Hi Eagles,
You said...
"I've spent the better part of a day looking through the forums and have become more confused the more I read"
Well Eagles, welcome to the Treasure Net . It's not so easy to distinguish good and bad advice, further complicated by (a) most members have their personal favourites, and (b) for every question to 10 members, you will receive 10 different opinions.
There are a number of "all-around" units that would satisfy your requirements. MXT would be an excellent choice. Why? Ease of use, solid performance, good selection of coil sizes...both concentric and DD, solid build backed by a no nonsense company that stands behind their products.
MXT is versatile. It offers real prospecting capability, plus coin and relic hunting discrimination modes. The discrimination modes offer visual target ID with confidence indication and excellent iron ID resolution. At a modest 14 kHz operating frequency, it will not signal over the very tiniest nuggets below 0.3 grains (which is quite tiny) with the 6"X10" DD coil, but then again, smaller more sensitive coils are available.
The 6"X10" DD coil is versatile as it can be used with very good target separation in trashy areas, for both nugget/coin shooting. The larger coils, for example, the 12" concentric will add measurably to depth ability over coin size targets, rivalling the F-75 stock 11" coil...except that the 12 inch coil loses sensitivity to small gold that F-75/T-2 stock coils will signal over. The 14 kHz operating frequency will also handle higher mineralized soils better by comparison to the high frequency nugget units. Its ground balance autotracking system is as good as anything currently available in terms of accuracy and speed. Plus it can be "locked" when not needed or wanted, and this feature can be handy when into hot rock patches or over man made iron residues.
The discrimination modes offer you the ability to have conventional discrimination (trigger centre position C&J mode) or to notch out pulltab range conductivity (trigger in forward position) in C&J mode. In Relic mode, with the trigger in centre position, tone ID will follow the disc setting...everything below is low tone, everything above is high tone. With trigger forward position, there is a choice. (a) with disc set to zero, iron will signal with a low tone and all other conductivities will signal with a high tone. (b) with discrimination dialed-in, targets signals falling below that disc setting will be suppressed/eliminated. Trigger squeezed in either disc mode offers pinpointing/depth reading.
The prospecting mode has a subtle % iron visual ID accompanied by an audio iron "grunt" feature (trigger in centre position) when very confident the target is indeed iron composition. The trigger forward position allows the user to hear signals without the iron grunt feature. The trigger squeezed position turns off auto ground tracking when evaluating a target signal. This prevents tracking into the target, ensuring the best audio response is provided.
MXT provides an adjustable Threshold retune rate control (SAT) for varying soil mineralization in Prospecting mode only, in addition to Gain control, and adjustable Threshold control used for all three modes. MXT offers an auto tracking ground balance switch that selects either salt/alkalai, lock, or normal ground tracking options. Auto tracking operates in all modes, and provides enhanced stability over extreme/variable ground.
Jim.
Digg Mo
