DetectingWales.com

Hi all, I have a minelab sovereign xs which is great on the wet sand and I'm told it's also great on pasture, but the land I have just got permission on is either in stubble or 1 and 2 year old stubble direct drilled with grass and has a lot of iron on it. Is there a detector more suited to this type of land? Unfortunately a CTX or a Deus is beyond my pocket so would something like an explorer or quatro be any better or would I be better off saving my pennies and just working slower?

slower will help but an Explorer will make easier work of it ;)

Hi Old Pete, the xs is well suited for it mate, stick an Ultimate coil on and you will have an awesome machine  :o even this years stubble is beginning to rot down now and with a bit of frost it will be well detectable. Presumably if it's still in stubble it will be seeded next spring so plenty of time for searching?? I had this combination for many years and worked the fields with Bronze Age right through to medieval. I have the CTX  and the Deus now but still miss the sovereign. PS what coil are you using at the moment

I'm using the Minelab BBS1000 10" coil.  I was just wondering if there were items that I am missing that I might find with a different detector.

Hi Geoff, in what way would an explorer make it easier work? Also what's the difference between the XS, the II and the SE?.........sorry if I'm asking questions that you've answered a hundred times before :-[

Your using the same coil I had with my set up,I wouldn't have thought you would be missing much, although I can defiantly say that when I changed my coil to the Ultimate my find rates did improve  :o no doubt in part to better ground coverage but depth as well, As Geoff said a slower speed will help, although I did have an Explorer for a while I found it played my shoulder up at the time and I certainly did not master it and I'm sure Geoff and others would advise as to whether it would be beneficial to upgrade, but as you say more expense If you decide to purchase an Ultimate I still have mine so PM me, it's been in my cupboard gathering dust for a while and is no good to me now, but get more advice as I do not want to sell you it if you do not really need it perhaps others on D/W will help, good luck anyway Pete ;)

I'm speaking from the point of view of the iron, there are few machines that can hit as deep as the Sov's and with the Ultimate coil the sensitivity to small items isn't to be sneezed at but if you are plagued with a lot of iron then a larger coil is a backward step in this regard, the Sov suffers in one area and that's that you can't turn off your iron mask and keep tones so unless you slow right down to a snails pace or dig everything you are bound to miss targets, the Explorers have full tones with or without disc and while they are just as slow at recovery with discrimination you can run with a wide open screen (no disc) and let the tones tell you what to dig or not.
Your lucky I've only answered this on 99 times ;D the difference between the XS, first Explorer, and the SE Pro, the last, is mainly marketing :-\ Yes the SE has a better menu layout and screen/tones but in performance they are all about the same, I've had 2 x Etracs, an SE and an SE Pro but I use an XS out of choice ;)

Thanks Geoff for a great explanation. There is an awful lot of iron there and the sov keeps nulling out all the time which is one reason I'm thinking I might be missing things. If a larger coil is not going to help with the iron (although I do fancy it for the beach) I have seen smaller 5" coils about, would this help me get between the iron or would that lose me depth and/or sensitivity?

It won't lose you sensitivity in fact it will increase it but you will lose depth on larger targets, probably not on small hammies and Roman though, personally I wouldn't go down as small as a 5" as an acre can look awfully big when viewed from a 5" coil ;D My choice would probably be the Tornado 8" or the Coiltek 10x5 little joey coil ;)

I think I'll have to sleep on this one and try and decide which way to go.  Thanks for all the replies. ;)