I was only able to spend almost an hour hunting with my new 12 x 10 SEF butterfly coil this weekend. I had scheduled 2 hours but a home crisis cut me short early. This is what I can tell you so far:
Regards weight - it isn't any heavier than my new Cleansweep coil. Handles fine on the end of the detector.
Regards ground balance - it doesn't need any more ground balance adjustment range than my Cleansweep coil does. In fact, it wasn't any further off balance than the Cleansweep coil was when I first put it on. So yes, my Golden can be manually balanced to run this coil just fine without a trip to Tesoro.
Regards sensitivity - I was able to run the gain at Max or into the red boost zone with very little EMI falsing. There was one little 4 foot area where it chattered just faintly, but other than that one spot, it ran smooth and silent.
Regards pinpointing - it pinpoints just like any other DD coil. If you are familiar with DD coils, then you would not have any pinpoint issues. If you have never used DD coils, then you would have to learn how to they work. I pinpoint in Disc mode off the toe of the coil and had no issues. I didn't use the all metal mode for pinpointing because I have it supertuned.
Regards discrimination - The only changes I needed to make was a slight adjustment to my notch width to keep my gold tone in the range I prefer to run it. Other than that I had no issues with discrimination other than the normal ones that are common with DD coils.
Regards depth - This is still pending as I didn't get a change to hunt deep targets this go around. It did hit good on the middle range 5 to 6 inch targets but I didn't get a chance to hunt for the deeper 7-9 inch targets, so that will be pending.
Regards Overall performance - My first impressions are positive. It handles well as far as balance and weight, it hit well on the targets I did find. Pinpointing wasn't an issue. The only negative note was that for some of the deeper targets I recovered (5" to 6" range) the target signal would sometimes go quiet in the hole. I didn't have time to experiment with this to see if it was a ground mineral issue or a target orientation issue. I'll have to look at this some more when I get time.
Overall I find it to be a positive addition to my other coils.
HH
Mike
Fisher F5 - Whites DFX / Bigfoot combo - Minelab Explorer SE Pro - ETPro - Tesoro Compadre
