oldtimerROB said:
Had a look at the CTX and at $2600 it is twice as costly as the Impact but look identical in build quality.Also unlike the Impact we don,t know anyone who has tested it in very high mineralisation on goldfields.The CTX has been put out primarily for beach and park detecting much like the Impact.The Impact is establishing itself as a cheap all rounder able to be used in any environment and as such should appeal to people taking up detecting as a hobby/ or ones without deep pockets, and not professional gold prospectors. You can make up your own mind if the Impact-CTX comparison was a fair one.
You can't really compare the 2 because the CTX uses a frequency with a total of 27 harmonic frequencies, But saying they are both multi frequency machines but that is all the have in common,
In hotter ground from a Prospecting point of view the Impact is streets ahead with it's ground tracking system and it's high sensitivity works better for finding gold due to it's low conductive properties, In this situation the CTX falls short by quite a large margin,
The CTX excels at finding deep silver and in a beach environment and relic hunting the CTX is the clear leader, Neither machine would be the choice of the full time prospector because most of them would use an LF machine where the ground was favourable but mostly they would use the SDC, GPX and the ZED,
Both machines are first class detectors but they are very different from each other, And although the Impact is a high Gain machine even your Air Tests fall short compared to some other VLF's, I know Air tests do not represent true depth but if that extra depth is not there when air testing it won't be there on in ground conditions, That is not saying that the Impact is not powerful because it is,
There was a lot of hype while the world was waiting for the Impact to be released but it was not adopted into the Prospecting community like a few other VLF's over the years, I personally wanted to buy the Impact but from an all out power point of view it just seems to come up short from what I already own, But again where mine falls short the Impact excels but from a Prospecting VLF point of view and for searching for low conductive coins from 2 or 3000 years ago and raw power mine excels even though it does not have some of the bells and whistles of machines designed later, but on the other hand it was built by a Prospector and the best VLF engineer in the business.
Like many I could name, you could keep jumping from one machine to another but you would be better off sticking with it and mastering it over a few years, because there is an old saying, Be wary of the man with only One Gun, because He probably knows how to use it, And detectors are much the same,
I can't count all the miracle VLF's we have been promised since I bought the first model of what I use and now I am using the 4th updated model and still that miracle VLF never happened and nothing new that has come out since then (2010) has done what they said and none of them are an improvement across the board, they have a couple of good features but fall short else where, And it has always been that way, So you either need to stick with what you have or find one that works for you,
J.
