A buddy of mine bought a package deal of used whites gear so he could get a coil for his mxt pro in the package was a Whites DFX so he offered to sell it to me. I'm upgrading from a Garrett Ace 250 I tried it out and it seems to be very user friendly. Any thoughts on this machine?
I use a DFX and found it difficult to understand when I first got it. One day everything finally clicked and there's no way I'd ever let this thing go. There's a couple of key settings you need to know and not much else.
Keep your AC around 75 and DC around 50 for more depth. Adjust AC for chattiness, but you should be able to run between 65 and 75 with no problem and raise the preamp gain until the machine becomes unstable.
Learn to use mixed mode. I couldn't take it at first, but now I never turn it off. It runs the AC and DC channels at the same time and you get the best depth since you can hear the DC all metal channel at the same time. You'll find the deep stuff using this mode. The all metal channel will go deeper than the AC discrimination channel. It's probably not necessary if you're coin and jewelry hunting in a park, but in a field and relic hunting it's a must.
Recovery Speed, sweep speed and ground filters are the other three settings you need to learn. I run a higher recovery speed which makes the target sound more defined and crisp. The lower the setting, the longer and drawn out the signal tone is. So I run it higher for a quicker tone response. Sweep speed and ground filters are related settings. The less filters you have, the more noise will be let into the receive coil. Sweep speed is set to fine tune this. Play around with some buried targets and find the settings that give you the best signal response.
I'm by no means a master of this machine, but hopefully the info I provided helps out a little bit.
The DFX is awesome and I wish I had gotten into metal detecting years ago. Good luck. You'll have fun with it.
