I received my Fisher F70 complete with a standard 10COIL-F70 ellipse coil. Ten inch mono reel. In principle, a good package for a beginning digger. It was with her that I had to master all the intricacies of instrument search in the old days. And I had to master these skills in almost ideal conditions. About ten kilometers from my village, farmers plowed a field where a village of 57 households once stood. Judging by the finds, the village stood in that place for no more than 60 years, from the beginning of the 20th century until the 60s, when, according to the law on the consolidation of settlements, the last three old women were moved to dormitories in a neighboring village. Why did I call the conditions ideal? Yes, because the field itself had not been plowed for ten years; it had already become overgrown with birch trees. In the spring, when the grass lies down, it is almost impossible to get there, so the place was unoccupied. And besides, the field was not plowed with “suitcases”, but immediately for sowing with disking, so it was like walking on the beach. Dream! Therefore, as you can understand, the place is simply excellent to gain real experience in handling MD in a short time and at the same time not lose interest in the hobby during the training.
And so the verdict after two months of digging around this village with 10COIL-F70 . It is of little use for an open field cop. The very small coverage area of the coil itself forces you to literally mark time, or skip a lot of what has already been covered. Excellent signal separation in littered areas; it was pleasant to find a bilon in the same hole with a large metal object. A very good detection depth; due to the conical structure of the beam, the Soviet snout was detected at a depth of a fiskar’s bayonet. Remarkable discrimination of signals, the place was heavily littered with the remains of sheet iron, when a color signal passed through, I ran the coil again, turning the wiring line 90 degrees, and the device always showed blackness. Separately, according to the depth of large signals – a steering wheel from a tractor at a depth of one and a half meters, a locking ring from a cart wheel (about 25 cm in diameter) at a depth of 60-70 centimeters.
Then they plowed up a field in the immediate vicinity of my village, and I will say this, we call this field nothing less than a “miracle field.” And all because of the excellent preservation of the finds presented in this field, historical periods from Ivan the Terrible to Stalin. Money and a lot of metal-plastic. Still, it’s more interesting than digging for two dozen tips per trip. And in this open space, a thought began to overcome me, which sooner or later comes to every digger. There are few finds – because the device is weak. What to do? And there are two options, either sell the entire device and add money to buy something “decent”. Or buy reels. The second option seemed more interesting to me and how in such cases YouTube can help.
First, I learned how a cone reel differs from a DD reel, which further strengthened my desire to buy a new reel. Then I took stock of the finances and chose models from three manufacturers: Nel model Tornado , Detech model Ultimate and Mars Discovery. Tornado at that time was the cheapest of this line, so the choice leaned toward Nel. And again and again forums, reviews and comments. There have been a lot of complaints and just openly negative comments about Nel. And there are three options, the first is that coils from this company are bought many times more on our market, so there are more comments, including negative ones, than from competitors. Secondly, the company is young; there could be “childhood” diseases in the product, which are eliminated over time. And third, just an order from competitors. I ordered the reel, paid for it, and it was brought to me by friends who came to dig in the plowed fields.
For two seasons this has been the most productive and catchy reel in my arsenal. I am so pleased with her that I even started writing words of gratitude on thematic forums, which is generally uncharacteristic of my introverted nature. No glitches, wire breakdowns, or other defects that are often written about on forums and reviews, tough, honest use for wear and tear. The only downside I can mention is the tanning of the wire at sub-zero temperatures. Well, at this price you can buy wire with a high silicone content, you especially notice this when you pick up a branded coil. And here is one of the stories after which I realized that I had not spent my money in vain, not at all in vain.
Copping in the company of comrades has its own interesting moments, in addition to the fact that you can take people out to explore a new place, with their help, comb the field and understand whether there is any point in digging here or not, and if there is, then dig without them while they are soaring in the stuffy capital offices. No one has canceled rational egoism in our business. You can be “not driving”, with the ensuing opportunity to roll a little. And, of course, the competitive process, especially when there are walkie-talkies and you can report every discovery to the team. And then my friends from the capital came to me, it happened about two weeks after I installed Nel Tornado on my MD. During this time, I managed to become more experienced in searching, since the physics of working with large coils is strikingly different from standard models. A field near the village has been plowed up and will soon be sown with winter crops. There are a lot of finds, but the safety is 50/50. In Soviet times, the field was given over to corn, and this is a very tough agricultural crop, so tons of ammonia were poured as fertilizer every year. It happens that you find a coin with a good relief and patina and edge, but on one side there are three stains like ammonia.
We walk across the field, I have my Fisher, my friends – let's just say, so as not to be accused of custom-made black PR, I will only tell you the cost of their devices at that time. One friend has a device for 55 thousand, another for 75 thousand. + – 2-3 thousand depending on the store. I have 20t accordingly. device + 8 t. coil. Half a day passed, I saw the faces of the comrades sour and dissatisfied, one of them came up to me, took a drag on a cigarette and he said that the field was empty. There is nothing here, maybe we can go to another place? I was really surprised. He showed them the most trump spot of all that he had scouted at that time, and they gave him something else. How empty? From my pouch I take out a handful of coins, ten coppers, a couple of pieces of advice, a companion, horse meat and a couple of lead seals. The friend was surprised. He showed his catch – three coins and a bent cross, after which he looked askance at his device and began to turn the toggle switches, the device was analog. We agreed that as soon as I caught a clear imperial signal, I wouldn’t dig, I’d call a friend. As per the law of meanness. I take ten steps and catch a 100% imperial signal. I call a friend, he does the wiring, his device is silent, I do the wiring – a clear signal. He changes settings, wiring. Silence, more settings changes and silence again. The intrigue is missing only fanfare and drumming. Okay, I’m digging, at a depth greater than a fiskar’s bayonet, two kopecks of Pavel, beautiful in relief and AM, in general, the law of meanness in all details. After that, I realized that I wouldn’t want to change my seventieth Fisher for a long time.
I’ll do a separate review on working with the Nel Tornado reel, but for now I’ll move on through the list of the collection. The next reel in my set was a sniper 6.5 reel for Fisher sniper . Winter has come and with it the desire to dig the basements of old abandoned and not abandoned houses. For example, I dug up two dozen early tips in my underground. As always, I began to study the topic using videos from YouTube. And there, everyone walks around the abandoned place with sniper guns, so I gave in to this aspiration, bought a used one and went out to dig. In the center of the village they leveled the old site for the market, the top layer of about thirty centimeters was raked into a common pile, and this is the place where the market was still under the empire. It’s an interesting place, but you can sell the garbage and soil for scrap metal without cleaning it up. I dug this pile for four days, not so much in the hope of finding something valuable, but rather to scratch the winter itch. Four councils, three imperial coins killed to the point of indistinguishability. I won’t mention the hundreds of vodka corks. The Fisher sniper was created precisely for such overly littered search conditions. For the USA, these are old warehouses, hangars, places where there were shops, where there is a lot of iron waste, but there is also a high probability of finding rare fines. I carried out a test, covered a coin on three sides with nails and the device saw a colored target. One of the disadvantages of this coil is its small detection depth. When digging house pits of the 18th-19th centuries, where there is almost no debris, the coil shaves targets at a depth of 5-10 centimeters, large targets, like fragments of cast iron, or sees the cast iron itself at a distance of no more than 20 cm. For this reason and after numerous comparative experiments between snipers and 10COIL-F70 ellipse, I realized that the ellipse works to separate signals in littered conditions, just like a sniper, but at the same time has a detection depth of large targets several times greater. But we all, when digging a hole in the place of an old house, dream, dream and desire to find exactly the pot. I recently sold the sniper, getting a little more for it than I paid for it.
The next one, not in the collection, but already in testing, was the standard DD coil from Fisher F75. 11 Double-D Coil Test Report. It will be of interest to those who want to buy a Fisher F70 and will be tormented by the thought of buying a device with a standard ellipse coil or a DD from seventy-five. Moreover, the final price of the device in this case differs. I've been digging since 11 Double-D for about a month and a half, periodically changing to tornado and checking the average results. For an open field this coil is rather weak. It showed itself well at the “garbage dump” – this is a field where there was once a street of the Soviet period, a lot of iron, aluminum wire, and other colored garbage. This is the native element for this reel. It is absolutely unsuitable as a borehole reel on the F70. The weak processor of the device begins to fail due to excessive load after 15-20 minutes of operation. This is expressed in the form of a continuous trill of arbitrary signals, even if the device is removed from the search area. When this happened for the first time, I thought that was it, a fur-bearing animal came to my beloved MD. It sat unplugged for a bit and started working again. In general, it very often happened that the reason for the unstable operation of the coil was the plug, it untwisted, or I didn’t twist it enough during the process of changing the coil, which is why a lot of phantom signals were issued.
The latest in my reel collection is the FULL Nel Hunter 12.5×8, 5 reel. It appeared as a result of my desire to master forest digging. I chose this particular reel for two reasons. The first is the above-mentioned satisfaction from the Nel Tornado reel and the second is the video channel of one little-known digger specializing specifically in forest digging. His Fisher F75 was equipped with just such a reel. I can’t say anything detailed about the quality characteristics of this coil in real work. Because I couldn’t master the science of forest digging. This is just hard labor, which is why I have immense respect for the specialists and pros in this area. Yes, this reel is much more convenient to walk through the forest than with a tornado, and it’s not about the size, but more about the weight. The very physics of coil wiring depends on its weight, and in the forest it is more convenient to swing lighter coils. As for the field cop with Hunter, I didn’t notice much difference between the Tornado, if someone, when choosing, does not have enough money for a Tornado, then I recommend taking Hunter, on arable land it gives approximately the same results, the only difference that was found is she digs less for large coins, but more for small things, such as scales. In general, according to personal statistics, Hunter sees scales twice as large, and here I am not talking about the depth of detection, but specifically about recording a signal during fast wiring.
At the end of the article, I will say that when choosing a device, someone is guided by its multifunctionality, versatility and variability of digging modes with one standard coil. I chose the option of purchasing an inexpensive MD with the possibility of a subsequent upgrade through the purchase of additional coils. The basis of my choice was knowledge of the world history of inventions, when, in order to save money, they tried to attach a dozen functions to one device. As a result, it turned out that the functions themselves did not work fully and the user regularly used only a couple of them. But for me, I realized that the reel was not needed, so I took it and sold it.