You could find gold with the stock coil too. If you're talking nuggets, hunt in AM mode with the sensitivity cranked. What helps is, before even going out hunting, is to get some test targets (if you don't have gold then lead will do) and practice a bit with in-ground targets and the different modes. If you use gold, don't just chuck down a ring.. the toroidal shape will skew your results.. cut a chunk and maybe beat it a bit flat.
I'm going to preach a bit of heresy here, but bear with me: practice with the disc. and iron silencer mode too. There are situations where, especially with strong signals mixed in with abundant iron trash, the disc./ID function could be useful. Yup, 'dig it all' is how the saying goes.. but chest deep in a river with tons of trash tends to promote 2nd thoughts. I was hunting up in Alaska's Arctic Circle (N. of Coldfoot and abt. 7 m in the mountains) with a Fisher CZ 6a and managed to pull out more gold than 2 other guys with Minelab SD2200d's. Judicious use of the disc. mode ID function really helped, as did running it on the ragged edge (in salt mode due to ground conditions).
That's another thing I almost failed to mention.. get that puppy running so hot that it's almost unstable. With a bit of practice you'll be able to differentiate between ground noise and a legitimate target. If you read some posts re. the MXT and the smallest sized gold people can find with it, there's often mention of 1-3 grains. EXCUUUUSE ME! I actually weighed some of the stuff found with my MXT and we're talking about a low of 1/3 grain; even smaller if hunting bedrock that's formed into thin plates and listening for the tell-tale crackle. Then again, I'm not talking nice 'n smooth operation here, but it gets results. I don't think that Fisher makes a DD coil for the 1270, so the smaller coil would probably allow you to crank up the gain a bit more to find the smaller stuff.
The pic shows one of my test nuggets. It's about 1 grain and wafer thin. My MXT just bangs on it and the Garrett GMH III just barely detects it with the stock 8" coil (lying on the ground, MXT VDI abt. 84 and F70 vdi of 91). This is with a lot of EMI too. ..Willy.
