Nugget hunting with a MXT

[arizonaames]

Has anyone noticed that the more the SAT the less deep it will find a target? The less SAT the deeper it will see a target.

[Willy]

I dunno, the ground here is so bad that I had it at full Hypersat (but still full sensitivity) constantly. Still got plenty deep. I think that a person just has to listen much harder with it cranked up 'cause it gets tuned out so fast. ..Willy.

[arizonaames]

Swinging slower will also be like turning up the SAT. I can remember in Oregon. Sometimes the mineralization would get so bad that one had to reset everything every couple of feet. With the MXT, you can take an average place for ground tracking and lock it in place. This sure beats the old Goldmaster/Vsat that I had for years. It only had manual ground tracking also. I spent more time playing with ground tracking than hunting.

[nuggetshooter323]

The slow retune lower VSAT setting is better for smaller, deeper nuggets, but just like Willy said, sometimes you have to have it set high just to wade through all the hot rocks and cold stones. If you ever get a chance try the GMT, Ithink that for nugget hunting it's better than the MXT. I borrowed an MXT from a friend of mine, and found that the ground tracking, and the iron probability were much better on the GMT. Though, I do think the VDI feature is a nice information to have.

[arizonaames]

The GMT and the GB2 are great machines and better at finding very small nuggets and flakes close to the surface because of their higher frequencies. However, the MXT will go deeper and find nuggets that are larger than a flake because of it's lower frequency, 13.86 kilohertz.

Many gold nuggets are found where there is a lot of mineralized ground. The big difference between gold detectors and coin and relic machines is a variable SAT. The nice thing about the MXT is that the dual control is a discrimination control in Coin and Relic modes but in Prospecting mode it becomes a variable SAT. What this means is that when a signal is sent from your coil and hits the target, it then comes back to the coil and registers a target in a certain time frame. The speed that this happens (Threshold speed) is controlled by the turn of the SAT (dual control in Prospecting mode). You can speed up the recovery to the point that you can turn it up (cw) to the Super SAT +1 though+3. The faster that you run the SAT speed, the less depth that you will get but you will be able to hunt in bad mineralized ground that other machines cannot do. Can one recover some of the loss of depth caused by turning up the SAT? Yes, to some extent. One can turn the gain up until the ground conditions can cause the loss of a good target (experiment with a test nugget) or one can turn down the SAT somewhat and swing the coil slower. I hope that this helps someone understand the SAT on a MXT or other gold machines better. All machines are specialized for what you want to do with them.