Hi guys, my ears were burning so I figured my name must have been used in a post. ha ha ha
Here is how my story goes with the coils that I bought. I started out with the stock concentric coil. It worked pretty well but I do have to say that I hardly ever found any nickels with it and that may have been because I was still green with the detector. After about two months I bought the 10.5" HF coil because I was planning on doing some beach detecting. I figured I would try out the new coil rather than waiting until I got to the beach. Almost immediately I felt it was leaps and bounds above the stock coil. Guys, please keep in mind that I am making these statements based on using the detector in the soil composition in my areas but you may have the stock coil and love it. I don't dislike that coil, it just hasn't given me the best results.
I was so impressed with the 10.5"HF coil and although it worked great for me, it was a little too much coil to use close to picnic shelters. That's when I bought the 6" HF DD. Obviously, it's pretty much the same as the 10.5" but just smaller.
Buying the 10.5" and 6" MF coils was pretty much on a whim. I did some more reading about coils and was really second guessing that maybe I would do even better with the MF coils. I closed my eyes and hit the submit button on a Minelab dealer's website and a few days later the MF coils showed up along with the charges to my debit card.
After putting many hours on them in my soil, I was able to determine that these two coils were different than they high frequency counterparts. I'm not really a fan of the 6" MF coil. I just think that the HF does a better job at the same task. The 10.5" coil seems to give me a little better depth than the HF coil but also seems to pickup more can slaw. It's also gives you less precise readings on nickels than the HF coil.
My favorite coil is the 10.5" HF DD. It's just a great all around coil. The readings are sharp and reliable. If I feel that I have fully detect an area and go from the HF coil to the MF coil, I will very rarely find a large number of additional coins. If I fully detect and area with the MF coil and then go back over the same area with the HF coil, I will typically find a notable number of additional coins.
If I had to list the coils in the order in which I use them, they would be as follows.
10.5" HF DD
6" HF DD
10.5" MF
6" MF (probably only used this four times during the 2011 detecting year)
9" Stock (I have not used this in the last year)
I will always start out with the 10.5" HF coil. If thing aren't going very well, I will switch to the MF coil after and hour or so and see if maybe I'm dealing with different soil than I am used to. Having all of the coils doesn't make you a better detectorist, but knowing when to use them and their characteristics can help things a little. You would think that if I went detecting with someone that only had one coil that I could run circles around them. I can assure you that is not the case. Although I usually do pretty well, I was detecting with Hotrod53, our mother and uncle. We were all using 705's. Hotrod53 and Mom were using the gold pack coil, our uncle was using the stock coil and I was switching between two or three coils. Mom found about 2 indians and a few other coins, Hotrod53 found I believe 4 indians and a seated dime. My best coin was just a 40 something dime.
