Araratgold said:
JP,
I will be interested to see how you go with it, is it lighter than the GPZ19 ?
How does Minelab sit with your use of these coils, bypassing their security measures ?
Cheers, Rick
Hi Rick, I think you will like it in your ground where there is soil cover, in gravelly ground where there is no soil cover and the gravel is full of Magnetite and Hematite they will saturate quite readily. If you want to use General/Difficult you will soon discover it hates being rubbed or bumped, I found even sprinkling small gravels onto the coil caused some resonance responses through the audio, so they are quite bad for that!
Depth is good and of course it is a pleasure to use weight wise. I personally would have preferred a solid coil rather than a spoked design, as the edges of the spoke sections are always bad for sticks and rocks clipping the edges, even the GPZ 19 coil is bad for this (thankfully NuggetFinder make a solid skid plate for them).
My one is a Spiral wound, I actually prefer the spirals for sensitivity and having less rub and bump sensitivity compared to the traditional wound coils. The guy who builds them has not got back to me yet on why this is so. Spiral wound is a lot heavier though. My one also has a mod to get rid of the signal off the Ferrite, so will be a lot quieter in High X soils. It adds weight but runs a LOT quieter!!
As for your last question I am not at liberty to fully discuss this subject as it is ongoing. There have been reports of some coils bringing up a coil not connected alarm on some units which is NOT good, how Minelab would view this if a detector was to come in for repair I am unsure but am pretty sure they can easily tell by any damage that might result. Mine have been OK so far except for the odd Coil Overload message when changing Gold Modes and Ground Type Modes, I now just lift the coil into the air while changing modes to avoid the coil being directly coupled to highly mineralised ground. I have also discovered there is quite a bit of variation in these coils when comparing like for like, not sure if this is due to them making changes or just the difficulties in hand making them, either way one coil will be very good to use and the other average. The ground I tend to work is extremely variable and has high X signal, all detectors have their own behaviours in this type of ground.
In the right locations the coils will be beneficial purely for the weight reduction and variety of size options, especially the smaller ones in tighter places. Targeting quieter soils or areas that have a cover of quieter soils overlaying mineralised gravels are the best for these coils. I pinged a 8 gram chunk with the X 17 Spiral missed by me many times using the GPZ19 coil, this coil was really nice to use at this location in General/Difficult and slammed the 8 grammer really well!
JP
erfect: 
