christopher-ohio
Active member
Well, I went up the street to an old farmhouse site this afternoon for about 1 1/2 hours where the house was removed that I've hunted to death with many great machines. I didn't expect to find much but mainly wanted to see how the machine worked on ground that I'm very familiar with, including deep iron targets that false high tone on my CZ's, Explorer II, etc...First off, the machine starts up in just a couple of seconds...very nice. The ground balance shows the progression by number percentage and takes at long as previous Explorers. It does tell you what channel it selected. I first tried the coin discrimination pattern but I found that some signals were broken due to partial discrimination. I tried ferrous and conductive sounds. Iron sounds like a coin so I had to use ferrous. I then decided to just use all metal, ferrous sounds after trying conductive for a bit with 18 manual sensitivity. Nice stable, quiet machine....felt a bit lighter and better balanced than the Explorers but it does still have some weight to it...easy to swing. Now the great part...I experienced absolutely no falsing on iron unlike my Explorer II plus I could hunt much faster since the machine was much faster with tones and cursor/numerical ID which locked on targets nice without much bouncing more than a few numbers. Another nice thing, small bits of aluminum can chopped up with a mower came in super low like foil 12-02 to the far left...bigger pieces would ID higher like 12-13, 12-15, 12-17 up to 12-27 depending on how big the piece was. It did seem very sensitive to small items but with very nice separation with the new 11" coil. I only found one coin-a chewed up, only part of a corroded zinc and I was fine with that but I dug absolutely no trash. I'm going to go to a place loaded with clad tomorrow see how it hits coins compared to the EX II. I don't have a sunray probe but the depth guage was right on and the pinpoint was super accurate...do I even need it and add the extra weight?...probably but we'll see. After digging a hole, the target could still be clearly heard swinging the coil back over it unlike an Explorer II. I really, really like the machine so far without any complaints whatsoever. I also had no glare issues with the display. It seems much more powerful than any of the Explorers and I think we are all going to be surprised at it's depth. We'll see what tomorrow brings...HH
Ok I had my say