Finally got hold of this coil for the Minelab Manticore and had it out for a few spins . You could say that my experiences with the 15″ NOX coil gave me the knowledge base to begin my comparisons with. The NOX 15–was a good good, deep coil but chattered in salt and needed to be slowed down (4) to get good depth. I ran the Manti 15″ in Neil Jone’s “Freesestyle” settings, transposed on Beach Deep, Beach General, and the All Terrain General modes. In that it uses 3 levels of filtering (Ferrous Limits, segmented audio and all tones) Freestyle is a great system for stabilizing the Manticore at higher senitivity settings, and bringing up good, clean responses. This system was pretty good for the big coil–it ran very smoothly even up at 26 / 28 on fresh water sand. This coil really showed how well it interracts with the Manti’s great processing–giving clean, sharp tones on several deep coin sized targets–15 inches and deeper.
I also tried this coil on some of the stock modes. It sounded really good in Beach General in that you could hear the interraction with the ground–evidence of signal penetration owing to the lower frequency weighting. One high tone proved to be a toy car down 18″ -plus.
All Terrain General seemed to have a lighter touch owing to its higher weighting responding to the heavily mineralized fresh water sand–probably not the best big coil tough sand mode.
“…in the house…!”
I also tried the coil with another great system–Tom Dankowski’s Beach Low Conductor settings. This is also a very deep way to run the Manticore although it’s a bit more noisy. In that this system uses Prospecting audio, it was a good test for how the coil filtered down signals to a clean, single tone. The 15″ coil was pretty good at this–although there was more flutter due to to the “open screen” nature of Tom’s settings.
It’s obvious that the Manticore has stronger processing than the Equinox and how the machine operates with a larger coil is a good test of this. This coil was, smooth, hit several deep targets, and sounded off well on some very small, deep signals too.
The overall depth was still short of a pulse machine such as the Whites Dual Field, but was certainly approaching it. At the same time, The Manticore gives you great audio, and on-screen accuracy.
A Couple of Minelab Manticore 15″ coil ponters:
1/ to really get a feel for the kinds of tuning changes that are needed to get the depth from a big coil–try testing it indoors. Before getting these coils to go deep–a way has to be found to make your signals stand out from the larger detection fieild.
2/ To get the hang of hearing when you are tuning too high or too fast–test the extremes–the maximum settings over targets to hear how these affect detection.
n My best Manticore find so far, it’s .75 ct.
3/ If there’s any detector that can process well enough to support a big coil–it’s theManticore, but at the same time your setting and sweep speed need to be balanced. Lower Sensitivity and a slower Recovery Speed give the detector time to process what’s under the coil effectively.
4/ Where you are hearing short clipped shallow signals, this mean that deeper oneswill be harder to hear and acquire. Lower sensitivity makes your signals sound fuller and gives you more target information in the signal tone.
5/ When you want to use the red “iron indicator” remember that you are dealing with a more skewed detection field ratio. This means that more exact, narrow coil passes will be needed to get an accurate response on non-ferrous signals.
When I got my first 15″ “WOT” coil for the Soverign years ago–it took for a couple of years and some instruction from an “old-timer” before I was able to really get the performance from it. This involved learning to run a balanced signal and hear exactly how the machine was performing. I get the sense that this is a coil that will perform best turned down, not up. Be sure to base your settings upon testing, not guesswork.
This coil has a ton of potential and is a must for the kit of any serious Minelab Manticore hunter.
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