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LTD My Impressions....Very Skeptible

D

Daniel Tn

Active member
Alright so I read through the previews and reports on the LTD. The original F75 was by far my favorite machine and I kept it longer than any machine I've ever had. I couldn't get over that First Texas wasn't going to do an upgrade for the old ones and I just couldn't see paying that much money for the same machine with an added bell or whistle. Well it was NASA Tom that got me to change my tune. He posted some things on his forum that perked my interest and I decided to go for one....ONLY after he said that in the DE/JE modes, that the LTD was the same as the old F75. I figured if nothing else, I could always use those modes and still have a really awesome detector.

I ordered mine a bit later than the others. So when the first wave of folks started getting theirs and posting the reports, I read them and some seemed a little far fetched IMO. That's the negative attitude I had about it. I was like everyone else...thinking it was going to gain an inch or two at most. So anyway I came home this evening and found the box waiting on me.

I opened 'er up and wow was the first words out of my mouth. The pictures of the camo on the internet made it look cheesy. In person it looks AWESOME! My F75 was one of the first generation ones and I can see where Fisher got their quality control on their game on the later models...better looking battery department and the shafts went together better. The fit on my coil connector into the meter housing was very tight on my old unit, and fit in really nice on the LTD.

But you all are interested in results and not cosmetic stuff. Well here ya go.

I am busy deer hunting this time of year so detecting has taken a very big back seat. So I only played with the LTD for a minute. I wanted to see how it did on one target and one target only. The fabled 9" button (I did an earlier comparison between the original F75 and my TDI).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_T2__iZLfI

Well in case you didn't want to watch that, what happened was this. I had the F75 in motion all metal, sensitivity at 90. In hot red iron dirt. The F75 whimpers on the signal and doesn't give an ID on the meter. The TDI smashes it with a few inches to boot.

Okay so now the LTD was up to bat. I have this on video as well but don't have time to edit and upload it at this time. I put it in motion all metal...got the same results as the original F75. No surprise there. I put it in the boost mode...ground balanced again, and went back over that target and BAM. I ain't lying or trying to tickle your fancy. I was able to hold the coil 4 inches above the ground and still get a repeatable audio signal AND IT WAS BOUNCING AN ID on the meter! Do you know what that means folks? The LTD is the Daddy Rabbit. :) That puts it on a level playing field with the TDI on button size brass.

So how does it do on bullets? Well I hit it on the deepest bullet in my testing area. The old F75 would always ID the bullets as iron but give a good signal on them, and then do the "bounce" I always talked about in the YouTube vids. Well the LTD hits them even better audio wise and here's the kicker...was reading and locking into the zinc/dime range. I will have to do some extensive testing on that in "real world" conditions to verify that one in the field but for now I am VERY VERY impressed with the LTD.

It's a lot more than a mere upgrade. They could have marketed this thing as their newest flagship model with a different name...that's how big of a diff the boost mode makes.
 
Thanks for the report Daniel and I'm tickled to death you got to see it for what it is capable of. There was never a doubt in my mind what the LTD brought to the table after the first hour of the first day I had it. I really believed all along that most folks that have had and been successful with 75's and T-2's will love these LTD's almost immediately. Great post Bud!!
 
Daniel,
That is very good to hear. I had read about your results with the F75 and TDI on that button and was wondering how you would do with the LTD.

I have not used any of the F series ... before yesterday. I broke the budget and got one of the F75 LTDs.

Took it to a soccer field I know well. Turned in on and started with the defaults and had to walk away from the concession area with the near deafening chatter. Walked to near center of the soccer field and worked on setting it up. Went only BP mode. Ground balanced with a 66, and I moved discrimination to 6, no notches, sensitivity to 55 and it was quiet enough for me to start learning it. Played with tones 3, 3H, 4 and 2F. 2F is interesting, but spent most of the time in 3. Did not dig much at all that was 2 inches or less. Not sure why since that is where much of the clad I find on this field has been. Just did not seem to get solid repeatable hits that were shallow. Could have been that I never put the coil over any shallow coins in the limited area I covered in about 1.5 hours. I was moving kind of slow since I was digging a lot of targets.

I dug $1.04 in clad, a nice pocket knife in surprisingly good shape at 2.5 inches, a large amount of foil and 18 pull tabs that all sounded off very solid. 16 of them were the old beaver tail type with measured depth on the beaver tails from 4 inches to10 inches. I've pulled a lot of beaver tails from this field but I don't recall any deeper than about 7 to 8 inches.

No regrets here. My learning on this beast has started.
Cheers,
tvr
 
Great to hear you are happy happy hunting.
 
In a trashy area the boost feature will light-up more targets simultaneously, thus rendering an accurate ID impossible. I would run the small coil using moderate sensitivity in DE mode, then repeat the search using higher sensitivities in BP mode. I would never use the big coil in a trash-dense site.
 
I would love to see a video on coins recoveries too.
 
I can't speak for what will happen in the boost mode with the stock DD coil, but that is the first coil I personally use when hunting in the trash. Yes, it lights up all the targets, but it will flat out separate them, as well. I dug a very deep 41 Merc. earlier today that I am not sure my smaller elliptical coil would have detected and there were trash targets all around the dime. In 3h tones, the large coil sniffed it out and I was using 0 disc. and sen. of 90. HH jim tn
 
Given the same level of background chatter (not SENS setting), I find the 5" DD every bit as deep as the 9x11" when testing in my test bed. The big downside, and it is big, is that the coverage is only 1/2 that of the big stock coil, so given the same amount of hunt time, you'll only cover half the ground and see half the potential targets. I find that I reach for the 5" too often because of the clean separation and solid, repeatable IDs that it outputs.

As a side note, the 4x6" elliptical is equally performing and gives a nice (bad) ID to bottle caps. In fact, the 4x6 concentric has an area of 18.85 sq-in versus 23.75 sq-in for the 5" DD so the separation would be theoretically 20% better using the 4x6 compared to the 5" DD given equal sensitivity under the coil (a big assumption). In addition, the 4x6 covers 20% more area than the 5" DD for a given sweep. The 4x6 elliptical is a very nice coil that sells cheap used but appears to have been (unjustly) overshadowed by the 5" DD.
 
I received my F75 LTD this afternoon. I fired it up to make sure that it at least turned on. I did what everyone else does when a new detector arrives. I threw some coins on the ground and checked it out with a very informal air test. Holy cow. In boost mode over a dime I pretty far away. I have an old yard I want to detect. So I will write up a little report by the weekend. I can tell by my informal air test that this detector is the hottest I ever held. How this will transfer to actual use is the question. Stability is a must. I never used a F75 before, so there will be a learning curve. I did scroll through the menu system. It really doesn't seem that complicated. Reading the forums helped.
 
I too went to Nasa Tom's site and some of what he mentioned really peaked my interest to the point that I was going to buy an LTD today but his site no longer exists and I was hoping to pick his brain while learning the LTD, do you know what happened? He mentioned he was going to be off line a while for a project, but I didn't think that meant he was taking down his site?:confused:
 
Tom is out of hand for a few more weeks but he has a webmaster that looks after the site. I don't have a clue who that is but I'm sure or hope that he see's what is going on.
 
I am taking the LTD to my worse relic site tomorrow for a stretch of the legs. Test garden results are impressive but it's the real world stuff that gets the job done. I will do some filming while I am there and post the video as soon as I can.
 
Can you do a similar experiment with a copper or silver target, I am really interested in knowing if the new LTD gets similar results on those metals for coin hunting. My F75 will pick up brass and lead that my explorer misses, but it's never really excelled in the copper / silver range, I suspect because of frequency. I am hoping with the boost feature that maybe, even though the LTD is not truly optimized in the high conductive range that the additional boost might make the weaker high conduct signals just large enough to be caught and overcome the lack of a very low frequency. Please let me know how it goes. Then again....screw it, I am just going to buy it:beers:
 
They say that even the CL (cache mode) is good in trash if you swing REALLY slow. Also they mention keeping the coil a 2 or 3 inches off the ground. I think a slow swing speed is going to be critical with BP and even more critical when using CL for hunting relics and old coins. They always seem to be in trashy areas.... don't they?

J
 
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