My experiences so far with the new Z19:
1: YES it is heavy, but compared to the early miners and the work they did how can people possibly complain.
2: YES the open spoke coil is a pain in heavy grassed and wooded areas, easily fixed by attaching Perspex to the bottom.
Remember back when the Z first came out, nothing but complaints people ditching them for a loss, well I am one that believes in ML's technology and the amount of R&D that goes into designing the detectors and coils [a bunch of smart people over there]. People must have patience and really learn the ZVT technology and listen and interpret what the detector is telling you, remember the Z is a totally different beast to the GPX series and expecting to run the detector with a perfect threshold is not going to exploit the ZVT technology to its maximum potential. I look at the Z much like a Super VLF machine and you will only start seeing great result by unleashing ZVT and running the Z in
Normal mode and not difficult. This is where the 19 comes into its own due to the geometry of the new coil Normal runs much quieter then the 14 on the same ground.
Now for my 10 hours of work so far put into the coil. I went back to an old patch in Talbot that has been very kind to me and selected an area 25m x 25m to do a comparison between both the 14 and 19 coil.
Detector settings for 14 and 19: [I ran the same settings for both coils]
Gold Type: High Yield
Ground Type: Difficult / Normal
Sensitivity: 13 6
Smoothing: Off
Threshold: 26
GB: Auto
Volume: 2
Volume Limit: 4
1. I gridded the area in both Difficult [no targets], and Normal [no targets] using the 14 and came up with nothing. Happy I hadn't missed anything
2. I then gridded the same area using the 19 coil and came up with difficult [no targets] and normal [4 targets], I re-checked in difficult [0 targets]. Without disturbing the ground I connected the 14 coil and re-ran over the 4 targets, I could just make out 1 target in Normal and cranking the sensitivity up to 17, however the EMI and ground noise I believe would have caused me to miss it if I didn't already know the target was their.
3. I scraped 4 inches off the surface of all 4 targets and the 14 coil in Normal/ Sens 6 picked up them all up
.
4. I reconnected the 19 coil as I wanted to test pinpointing with the coil on the targets. I found it very good and with the major advantage of the spoke design and being able to see the TX/RX overlap on the leading edge and use it as the pin pointer. It worked a treat and I could be happier for such a large coil.
Now for the Targets.
The first target turned out to be a piece of lead from I think a .22 or something similar.
The [3] remaining targets turned out to be:
Gold 5g @ 12 inches [River Worn]
Gold .5g @ 4 inches [River Worn]
Gold 1.2g @ 8 inches [Reefy]
Why both Reedy and River Worn in the same area I cant explain but my previous finds have been a mixture of both.\
All I can say is that I am going to persist with the coil as I believe it has a lot of potential and hopefully ML will also release a software update to further enhance the capabilities for the Z.
Rgds
tryhard.