If you want to keep it cheap price wise then a used QXT or QXT Pro (same machine) should also be considered. They only have 8 zones of VDI, but a bigger net catches more fish in many ways. If you want a VDI # to split hairs more precisely say versus tabs then it's not the machine, but on the other hand it's got three things going for it- very fast machine so it'll pick them out of iron or other junk, assignable tone alerts (high or low) to any of the 8 zones, so you can say assign a high tone to the foil zone, the nickel zone, and the tab zone for instance, with lows for the others, when gold ring hunting, as most gold rings will read in that range span...And, it's got a flowing sizing display on the screen, which means you can easily tell ring or coin sized targets (two bars) versus larger foil and other junk.
It's running on the same low frequency of the XLT and 6000 and such, so you wouldn't think it'd be especially sensitive to gold rings, but I can tell you it'll bang on the thinnest of gold rings at pretty good depth. Fine jewlery like thin chains and tiny earrings? None of those Whites are best for that, so look elsewhere then.
There was a guy who posted in either this forum or the main forum about a year ago a BUNCH of gold he was popping with his QXT. Really impressive stuff. More so than I ever popped with the QXT in the seemingly short amount of time he was getting all that stuff. I'd search for that thread (try Quantum, QXT Pro, soccer field, etc) and maybe that will wet your appetite for one. Great little machine. Very good depth on silver/copper old coins. Very fast for a computerized detector, although not with overly processed audio so you still get to hear good fine target traits to avoid a lot of junk, and for a computerized unit of it's day and age it's as fast as pretty much any computerized unit these days that I've played with. The software isn't hard to program. Not overly loaded with settings. Just enough to get the job done.
As for the modern Whites, my vote would be the MXT or M6. A friend uses one and he has dug a ton of gold rings on land with it (the MXT). He swears he can hear the difference between a tab and a ring many times. Who am I to argue? The guy is unbelievable in how many rings he pops on land with that machine. I rarely land hunt for rings and am mostly after old coins. Hunting the beach or water is just so much easier to scoop targets looking for rings with all the trash you have to dig to find one. On the other hand, I plan to make an effort to start doing more gold ring hunting on land in the future than I have for a while.
If you are an ear hunter for gold rings, then look into whichever Whites have the best audio so you can kind'a elimate some trash that *shouldn't* sound like a ring versus the round, smooth, warm, soft, "quality" sound a ring usually has.
PS- If you do get a Quantum, most rings I've scanned would bounce evenly between the foil and the nickel zone, which makes sense, since most rings (almost half according to our number crunching with a large random pool of well over 100 rings not biased by digging only certain zones) read in the foil range. Almost half read below nickel in that foil range. The tab and nickel range combined didn't even equal the number in the foil range, and in fact there were more rings from zinc penny on up than there were in the nickel zone alone. You've got to have high resolution to see this stuff, because with less resolution it'll look like more read in the nickel zone, only because it's a wider zone that is taking in foil below it and tabs above it some too. These rings were found by an Excalibur water hunter digging every single signal above iron in the water over a number of years. He never passed on a target unless he just couldn't get it in the scoop, so they haven't been biased by selective digging. If anybody wants a link to that thread and it's research with graphs shoot me a PM as it's in another Findmall forum.
