Congratulations on your purchase. I got one about 3 weeks ago. I have been out 7 times now and I'm getting pretty use to it, even though I haven't yet found anything of real value. (About $8 in clad, 3 junk rings, 2 junk bracelets, toy cars, spoons and other typical junk beach items.) Right now I am primarily a beach hunter. Once I figured out how to build my own mode, I took all the gold and silver I have found over the years with other detectors and built a mode by rejecting everything and then accepted those signals as good targets. It was a cool and informative process. I have a gold ring that rang up as a 12-22 on the Fe-Co scale. However, as I moved the target away from the coil the Fe-Co numbers change. The further away the target, ie. the deeper the target, the more erratic the Fe-Co numbers are. When I was finished accepting the Fe-Co numbers of all my gold and silver treasures from close to the coil to just barely detectable, I had a mode that was almost exactly like the out of the box Minelab Beach Mode already in the detector. I did change the tones from 50 conductive to the Fe-Co combined tones (5 tones), but otherwise it is close enough to being the same that I just use the stock Beach mode. It has been a lot of fun trying to figure it out and optimize its performance. Overall I am pleased. Hope you enjoy. By the way, you can go onto the minelab web site and download the users manual and Exchange 2 program even before you get the detector. I had read the manual twice before mine arrived. Good luck with your new equipment. Papa
or find a payment plan for one. It has many features that are appealing. I have done so well with the Etrac that the CTX has got to be incredible! I'm starting to build a detector arsenal 
might even look for an Xterra too.
