Hello, Ladies and Gents, I have finally saved up the cash to purchase a new detector. My view is never finance your hobbies. Anyway. I have an old CoinMaster that I have had since the late 70"s and it still works. I have spent hundreds of hours detecting, so I'm not new to the sport just a little rusty. Now that I'm retired (disabled vet) and have time to get back into the dirt, I'm looking for a new machine. I don't know anything about the other brands so I'm sticking to the brand I know. I have narrowed it down to a couple of White's.The Spectra VX3 or the DFX300. Any thoughts on these? is there something better? I'm a coin and relic hunter, but I do enjoy prospecting. I've got around $1000 +- to spend. I would like to buy a model that I can grow into and not be limited after I get up and running. Any and all advise will be appreciated and anybody in central Kentucky looking for someone to detect with, just give me a call.
Thanks
Pat
Lots of machines can do a decent job of coinshooting, not quite so many at relic hunting, and only a few at gold prospecting. It's not clear from your post how important the gold prospecting aspect is to you, but the DFX isn't going to do the job. The VX3 isn't going to do a decent job, only a lousy one, besides which those thousand bucks to get back into the hobby should include some money spent on things like a good digging tool or two, and arguably things like headphones and battery chargers. Not to mention club dues, cost for maps, etc. From the thousand dollar perspective the VX3 ain't looking so good.
Pat, you mentioned wanting to stick with the brand you know, but your prior experience with that brand is from a long time ago. A lot has happened in the metal detector industry since then, including at White's. Been there and done that.
In the White's lineup, if what you want is a general purpose machine that will do a respectable job of gold prospecting, that machine is the MXT with an approx. 10 inch elliptical DD searchcoil. It is a modification of the GMT platform which is one of the best gold machines on the market. And the MXT's features and performance go far beyond the 1970's Coinmaster.
I'm not gonna knock White's, I've designed products for them including the MXT, I respect White's as a company, and still have friends there in management positions. However you should be considering products from companies besides White's: after all, a lot has changed since the 1970's.
If you're serious about the gold prospecting part of it, I'd recommend reading my book "Gold Prospecting with a VLF Metal Detector" which is available as a .pdf on both the Fisher and Teknetics websites. Although its production was a Fisher-Teknetics project, it is useful for anyone who is gold prospecting with a metal detector (even PI) or who is contemplating doing so.
If you decide you're serious about gold prospecting, I recommend checking out the Fisher GB's and Tek G2 (which are the same platforms in slightly different configurations). They are dead-serious gold prospecting machines, and probably the best relic hunting machines in their price category. Among single-frequency machines, they have a reputation for being surprisingly good at saltwater beach work. And when it comes to coinshooting, although there are more expensive machines that'll go deeper where there is no masking from iron, the GB/G2's have an reputation for finding the good stuff in trashy situations that more expensive machines missed due to masking. And nowadays, the most available good beeping sites are the ones that have been beeped many times until they were thought to be "hunted out", but weren't because there was so much good stuff still there often at shallow depths that was masked by iron. ......I'm in engineering, not in marketing and not on commission, and that's my salespitch. I'm not saying buy a GB/G2, only that if gold prospecting is an important part of what you want a metal detector to do, these are models that deserve a serious look since they also do other stuff well.
In any case, I hope that you choose well, are happy with what you get, and enjoy becoming a beeperist again in the 21st century. If in the end you decide to stick with White's, please call the factory and tell 'em hello from Dave.
--Dave Johnson
