First off the Sun Ray probe works just fine, almost too fine. It's real stable and quiet to the point I had to touch it to metal to realize it was even working. For a second I thought it was not working, I mean quiet and stable, much more than on the SE. As for the ETrac itself, well, At this point, after only swinging it for five hours, Honestly, I would have rather had my old SE with this faster processor. When I brought the ETrac into dense iron that I pulled two Indians and a button from the night before with my SE, it choked hard with it's current coin pattern, I mean completely nulled out for 45 seconds at a time. I had it set in auto sens, dense trash, fast, conductive tones, set to difficult ground....all of this I am assuming are the settings I should have been using, again, assuming. For all I know, I might have it set up crooked. In it's absolute defense, I was in all metal with my SE, in FERROUS tones, the night before, hearing everything, waiting to pounce on the high tone like a cat. The bad thing, is I was using the exact same Pro coil with both, as I haven't taken the new one out of the box yet. The same shafts, batteries and coils all seem to work with the new ETrac. Basically, if you're in real dense trash AND you are going to use a discrimination pattern, I am guessing that you would have to go to a smaller coil. That's my next hunt and may blow my mind, so we'll see. I tried the ETrac in all metal, in both ferrous tones and conductive tones. Several targets I swung over in ground gave a reading in ground that was different than after it was out of ground, which is a heavy argument against hunting with "tight" discrimination, apparently the ground mineralization and nearby targets still effect the ID in ground some. That nail/dime test is pretty until you turn the coil 90 degrees in which you only get the null. It also starts to null if the coil is more than 4 inches from both, that might have something to do with the ground I had them on, so that is not Gospel, I will check again on clean ground. One other thing about the nail test is if a dime or any target other than iron and iron are on the hot line of the coil (up and down), I only got the null, which is why I believe the 11 coil is not going to be the dense trash coil. Nothing sounded "flutey" to me but I may have been staring way to hard at the screen. Speaking of which, I am hoping there's a way to list the con # first and the ferrous # second as what is the sense of seeing a 12 first, when the conduct number is more important? We could inverse the #'s on the previous models, so I am assuming that we can now. It does false some, in real heavy iron, but I would expect that. Twice I dug a ten inch hole that read in coin land only to find large iron. Hunting with this thing with heavy discrimination feels allot like driving a sports car without fifth gear, a whole lot of power being stymied. There has got to be some settings that let this thing loose and I will find them. Factory presets is good for the brother in law who wants to "check" out what your hobby is like and the wife who wants to see what all the fuss is about, but they are not going to fly in the trash that I hunt. In all fairness I have no business taking a new machine that I don't know into dense trash and expecting miracles but I was expecting a great deal more than I got, that's for sure. And yes I did hunt with it in "open" areas in ground I wasn't familiar with (my dealers site), I dug three pull tabs at 12-23, & 12 -24, one dime and one penny (modern at about 5 inches), oh, and my best find, a pistol minni-ball about three inches deep. His site was almost kill the grass dry and pounded for 15 years by some of the best Explorer and Sov users. You could tell by the absolute absence of clad. The processor is way faster, the screen updates quickly, I don't think I would call it "real time", but close, just slow enough for you to be able to follow it, any faster and you couldn't. Problem is: I DON'T WANT TO STARE AT A SCREEN, I WANT MORE TONES WITH MORE VARIABILITY SO THAT I DON'T HAVE TO STARE AT A SCREEN AND I CAN CONCENTRATE ON MY COIL CONTROL AND MOVEMENT AS THAT IS HOW YOU METAL DETECT IN TRASH. So I will find a way to do that with this machine or I will put it back in it's box and sell it to someone who isn't as serious about this as I am. People wonder why I don't post finds, well, quite simply, I am lazy and anyone, with any detector can make great finds with nothing more than great research, but when you pull an Indian head or a Seated out of a hole with 5 nails in it, that had just gave you the tiniest smidgen of a signal, well then your using these machines to their fullest potential, and that's my goal and my reward. The ETrac is an Explorer and it was made by Mine Lab and apparently, I am going to the bottom of the learning curve once again. Maybe using a small coil in long audio? I just have to figure it out. My ground is on the dry side, but it was the night before too. Not trying to discourage anyone, but for me, I miss lots of tone variance in all metal and I am not a big fan of "let the machine do it" dummy detecting. It is way easier for me to pick around the nails when I can hear them and with discrimination and a null, it is way difficult to wiggle them out. I haven't made up my mind yet, who knows, maybe this thing will really impress me on my next hunt.
