I haven't really used both, held and swung the F75 for a few minutes on a community hunt with my club once and for some reason didn't like it all that much.
Seemed a bit heavy and unbalanced to me but I am sure that is only because I am more comfortable with the F70 due to several hundreds of hours spent with it.
If I would have gone with the flagship instead I am sure I would have gotten used to it so that is a non issue.
All the extras on the top end are great, the extra programs and processes seem very cool especially the FA process.
I read it is super fast but for the life of me I can't even imagine what hunting with a unit faster than the F70 in DE would even be like.
Most of the other extra programmed settings sound neat but I am the kind if guy that likes to set up my detector myself and tweak the settings after so preset programs never were my cup of tea.
People keep referring to boost that is lacking on the F70 but the precursor to boost is SL speed on the F70 which came out first.
Different process...same effect.
Seems to work well and goes a bit deeper into the soil and in areas with high grass or stubble where you have to hover the coil higher off the surface it does the job.
No DST process on the F70 to really quiet it down and that would probably be cool but even though I am pretty sure FTP could offer the upgrade on this unit if they want they never will, or won't till the F75 is out of production and replaced by something else.
As far as noise I do get some from time to time mostly because I practiced and just got used to hunting on higher power levels, but I have hunted right under some power lines without much chatter, surprisingly, and in all kinds of difficult situations, EMI saturated conditions, and I can turn the power way down to quiet it down and still have confidence I can get to decent depths or just deal with it.
Lower power levels still seem to be able to get pretty darn deep if that is what I choose to use, also.
I learned to deal with extra chatter long ago and no matter what is happening this thing seems to stop and somehow tell me when it is scanning something good no matter what.
I have used this thing and figured out that it can do amazing things in all kinds of sites.
I was super successful in sites with more iron than you might want to believe possible, that took some practice and lots if experimentation but eventually I did it.
Depth with the standard coil is great and pop tops are a non issue with that concentric, but using both the small and the large F75 DD coils pop tops can be dealt with pretty quick and efficiently.
The small sniper seems to get as deep as the standard if not more, the big DD on this thing gets me ID's at the 12" range and sometimes further in good soil.
The deepest target I even attempted to dig in the great Kansas soil was at a measured 15", I was in disc and that one actually had pretty accurate I'D info on the screen which is unusual.
This summer I moved back to Birmingham Alabama where the soil is much more than just mineralized and challenging, it is crazy because of the extra added attraction of extra iron buried in lots of the area used as landfill, iron slag spread out from foundries distributed in the same way and even tiny nodules of naturally occurring iron infused into much of the soil.
In the worst of this stuff there is a curtain at about the 4-5" level that stops pretty much all detectors or even if we can get past it the signals are so skewed that they make no sense.
After several months of experimentation I succeeded in getting by that iron veil and actually recognized and dug several older coins at the 6-7 and once even the 8" level.
Recently while hunting at a local park that has all these problems with two friends, one with an E Trac and one with a Whites unit, they found a few good targets, older wheaties, at the 4-5" level but never were able to get further.
I managed to dig an IH at 6" and a very worn and thin V nickel at a measured 7".
I still can hardly believe I was able to do this, both were found with the small DD coil which is my coil of choice for hunting in this devil dirt.
When it comes to hunting targets the F70 does not seem to have a problem in any area.
Coins of any kind and size are no problem, jewelry is favorite thing to hunt for and I can tell you that no matter what it sees, silver or gold in any size from large to small in any configuration and just about any depth or any other metal it is all the same to this thing and it will let you know.
I am not a true relic hunter but I have found them with the F70...easily.
Speed, rapid recovery and target separation is legendary on all the Fishers and this one is no exception.
As great as all the extras on the F75 are and well worth it for those that can afford them and prefer to use them, the rat-rod F70 seems to be able to keep up in a very respectable manner and preforms more than well for those of us that spend just a little time learning to tweak and understand it.
If you want the extras get them, if you don't think you need them well, this is what Dave J. once posted about the differences...
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"The F70 was the product of a mission-- to come up with a less expensive adaptation of the F75, while incorporating things we had learned meanwhile. Without "dumbing it down". Because the F70 was advertised for a lot less money than the F75, marketing dept. didn't quite dare to say how good the damn thing really was. Some of the secret sauce we put into the F70 eventually made its way into later revisions of the F75 group of machines, as well as into the Teknetics "Fratbros" series and most other new beeps introduced after the F70.
As the top of the Fisher lineup, the F75 including its revisions got all the attention. That's how the F70 became a "sleeper". Guys like Mudpuppy will never have to wonder if they should have gotten an F75 instead.
This is the same sort of explanation I just posted in "another forum" about the approx. $200 category. If you get a Eurotek Pro, you never have to wonder if you should have gotten something else. Get anything else, and you'll wonder if you should have gotten a Eurotek Pro instead. F70 owners never have to wonder if they should "upgrade" to an F75.
--Dave J."
