I'm guilty of falling for all the advertisement and the hype of the latest and greatest. All the money I spent is ridiculous. I've owned over a dozen different detectors from all the leading manufacturers, Minelab, XP, Nokta, etc., but after buying and selling, after all these years I still have my customized Sovereign GT. That and my modified Excal that I used to have, found the best of my finds out of almost 50 years of being in the hobby. Some were OK, and some had interesting features, but I agree. Unless you have a through understanding of the machine, and had all the settings perfect, then you were actually reducing the performance.
To this day, if we have a storm that produces big waves on the east coast of Florida, I don't feel comfortable taking any other detector with me than the one that I know and trust the most, and that is still the Sovereign GT, because I know what it can do, and what I have found in the past.
Additionally, I don't have 20 settings that I have to verify. I just turn the detector on, maybe adjust a few knobs, and I'm off.
Instead of worrying about my settings, I'm enjoying myself and finding targets as deep as I care to dig, and very nice ones at least a foot deep. Plus, I don't dig as much little junk targets, can slaw, and bottle caps as I would using a different machine. So I agree totally from years of experience.
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