronger bias regarding small items to insure less trash is dug, but it results in more small non-ferrous items being misidentified as ferrous. I have used multiple F75 detectors and all of them when you get near the borderline tipped towards ferrous more than the Racer will and as a result even in air testing the F75 will call small gold nuggets ferrous that the Racer correctly identifies as non-ferrous. This may result in more ferrous trash being dug with the Racer but it also does pull non-ferrous targets up the F75 will miss.

Now I am talking hardcore hair splitting stuff here but it is why after extensive head to head testing I decided that the Nokta/Makro units deserve a place in my detector collection. I normally use high power Minelab units, the GPZ7000 getting all the glory this year, but I always have a VLF on hand also to deal with trashy locations where the GPZ would be near impossible to use. And all this summer the Racer rode shotgun while the F75 stayed home. And it did pluck some nice nuggets from some really trashy sites for me. The standard Racer is no slouch as a nugget hunter and the upcoming Gold Racer is going to make some waves.

 

[SouthFLdigger]

Guys i own a Nokta Fors Core and a few Fishers and Teknetics detectors. The Fors Core does not lag in performance in any way as compared to the FTP detectors. The Fors Core works amazingly well in the salt too, which is a big bonus for me, i imagine the Racer is the same. Try out the product and then comment, the Fors Core can be improved but so can all detectors.

 

[Ytcoinshooter]

I was considering adding a light unit with with good out of the box attributes in trash, iron and bad ground. I've had a variety of detectors I got to know well over 30 years. My wants were specific and I took my time researching. If the videos I watched of the Racer detecting through Culpepper Va. dirt and 13+ inches of wet salt beach sand to smack a mine ball were for real....AND the excellent nail board test performance to boot I was intrigued. Try placing a rusty nail ON a silver dime and test. I did that after I got mine and still marvel at the results. After 3 weeks of use I have about 40 hours on it, learning its nuances and objectively evaluating it. My notes are posted elsewhere on the Internet and it has turned out to be a smart purchase and great tool. I just hope I don't start seeing my local competition swinging Makro Racers.
I haven't been over here reading or posting for a long time and stumbled upon this thread. I read everything here and it's really odd the biased comments I've seen from non owners/users.
Thats OK, keep it that way, more missed & masked goodies for me!
HH-Bruce

 

[Tom Slick]

Bruce, Quit telling everyone about the Racer.

 

[ZR2guy]

Personally, I think that the " head-to-head" comparisons topic should be removed. The line between facts and opinions gets pretty fuzzy sometimes. Next thing you know, religious beliefs and ethnicity get brought into it, people get called out and tempers start to flare. By this time, the original topic is ignored. Maybe a topic titled Roper Room would work better. A forum where adults that can't act like adults can hang out and maybe once in a while, talk about metal detectors.

 

[Steve Herschbach]

Adults can have adult conversations without insults. If not, that is why moderators exist. If you follow the forums for enough years, you know which opinions to pay attention to, and which to ignore.

 

[Treasure_Hunter]

Larry, Nokta is a sister company of Makro, Makro and Nokta were owned by 2 brothers and merged this last year and kept both names.. Same company like Chevrolet and GMC.

The Nokta Fors Gold works very well in the gold fields at 15 kHz, its twin the Fors Core can be ground balanced on salt beaches and is very stable and you do not need to turn down the sensitivity to use it on salt beaches either.

Doesn't matter if it is foreign made or not, their detectors work very well...

 

[ZR2guy]

Adults can have adult conversations without insults. If not, that is why moderators exist. If you follow the forums for enough years, you know which opinions to pay attention to, and which to ignore.

Agreed! You are right.

 

[LuckyLarry]

Steve, you made my point, but I am surprised at you. I've been waiting for the dust to settle and the air to clear. Let's do it this way then...

My words:
"One is an unproven toy." I meant it. It (is) a toy, and in my words and in my view, it (IS) still "unproven", and most (but not all) hand-held metal detectors ARE toys, and so far, it does take 2-3 years for the bugs to be worked out of a modern-day metal detector. If in doubt, have a good look at the Garrett AT and Ace series, and tell me how many years it took to work the bugs out of those, and they are still being refined and corrected.

So now let me give everybody some things to think about; And I think I am the only one here that knows (some) of the following too

I worked for the Department of Defense in R&D of electronic/nuclear torpedo warfare command control guidance and doppler enable systems - and sometimes using metal detectors so powerful (I have a Top Secret Clearance, so I can't give out info on how they work) that it would rock people's socks off if they could see how powerful they really are. Sometimes we sent trained seals to retrieve an inoperative nuclear powered (failed) torpedo at the bottom of a canal or bay somewhere, but sometimes a certain type of metal detector was used to locate it too. And no, we can't buy those metal detectors, only the Federal Government can.. I already know the capabilities of many metal detectors, and their inherent capacities too, some of which nobody on this page will ever see, and I know the difference between a serious tool, a hand-held toy, and a hand-held metal detector too. . That's all I can say about that, the details are all top secret. To me, ALL hand-held metal detectors are toys 1st, and a tool 2nd. I stand on that and it makes sense too. But this has been nothing but one of those "let's beat up on someone a bit", and something that happens way too often here too, instead of the more rational and civil "let's try to understand a man's statement better." The best way to learn something is to ask a question, not insult or demean, or misunderstand someone. I don't do that to people and I wouldn't expect it back either.

*****No it doesn't matter (where) it is made, but it does matter how long it will last, how well it will work, how easy it is to get service for, how easy it will be to get different coils for it, how much it costs, and whether it is too difficult to engage with someone who has problems speaking another language well enough, etc. Way too many people complain about one foreign made detector brand's service, and even more complain about detectors made in Asia, but again, that was not my main point. Simply said, I watched a man stab his bayonet right through the 10-ringer one day because his recently on the market detector couldn't find the massive rose gold ring that my cheap Bounty Hunter detector could as I followed in his footsteps. Then of course, he wrapped it around a tree and sent a note with it back to the factory here saying, "I killed it." I try to get people to avoid those situations and that was my main point. I don't nit pic, it's not my style..

Now let's examine your statement Steve;
"You of all people should know that single frequency tech is old tech and running against its limits, in fact your post says just that. Well, any halfway decent company can make a single frequency VLF."

I concur: Read my statement;
"the Fisher F75 is at the very end, the pinnacle of the engineering term "the point of diminishing returns". In other words, it is at the very end of the depth potential spectrum and would require a tremendous amount of additional voltage (Like a Nautilus) to go any deeper."

***Nautiluses commonly use 44 volts to get that extra 1/2" extra depth, but they don't handle high Fe soil well at all, it's a given.

Steve, you and I BOTH know that my statement is true because we both (should know) that it is true. And we most certainly know that we can't crank any more depth into one, because we can't crank any more POWER into one, right? It (and all others) are at the end of "the point of diminishing returns", just like I wrote. George Payne wrote about this in his engineering notes too, our singles and mullti-freq detectors are at the very end of their potentials for depth capabilities.

As far as how long it will take for a metal detector to end its journey of perfection, nobody knows, but most metal detectors do take 2-3 years, just like I wrote, and most of us already know that too. Some detectors are or have been re-engineered for even decades, such as the CZ series.

The end product; I have a great respect for you too Steve, but please don't get ahead of it all, this is not a good place to quarrel about misunderstandings or inadequately explained philosophical viewpoints. Yes, I could have elaborated or expounded on the discussion a bit more, but that was not my intention at all. My purpose was to suggest that someone focus on a metal detector that has already had 10 or more years of proof about its capabilities, rather than to take a risk on one that has considerably less time to prove itself accordingly.

Anyway, you all have fun. And no, I haven't logged in any hours on (any) metal detector, and I never will count hours of use. One last thing. Yes, and although I do not log hours into researching any metal detectors, I have read statements from people here and there, that the metal detector in question does have some troubles with high iron soils. But again, it is too early to say that their statements are true, false, or just made up statements or vendettas or guess work of some kind. Again though, I stand on my statements, hand metal detectors are for the most part "toys", and the longer one is on the market the more we learn about it. It takes awhile for one to prove itself, but that is not a magical number either. And BTW, the deepest-seeking all-metal detector I've ever used was an old Garrett Deepseeker, made in the early 70's, bar none, and it ran in the lower VLF frequency, it a single freq not a multi freq

Peace everyone, and HH
Larry

 

[LuckyLarry]

So now I found this..

To me and in this soil which seems to be on the mild side, the Deus seemed to be the better of the lot, not by much, but seemed (to me) to be a little stronger and more definitive. The Macro and the Fors Core seemed (to me) to be about even.

 

[Steve Herschbach]

No quarrel Larry, you clearly are much smarter and know better than the people who actually do use the "toys". Happy Thanksgiving!

 

[LuckyLarry]

No quarrels here either Steve, you and I both are here to help, it's what we do.. But the truth is in my case, if I had a nickel for every time I was wrong I'd be a very wealthy man.. Happy thanksgiving.. to you, and to the rest of the people here too.

 

[Newfiehunter]

Does knowing how a car operates make someone a better driver? Of course not...Same analogy applies here...Knowing HOW a detector operates when it comes to the internal circuitry will not produce the finds...I wouldn't be able to repair a detector ...To be honest, I know diddly squat about the circuity, circuit boards etc but do I make the finds?...YES! Good finds too! That is what most people on Treasurenet want from their detectors regardless of what detector they use and that is the purpose of this site...

I haven't done a survey but most people would not call their detectors "toys"...Do people call their vehicles they drive, "toys"? NO.....Maybe those who work with Ferrari or Jaguar may say that about our everyday cars we drive to be "toys".....It is all a matter of OPINION and to many my opinion doesn't matter either...Don't care if some people boast of working with the Department of National Defense, have security clearances, Classified Information..or if they claim to have contact with Aliens...

It is all about Metal Detecting...the finds we make and the fun we have doing it....That is all that matters...

 

[3RINGER]

Interesting read....even more interesting is how some view themselves.


I cant post some long list of deeds to show others one thing or another, I'm simply someone (like most probably) who truly enjoys the hobby. I have had the Racer sense spring and seen quickly where it would be used as it pertains to my other units. The blending of tones, use of the OOR in thick iron will produce and has in many outings sense getting it. Had a lot of units over the years....some stayed and some went but when you get something that gets the job done you hold onto it.

The Racer IMO handles iron sites well and set up is simple. Yes I had the same coil problem but after being brought up I had a new one to my door that was better made and it has held up well. Is this the only unit to have...of course not....if this was the only unit you owned would you be alright....yes. This is one toy that I'm glad i added to the arsenal.

 

[supertraq]

Lucky Larry....You don't need to show me a map of my own country or the area where I reside....I know where the Appalachian Mountain range is This map does not represent true soil conditions in my area since soil contrast differently .

So, the question is...Have you or have you not ever tested a Makro Racer? A simple YES or NO will suffice...Be honest...If yes, some can take your advice not to purchase it because it is a toy as you put it...If you haven't, then how can you call the Racer, a "toy"....Many detectors have gliches when first introduced....Why avoid the question?.. Just because you have designed the electronics for a various brand/detector mean you know the circuitry of another...Others like the Racer and that is their choice.....I am no designer by any means and maybe the circuity of all detectors are similar...If I was 100% convinced that the Racer was a good machine, I would have one by now but like you said we have to be careful and that I do agree with..If you avoid the question, and refuse to answer it, then why make a comment on a detector you know nothing about...

Why is the Racer not in your list of metal detectors owned,I sell I remove,I buy I add?

 

[Newfiehunter]

Why is the Racer not in your list of metal detectors owned,I sell I remove,I buy I add?

The reason why I the Racer is not on my list of detectors is because I haven't narrowed it down to which detector I would like to purchase next....My CZ5 is 20 years old now and it serves me very well and know it like the back of my hand...However, the days of this detector is probably numbered and have to make a decision soon on the next one...I have done my research on the Makro Racer and Notka Fors Core...They are impressive especially the Fors Core...Haven't read a negative review of the Fors Core yet, even though there has been some negative reviews of the Racer especially when it comes to the defective coils...I also want to see how the new Omega 8500 will perform...Teknetic detectors has caught my attention ever since I purchased the Eurotek Pro in July which totally impressed me...The warranty is another important consideration. A 5 year warranty over a 2 year warranty is obviously a huge benefit.. I would prefer a detector manufactured in North America since there would be less hassle in getting repairs and to be honest, Nokta/Makro is relatively new compared to the other brands. I want to know for certain what detector will suit me best before I spend my hard earned money on an expensive unit only to find out it is not for me....

 

[Rawhide]

I dont own or use a Racer. Nor have I seen anyone use a Racer here in my area yet. I have owned the F75 for a few years and will say this. It is light but durable. First Texas is great to work with if you need to send the F75 in. I have yet to find anyone with a deeper machine. But Target ID after 7 inches or so can get iffy. Heres something to ponder about the F75. The F75 not only has All Metal mode with threshold and tone adjustments. You will find many modes on the discrimination side also. Boost Process, Cache mode, and more. One last thing, you can also identify back filled dirt with the F75. A great process if your looking for caches.

Now I considered buying the Racer but settled with the AT Pro. AT Pro is totally different than my F75, but I needed the Pro for certain hunts. The F75 is more than capable, but I wanted to see if the pro could produce in certain conditions and it can. I would say the ability to call or send a detector into be repaired is a plus. I know First Texas and Garret do a pretty good job with customer service. I would love to try the Racer in some of the hard soil we have here. Im all for new toys. Yes I call them toys too. But my F75 is used like a tool, as it is a serious machine. Sensitivity and depth bar none.

 

[motohed]

I have to say I have the makro waterproof pointer , I like it hands down better than any other pointer I've had . Saying that I have had or used the so called top amreican brands and moved to the makro after all of them . I think the makro products seem to be built well , But I own an XP Deus now , I've gotten rid of my Garretts and white's and even a couple Fishers . I'm just saying do your research and buy what you choose , try to find someone that has one and try it .