Hi Chris.
As yet I haven't put them up against each other in any serious way. To be frank, I've been quite annoyed with the X-Terra, and have hardly had it out since I've had the Ace. The 2 main reasons are that, 1) I've had reliability problems with it. I think that they are sorted out, but I'm not sure about the pinpoint still. It still doesn't seem to be as accurate as I remember it to be when I first got it.
2) Since using the Ace with the large coil, the X-Terra feels so slow at covering the same ground.Guess I just got spoilt.
I'm going to Sydney next week and I'm going to check out the wide scan coil to see if it's any good. I'm hoping that it will give me a lot better ground coverage. After that I'll play around with the 2 to see what happens.
I'll share with you what I can at the moment.
The discrimination on the 2 are very similar. I have been bench testing the X-Terra 30 a bit for the last couple of nights and found that the only difference on modern coins, is that the 10 cent piece will give a solid lock of 12 (bottom pull tab range) and on the Ace they tend to come in just under pull tab range. The 50 cent coins and up, including 1 and 2 cent coins react precisely alike ie $2 coins can either come in at their usual spot or bounce up into the $1 notch.
In pinpoint, the X-Terra seems to do a fair bit better at telling a screw cap from a coin. It gives off a stronger pinpoint signal than a coin. $2 coins are the easiest to tell apart (smaller) $1 coins are a bit closer in sound and 50 cent pieces sound very similar to a screw cap (too close to tell apart reliably). I can't remember how they go when they are deeper in the ground, but I seem to remember that at any real depth, you can't really tell them apart from a coin. I'll check that out next week when I have it out again. This, in my opinion is the X-Terra's biggest asset over the Ace. It means a better coin to rubbish ratio. The Ace on the other hand seems to be able to tell a coin apart from a rubbish target by having a sharp stop to the signal as you slide the coil forward when you pinpoint. Although this works, I've found that it's not reliable enough to depend on. Despite that, I seem to be more adventurous at recovering targets with the Ace.
As far as actually pinpointing targets go, I feel that the Ace is more reliably accurate at it than the X-Terra. As I mentioned earlier, I'm not sure if X-Terra's pinpointing mode is working correctly (the reason I bought the pocket probe for in the first place).If I put a 20 cent piece down on the surface and pinpoint it then it will indicate that it is smack bang in the middle of the coil with possibly only a couple of millimetres either side of the coin.But sometimes it could simply be anywhere under the inner coil. Pretty sad.
With the Ace; Although I can';t figure out the proper way to pinpoint it, I find that using the centring and siding technique. it seems to be fairly close most of the time.
What sets the Ace apart in my books, is it's coil. It seems to have a much better detection field than the X-Terra, gives better ground coverage due to it's shape and is a whole lot better at getting in close to metal objects. I can get the large coil in as close as 3inches if I drop the sensitivity down to 1 bar! The X-Terra is not even close in this department. By comparison, the X-Terra seems to cover less ground and can't get anywhere near as close to play equipment.
Hopefully this has thrown some light on it for you.
Mick Evans.
That's what my eyes used to be awhile back. Now they have blossomed to a fuzzy 20/20. 