DiggerinVA
Bronze Member
- Sep 16, 2013
- 1,673
- 1,681
- Detector(s) used
- GPX5000, AT Gold, AT Pro, Whites TDI, Bandido 2 umax, Tejon, Vaquero, Deus 2, ORX and Legend
- Primary Interest:
- All Treasure Hunting
I want to take the time to talk about the AT Gold. I feel when it comes to VLF Relic machines, this is the most underrated machine available today. First off: let me say that my testing is done in MY DIRT!!! here in central VA....results may be greatly different in Florida, Oregon, Maine,....etc.
Lets talk about the two things i need in a relic machine to hunt fields for civil war relics. First off i need good depth. Secondly, i need good TID at depth, or i just aswell have a PI machine. Now, the minelabs have great ID at depth....until you try them in RED VA DIRT. Our dirt cripples those machines!
I have tried a bunch of machines, and of those, the best two were the AT Gold and the Fisher F75 ltd w/ DST. Now at first glance it is easy to "think" that the F75 is a much "stronger" machine....but after much side by side testing on actual targets, here are MY resluts:
In good or descent dirt(brown to black in color) the F75 does have a small edge over the Gold, especially when ran in BP and using disc mode on both machines. This is also why i would pick the F75 for the better coin or yard machine. But personally i prefer the AT pro for yard hunting(best audio IMO). Things change a bit when we put these two machines in highly mineralized dirt looking for deep bullets and buttons. The F75 tends to make everything sound like a nail at around 8" in my dirt(unless the target is huge). The numbers on the screen suffer severely also. But remember this still my second favorite relic VLF. The edge that the gold has is very small but just enough to get a few more bullets each hunt(in my experience). Also, know that i am using the 8.5x11 coil on the Gold.
The benefits that i feel the Gold has are: Stability, even w/DST the F75 is no where close to the smoothness of the Garrett. This is the reason so many people would assume the F75 is the dominate machine....mistaken stability for "weakness". The second benefit is the consistency of the Gold. Fringe targets seem to read very similar on the Gold. An example is : one day i hade dug a few bullets in this small area with the gold....there were several more signals including some from an old fence in the ground. So ijust picked a really deep signal that the numbers seemed to jump up pretty high in both directions. It was a Sharps bullet near 10" deep....i continued to pick these similar signals for the next hour and found a handful of deep bullets. I could never figure out a consistent element to fringe signals on the F75.
There are plenty of benefits to the F75 also, like the weight/balance, battery life, etc....but thats not the point. There are plenty of posts online praising the performance of the F75. This post is to talk about the AT Gold....
The Gold is not for everyone, but if you are in the South with bad soil conditions and are a relic hunter, i suggest you consider this great machine. Which ever machine you chose; take the time to truly learn it. When you step up to a mid-range or higher end machine you will not learn that machine in a couple weeks. Even a single tone Tesoro takes time to master. Good luck to all!!!
Lets talk about the two things i need in a relic machine to hunt fields for civil war relics. First off i need good depth. Secondly, i need good TID at depth, or i just aswell have a PI machine. Now, the minelabs have great ID at depth....until you try them in RED VA DIRT. Our dirt cripples those machines!
I have tried a bunch of machines, and of those, the best two were the AT Gold and the Fisher F75 ltd w/ DST. Now at first glance it is easy to "think" that the F75 is a much "stronger" machine....but after much side by side testing on actual targets, here are MY resluts:
In good or descent dirt(brown to black in color) the F75 does have a small edge over the Gold, especially when ran in BP and using disc mode on both machines. This is also why i would pick the F75 for the better coin or yard machine. But personally i prefer the AT pro for yard hunting(best audio IMO). Things change a bit when we put these two machines in highly mineralized dirt looking for deep bullets and buttons. The F75 tends to make everything sound like a nail at around 8" in my dirt(unless the target is huge). The numbers on the screen suffer severely also. But remember this still my second favorite relic VLF. The edge that the gold has is very small but just enough to get a few more bullets each hunt(in my experience). Also, know that i am using the 8.5x11 coil on the Gold.
The benefits that i feel the Gold has are: Stability, even w/DST the F75 is no where close to the smoothness of the Garrett. This is the reason so many people would assume the F75 is the dominate machine....mistaken stability for "weakness". The second benefit is the consistency of the Gold. Fringe targets seem to read very similar on the Gold. An example is : one day i hade dug a few bullets in this small area with the gold....there were several more signals including some from an old fence in the ground. So ijust picked a really deep signal that the numbers seemed to jump up pretty high in both directions. It was a Sharps bullet near 10" deep....i continued to pick these similar signals for the next hour and found a handful of deep bullets. I could never figure out a consistent element to fringe signals on the F75.
There are plenty of benefits to the F75 also, like the weight/balance, battery life, etc....but thats not the point. There are plenty of posts online praising the performance of the F75. This post is to talk about the AT Gold....
The Gold is not for everyone, but if you are in the South with bad soil conditions and are a relic hunter, i suggest you consider this great machine. Which ever machine you chose; take the time to truly learn it. When you step up to a mid-range or higher end machine you will not learn that machine in a couple weeks. Even a single tone Tesoro takes time to master. Good luck to all!!!
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