Sounds like the Axiom has little to no adjustments within the slow swing speed as an example?
The 16" x 14" will likely only signal on a pocket or nest of nuggets / lode.
Changing the soil timings ie Fine, Normal, Large and Salt, changes the amount of pulse delay.
Sounds like the widow will be very large to cut out all of the iron targets both cold and hot. The downside will be a lot of smaller low conductive targets like smaller nuggets, lead etc. will also be cut out or dropped out.
Only coils that work on the Axiom are the six coils made by Garrett.
Ok the factory preset setting I can follow that. Perhaps little room for fine tuning?
That is what Garrett makes for the machine. Not sure if other mono coils will work with the Axiom?
Only Garrett coils are compatible with the Axiom at this time.
The manual is available online along with some very good training videos by Steve Herschbach at Garrett.com
I have looked at both a while back and have forgotten some of the details as of today.
Too bad there is not a smaller coil made for the Axiom.
Testing the largest 16" Axiom coil for your ground conditions appears to be the best option and not for finding single small nuggets. Perhaps pockets and nests deposits.
When detecting areas highly likely to have lode deposits, it’s in your best interest to use a detector and coil combo that will pick up float specimens. These typically point to the lode deposit. So I could see trying a larger coil after all other options have been exhausted. Personally I purchased a 11x18 DD coil for my VLF and have found ZERO gold with it. .22 LR bullets are a little difficult to recover with this coil. Not that it will not detect them.
First some would see that not detecting any .22 bullets a blessing and could save hours to days of time. Second if you can't ground balance out the mineralization / iron then stepping up in coil size is a good option if you can work both with the machine / coil with the movement and weight. Third one should only use the larger coil to eliminate what might be there then go for the pickers if you can. Forth working with a number of detectors could bump up the odds of finding different sizes.
Most of the Colorado sites I visit are primarily high altitude, rough terrain, Pleistocene glacial deposits. Some have also had hydraulic mining so there is no rhyme or reasoning. The gold can be anywhere or nowhere with no typical alluvial/fluvial deposit pattern and there are no lode characteristics at all. Due to this glacial action, magnetite is also all over these areas and can be from microscopic to boulder sized with no set natural patterns. The same goes for the millions of hot rocks in the area which are either volcanic or mantle metamorphic rocks of any size. Using larger coils will just result in over saturation and make ground balancing an even bigger joke.
I have seen people do quite well hunting large boulders. With that being said it is up to the miner to come up with methods and plans of approach for any given surface ground conditions.
Your 11" x 18" coil could be useful on finding seams of iron in rock and hopefully there is detectable other minerals around that iron seam that the small coil could pick up on?
You can eliminate the ground and the hot rocks both if you follow the instructions. Watch this Garrett video.
The question about the Axiom 14X16" coil came from a Colorado prospector. He probably has hunted some of the same sites that I have. Detecting at 10,000+ feet altitude in boulder fields on steep mountain sides is just not a place for really big coils especially when the boulder piles are 10 to 20 feet high and breaking an ankle, leg or arm from a fall or causing a landslide is really easy to do if one loses their balance because their detector is simply too heavy and unwieldy to handle in those conditions.
Reality Check
