3bet said:
Monte,
I appreciate your input and always read through your posts with great detail.
I hope at least some of my posts are helpful.
3bet said:
mostly I am coinshooting at an old town in my area. In the mid 1800's it had a population of 15,000 and now it is around 750. Much of it is protected and I am going to do my first door to door permission check tomorrow. I do enjoy finding old relics, old toy cars, I really just enjoy being outside and digging up the past.
I, too, enjoy finding 'relics' or 'artifacts' and that's actually what prompted me to get started in metal detecting. I had been tilling my Mom's garden area and an old coffee pot got bound up and mangled in the tiller tines. It had a patent date on the bottom of 1862, if I remember correctly, and that was back in the years when many of us spent a lot of time watching western movies and all the TV western-themed programs. I was also intrigued by many of the older coins I would get in change as a kid and that had me interested in old coins.
Buffalo nickels and Indian Head cents were still actively carried and spent in my youngest years, and I recall leaving Kindergarten and stopped at a corner market on the way home and I got a Barber dime in change. That was the first time I recall seeing a Barber coin, and it was an 'old' coin, even to a kid in '54. Then I encountered some 'V' nickels in an out-of-use machine my grandparents had in their basement.
Yes, older coins interested me, and they interest me today, too. I am mainly a Coin Shooter, taking modern 'flash money' in local urban settings, if that's all the sites I have to hunt, but my preference is to find urban renovation or gain access to older private property, and mainly get away to old sites that are rural and forgotten. I've been seeking older places since I hunted my first ghost town on May 4th of '69, and the past 45½ years of old-site coin hunting has been,
and is, rewarding.
3bet said:
I would pick my F5 over the ATP almost any day.
I have used both, and evaluated the AT Pro, and your F5 would be my pick, as well, between those two models.
3bet said:
it will find a BB at 6 inches and yet will still get a quarter in the 8-9 inch range. I also like the all metal mode while still incorporating VDI numbers. I also use the phase readout to help determine if it's junk or not. It has independant threshold. I have not seen much use for the confidence meter after about 250 hours on the machine.
I don't use "confidence bars" but I do like to have a 'proper' Threshold adjustment, and I rely on the VDI numeric read-out rather than the Target ID suggestions. I don't use a "phase readout" to make junk/no-junk decision, instead I rely on hearing an audio response, then quickly reference the VDI read-out and
sometimes rely on a 2-Tone audio ID to
help classify a potential iron-type target. One or two quick re-sweeps to confirm my suspicions and it time to recover the target.
My MXT All-Pro is my primary-use model, but I still grab my MX5 most of the time when I get out to hunt a site. That's because it is simple and handy and provides the information I want. In the FTP products, although I like the Fisher F5, my personal favorite is the Teknetics Omega. A kind of 'simplified' F5 which rewarded me with a lot of really good performance in most of the sites I hunt. The MX5 took its place, however, due to a few things, such as the backlighted display, having a zero-Disc. setting, and mainly because it has the MXT type circuitry and shares the same coils with my #1 detector.
3bet said:
the only think the ATP has is waterproofing.
It is submersible, if a person wants that, but I've also heard the reports of leaks. I didn't like the one I evaluated because I didn't want to have to purchase an adapter in order to use my personal preference headphones, plus the fact that the gray-scale background and dinky sizes display read-out is a bit difficult for my older bad eyes to see.
3bet said:
I reach for my F5 90+% of the time unless I am park hunting mor small gold jewelry. then the ATP is obviously superior. Finding small lower conductors in the 5-6 inch range.
I wasn't impressed with the AT Pro when I evaluated it and checked it against models I had at the time on gold jewelry. Those were the MXT Pro, Classic ID, IDX Pro, Omega, and a Tesoro Bandido II µMAX. Matter of fact, the Omega did a very good job of hitting on gold jewelry, just like my Classic series models have, and the Omegas I used kept up their part of the deal when I hit sites and averaged 12 gold rings a year just from playgrounds.
3bet said:
I was going to get a gold bug pro just for my trips out west once ayear to see my family. Plus being able to use the 5 inch coil on my F5 and the 11DD on the GBP makes it seem like an esy next machine.
Why take a Gold Bug Pro to go visit family? Are you going out west to hunt for the elusive gold nuggets, or is it due to the lighter weight and compact size? I think it would be best to take along a detector [size=small](two if possible)[/size] that you are more familiar with that have a proven track record. Of course, if one model was an MX5, that would be my strong suggested unit to travel with.
3bet said:
GBP or MX5, I am still deciding. maybe once the tones issue seeems to completely go away.
The Tone ID issue was resolved long, long ago. Buy any new MX5 and you're fine.
3bet said:
besides, I still have 225$ in finds before I can dish out 500 for a machine. I don't buy a new machine until finding that much in the ground.
Well, if you only need $225 in "flash money" from detecting finds, and if you're close to any larger metro areas, just get out there and get at it when the weather is huntable. If I lived back in the big metro area or Portland, Oregon, that wouldn't take too long with all the parks and schools .... if I put in the time and effort. Fourteen months ago I moved over to a little town in Eastern Oregon with a population of about 550 to 600, and the closest bigger town of maybe ±15,000 or so is 57 miles to the west or 54 miles to the east. Those towns don't have the number of parks and schools or people to lose things as the bigger metropolitan areas do.
Good luck in your search for the extra shopping change.
Then again, 'therover' had a great suggestion, too.
therover said:
Then take a step forward and get an MXT-Pro, get the 5.3 Whites concentric coil as well as an SEF 8x6 DD coil, along with the stock and you won't need anything else.
In my desire to help promote the MX5 which I really like, and since it was a pick between it or another model, I couldn't help but promote it as the detector to buy.
That said, I totally agree with 'therover' that you could simply part with some of what you currently own and move up a step from the MX5 to the MXT All-Pro. I have a 12" coil in my back-back detector bag that I tote extra coils and rods in, for the times I need it. My primary use search coils are the 9" Concentric 'spider' coil for more open, lower-target sites, and the 6½" diameter Concentric [size=small](the 5.3 Bullseye)[/size] for 90+% of my detecting. make that your primary-use detector and you might not need or want another, but if you do, there are some good back-up models out there. One being the MX5 which shares the same search coils.
Enjoy the decision making, and since you don't have the $$$ on hand now, make an effort to find a dealer or two, or a couple of users of models like the MXT All-Pro and MX5 so you can compare them and their performance afield. See what they offer and how they might make a good fit in your detector battery.
Monte
