I live and hunt around Birmingham Alabama.
I have mineralized red dirt clay, mineralized black dirt, natural iron, iron bits nuts, bolts, nails and pieces from knocked down houses and neighborhoods most everywhere plus iron from microscopic to small to large pieces of iron slag left over from the iron and steel industries that built this town and ran for over 100 years.
Here depth is not great but luckily most great targets aren't all that deep...The 5-7" level has all kinds of fantastic targets and old coins, a surprising amount of them as a matter of fact.
The issue here is really masking, not depth, so many so called hunted out spots are not actually hunted out but the targets were so masked and skewed nobody ever went after them.
I have done amazingly well here despite all of that using a couple of Tesoros and a couple of Fishers, specifically the F70.
Using that one I figured out a few things and broke the code, somewhat, and I was able to cull a lot of those better targets out of the ground and some were surprisingly deep.
I did this by learning a new language and behavior which took me many, many hours of experimentation and digging.
Then I got the Nox.
The thing just handles my crazy environment better.
Not perfect, it likes iron but there are "tells" and the more I hunt with it the more behavior I am noticing about many targets including iron and targets masked by massive iron.
I did pretty good with the Nox learning it with the standard coil and it's unmasking abilities shocked me but then last fall I got the 6"...it changed the game considerably for me around here.
Using the 6" coil and some weird settings I found the Zippo lighter in an area in a park I have scoured 100 times.
It was solid, pinpointed perfectly but only in one really tiny spot and I dug it but my Propointer went nuts when I stuck it back in the hole to check after retrieving it.
Underneath this thing was something massive, the pinpointer was hitting on this thing loud for a good square foot around the lighter.
I have no idea how the Nox zeroed in on this thing but it did...I think the sniper coil might have had a lot to do with noticing it.
I know this rig had a lot of hype but I didn't buy one because of hype...I bought one because a buddy got one first and the first time we hunted together I saw what it could do in this dirt and I was shocked.
This is my experience at a certain special site I hunt, it is as close to a scientific laboratory as I can get.
I have a neighbor across the street that gave me the ok to hunt his small lawn and I have been doing that for over two years now.
I mean years, not seasons...we can hunt through the entire winter down here.
My personal space, nobody but me has ever hunted it.
I spent hours at this home on some hunts, sometimes I just hit it a little walking by it on the to a park that is just behind it.
When I say I have scoured this place for close to 100 hours of more I am not exaggerating.
I used a Compadre, a Mojave, a Red Racer with two coils and an F70 with 5 coils plus a Vaq and 3 coils including a concentric sniper.
At first it was easy, I found a walker half on my second target the first time I hunted there with a Mojave and many wheats and clad and other cool tokens and things in the months after but eventually things slowed down.
I started experimenting with the F70 and the others for over a year before I got the Nox.
Every setting I could think of, every strange repeating behavior I tried to notice, every coil and all of it got their turn.
I dug a few more masked coins when it went really dark there but they were few and far between.
I wondered why I never found any more silver there but, whatever.
Over a year ago I started to dig almost everything, the iffy ones might be good targets of good targets might be masked by trash or iron so I proceeded to dig as much as I could stand just to get another shot at something great but for a long time not much popped up.
Then I finally found a war nickel under a bush with the Fisher but no more silver after that.
I hunted this place several times with the Nox and the standard coil at first, again I found a few more coins, some wheats and others and not huge but I consider every target that comes out of here a big victory.
In September something wonderful happened, I was at this house with the Nox and my new small coil and I got a very tight, short high tone but in the middle of a cacophony of other numbers and sounds but I could eventually zero in on that sort of repeating high tone and dug down.
Under a root about 5" deep was not just one high tone target but two...plus the two rusty nails I dug out as I was digging down to them.
I had gotten coils over this exact spot countless times using all kinds of detectors and coils and never had any indication these dimes were down there because I would have gone after them long ago.
The Nox could get a piece of them but I think the small coil did the heavy lifting on this one.
After that I practiced looking for that same behavior everywhere and I started finding targets everywhere.
On a trip back to this lawn after getting pretty decent at this technique and this is what came out of that lawn.
Not all of it in this pic but about 70% of the coins did...The merc definitely surprised me.
This lawn was not so hunted out after all.
A few weeks later I hit this lawn again.
Same deal, Nox, sniper coil, sense at around 20, recovery on 4, iron bias pretty low, 5 tones with a special user program where all the coin number plus nickels all stuck out with loud high tones to notice things better.
Again, going slow and looking for that repeating behavior I got one, opened a hole and only a couple inches down I find this looking back at me.
This site, among others, proves to me how awesome the Nox is in my dirt and how much that sniper coil seems to matter.
I have many hours with the big coil and probably more with the sniper and the sniper hasn't left the bottom of my rod since I got it.
For many reasons and many of them silver.
