Are The Multi Frequency Detectors Really Better?

[Michigan Badger]

This question has bugged me for a long time. I just watched an online video that basically communicated this message: Buy our expensive multi frequency machines or you're going to miss lots of good finds.

How bout it? Are those BIG bucks multi frequency machines getting better depth than our single frequency detectors? Are we missing lots of great finds?

What do you all say?

 

[Ivan]

Badger..... here's some real life cases for you to ponder. I managed to get the use of a Minelab Explorer 2; for 3 months. It was exciting at first.......but I'd never trade my Cortes for it. Or the Tejon for that matter. These units pinpoint poorly, they weight a ton...you won't be detecting very much if your arm feels like falling off!!( Metal detecting is supposed to be fun) They have a very slow almost crawl like pace ......they can't be rushed even a bit. They cost way too much, I don't mind house payments and car payments.......no way detector payments!!!They seem to be made of cheap white plastic, and my unit even had cracks it it!!!(Shouldn't be the case for an over $1000.00 detector!) And finally they are not very hot on gold......I do a lot of park hunting and my gold ring counts went way down when I used this unit. They are "very hot" on old silver coins but..... the condition of most dug-up silver coins only qualifies them for junk silver at selling time. You can keep your silver; I'd rather have a machine that hits harder on gold!!! In our club there are about 3 or 4 members who did try the multifrquencies and they are all back to regular units. Multi frequency units are much more susceptible to electronic interference. In one example, I was detecting a ski slope that has a large power lines running near it. After being there one hour , two fellows showed up one with a Fisher CZ 7 and the other a Minelab Sovereign.They were looking forward to detecting this hillside with me. No problem, there is enough here for all of us; this was a very target rich area. They spent an hour trying to detect there, and just before they left they came over and asked me how I can be detecting there?? They couldn't get their units to act normal . They left shaking their heads that I just had no problem operating there. I left an hour later with 2 10K rings and a silver bracelet and a pocket full of coins. Multifreaks are out there but I am definitely not one of them. If you buy one, get it off of ebay there are lots there......that way you will minimize your losses when you get rid of it!!

 

[Macaco]

The Excalibur and the Sovereign.

They're great machines and find lots of good stuff.

At the beach (fresh and salt water) my friend uses an XLT and does at least as good as I do with a Sovereign or Excalibur. I think the XLT is a single frequency machine.

I suspect that the multi frequency machines are actually more likely to choke on black sand than the single frequency machines. Moderate to heavy black sand chokes the Sov and the Excal but the the XLT can, at least, work a little bit in the same area.

 

[Michigan Badger]

[quote Ivan]Badger..... here's some real life cases for you to ponder. I managed to get the use of a Minelab Explorer 2; for 3 months. It was exciting at first.......but I'd never trade my Cortes for it. Or the Tejon for that matter. These units pinpoint poorly, they weight a ton...you won't be detecting very much if your arm feels like falling off!!( Metal detecting is supposed to be fun) They have a very slow almost crawl like pace ......they can't be rushed even a bit. They cost way too much, I don't mind house payments and car payments.......no way detector payments!!!They seem to be made of cheap white plastic, and my unit even had cracks it it!!!(Shouldn't be the case for an over $1000.00 detector!) And finally they are not very hot on gold......I do a lot of park hunting and my gold ring counts went way down when I used this unit. They are "very hot" on old silver coins but..... the condition of most dug-up silver coins only qualifies them for junk silver at selling time. You can keep your silver; I'd rather have a machine that hits harder on gold!!! In our club there are about 3 or 4 members who did try the multifrquencies and they are all back to regular units. Multi frequency units are much more susceptible to electronic interference. In one example, I was detecting a ski slope that has a large power lines running near it. After being there one hour , two fellows showed up one with a Fisher CZ 7 and the other a Minelab Sovereign.They were looking forward to detecting this hillside with me. No problem, there is enough here for all of us; this was a very target rich area. They spent an hour trying to detect there, and just before they left they came over and asked me how I can be detecting there?? They couldn't get their units to act normal . They left shaking their heads that I just had no problem operating there. I left an hour later with 2 10K rings and a silver bracelet and a pocket full of coins. Multifreaks are out there but I am definitely not one of them. If you buy one, get it off of ebay there are lots there......that way you will minimize your losses when you get rid of it!![/quote]

 

[Michigan Badger]

[quote Macaco]The Excalibur and the Sovereign.

They're great machines and find lots of good stuff.

At the beach (fresh and salt water) my friend uses an XLT and does at least as good as I do with a Sovereign or Excalibur. I think the XLT is a single frequency machine.

I suspect that the multi frequency machines are actually more likely to choke on black sand than the single frequency machines. Moderate to heavy black sand chokes the Sov and the Excal but the the XLT can, at least, work a little bit in the same area.[/quote]

So you really like Minelab machines but don't really see the multi frequency feature as any real advantage over the single frequency machines? In fact, you suspect the multi frequency detectors may actually be at a disadvantage in certain types of soils?

Thanks! This is very interesting indeed.

 

[Macaco]

So you really like Minelab machines but don't really see the multi frequency feature as any real advantage over the single frequency machines?

The Sov and the Excal are great machines. I'm not taking anything away from them. However I don't think that the multi frequency technology they use is the reason they work well.

They supposedly pump out higher frequencies that are supposed to make them more sensitive to objects like small gold chains for instance but my experience is that they are not any better at detecting chains than my friend's XLT which uses one, much lower frequency.

They are much slower to recover between targets than the XLT too so you have to sweep them slow.

(I'm not touting the XLT BTW. I don't have one. My friend does.)

In fact, you suspect the multi frequency detectors may actually be at a disadvantage in certain types of soils?

Using the Sov and the Excal for example, they choke on black sand. They laugh at salt though. Many single frequency machines handle black sand much better than those two machines do. On the other hand many single frequency machines freak out in salt water but the Sov and the Excal don't care about salt and they run real smooth and deep in it. I don't believe they run stable in salt because they are multi-frequency though.

Combine salt and black sand and any VLF machine chokes. To work in that combination you'd need a good PI machine.

The Sov and the Excal are great machines but they do have their own limitations. If anyone told me they were going to buy either one I'd say great, you're going to find lots of goodies because I sure have, with both machines.

On the other hand I think the multi frequency thing is hype. The Sov and the Excal are really good machines but I don't think they are good machines because of their multi-frequency operation.

 

[Michigan Badger]

n/t

 

[JB(MS)]

I live in northeast MS and the two multifrequency Minelabs I owned, and one a friend owned, just didn't work well here. The soil here is virtually mineral free though and that was probably the reason the they didn't do well as there's no doubt they do work well in some places. Ours had limited depth, a decided lack of sensitivity to low conductive targets and, as someone else in this thread mentioned, were prone to suffer from interference. But, and that's a big but, we hunted a site in north Alabama that had some red looking, really bad, dirt that literally killed most single frequency detectors, it was so bad a well known high frequency detector could barely detect a coin lying on top of the ground. Bury the coin an inch deep and it couldn't see it at all, but the multifrequency Minelabs handled that dirt darn well. They also, along with the dual frequency Fisher CZ's, handled the wet sand and salt water on the gulf coast beaches without a whimper. Depth in the wet sand and water was virtually the same as the CZ's, but the CZ's could get quarters over a foot deep in the mineral free dry sand and the Minelabs could only do maybe half that at most. The multifrequency Minelabs I owned had a very slow recovery speed, required a very slow sweep speed for best results, didn't separate targets well, (thats a huge understatement), and were virtually useless at some of the iron laden sites we hunted as they stayed in a deep null most of the time. I'm sure they have their places, but the areas I hunt 99 percent of time certainly aren't any of them.

 

[findit]

have four tesoro's, vaquero being my favorite, and one sovereign i did notice the sovereign being a tad deeper in dry sand which is what my soil mostly consists of. but it could just be the slightly larger coil 10" vs 8", that seems to be the case with all the machines i have tried bigger coil = deeper jmo. although it is a 10" dd which is suppose to be equivalent to a 8" concentric. anyway both serve me well and i really didn't notice any other difference except that the sovereign = swinging more weight slower, as a result it usually stays home. i rather give up the extra inch and enjoy myself without my arm getting tired. don't get me wrong the sovereign does have it's place like in wet sand, but i don't ever hunt there so i only use it basically to recheck small areas. but if you got some big guns and don't mind the workout doesn't hurt to try both.

 

[Michigan Badger]

[quote JB(MS)]I live in northeast MS and the two multifrequency Minelabs I owned, and one a friend owned, just didn't work well here. The soil here is virtually mineral free though and that was probably the reason the they didn't do well as there's no doubt they do work well in some places. Ours had limited depth, a decided lack of sensitivity to low conductive targets and, as someone else in this thread mentioned, were prone to suffer from interference. But, and that's a big but, we hunted a site in north Alabama that had some red looking, really bad, dirt that literally killed most single frequency detectors, it was so bad a well known high frequency detector could barely detect a coin lying on top of the ground. Bury the coin an inch deep and it couldn't see it at all, but the multifrequency Minelabs handled that dirt darn well. They also, along with the dual frequency Fisher CZ's, handled the wet sand and salt water on the gulf coast beaches without a whimper. Depth in the wet sand and water was virtually the same as the CZ's, but the CZ's could get quarters over a foot deep in the mineral free dry sand and the Minelabs could only do maybe half that at most. The multifrequency Minelabs I owned had a very slow recovery speed, required a very slow sweep speed for best results, didn't separate targets well, (thats a huge understatement), and were virtually useless at some of the iron laden sites we hunted as they stayed in a deep null most of the time. I'm sure they have their places, but the areas I hunt 99 percent of time certainly aren't any of them.[/quote]

Yes, what you wrote is exactly what I found with my new in 2005 Excalibur 1000. I tested in very low mineral wet and dry soil here in Michigan and it (my machine) couldn't get a good solid signal on a freshly buried dime at 5 inches deep. In places with lots of iron it couldn't detect a silver half at 4 inches.

I sold it when only about 3-4 months old and took a loss of about $400. I hunted the same sites with a Tesoro Deleon (the land sites) and killed the coins and jewelry.

 

[Macaco]

That red clay dirt you described is probably very alkali, basically salty, which the Sovereign for instance can handle very well.

What I don't get is why a multi-frequency machine would do better in those conditions than a single frequency machine.

How would pumping more signals of different frequencies into the ground make a machine work better there?

Anybody?

 

[Michigan Badger]

n/t

 

[Uncle Willy]

Poor construction is why they are nick named " Exploder."

Bill

 

[Roper]

I am under the impression only multi-freq. work well on a wet salt beach. I tried a Tiger Shark and it was not up to the task. And do not want a PI.

Question is---Is there a Tesoro which will detect 6" on a wet salt beach?

I have an Explorer on trail and it is too heavy and slow, which pretty much leaves the CZ's.

Just curious if anyone has experience on a wet salt beach.

Thanks,
Roper

 

[findit]

but i would say it has to do with the dd coil that helps the sovereign preform better on wet sand and clay rather than the multi frequency. after all that is the whole purpose of a dd coil is it's canceling effects from the ground conditions.i think the frequency just effects sensitivity

 

[Michigan Badger]

n/t

 

[Doug[Manila]]

I found that my Tesoro (B2umax) was much better at finding copper/ bronze coins and brass buttons while the multi-frequency Sov was far superior for silver coins. The Sov did do better in the musketballs though as the tones sounded so good.

In trashy sites, the Tesoro would do much better as the Sov would keep nulling over iron.

For relic hunting, I would reach for the Tesoro first. If I want to a silver day, the Sov won't disappoint me at all.

 

[Michigan Badger]

[quote Doug[Manila]]I found that my Tesoro (B2umax) was much better at finding copper/ bronze coins and brass buttons while the multi-frequency Sov was far superior for silver coins. The Sov did do better in the musketballs though as the tones sounded so good.

In trashy sites, the Tesoro would do much better as the Sov would keep nulling over iron.

For relic hunting, I would reach for the Tesoro first. If I want to a silver day, the Sov won't disappoint me at all.[/quote]

Yes, I've heard this from many.

I know from my own air and ground tests that Tesoros are not the deepest on silver. The Tesoro brand rules with the copper metals and gold.

This is okay because most of my coins finds are copper and gold is what I really want.

 

[Macaco]

That is a huge difference right there.

Indeed, that could explain the stability in salt.