Whites MXT review and control settings

When a person starts looking for a metal detector you can be overloaded when you see how many different brands and models are out there. I would suggest asking friends you know what they like about their machines. You should also find a dealer you trust and knows a lot about the machines they sell. If you purchase one from a distant dealer it may be a problem getting service or answering questions. Your local dealer is a great asset, use it.

Once you have decided on the machine you like the best, learn how to use t by going out and start swinging it. You can watch a lot of videos and watch someone else using it but you won’t learn how to use it unless you are out walking and listening to what it is telling you. All metal detectors will pick up metal. What you have to learn is what metal the machine is telling you it is picking up. Is it a pull tab or a coin? When you first start out, dig everything until you learn the difference.

I have had a couple of other detectors in the past that were not cheap machines but were not giving me the results I wanted. They would pick up a lot of targets, mostly trash. I was at the local detector store in Golden, Colorado a couple of years ago. Gold-N-Detector’s had a new White’s model that had just come in. I asked Bill to show me what it could do. He explained to me how the White’s MXT worked, and it was very impressive. The White’s is not cheap, but certainly more affordable than many others, so I saved up and purchased one. I started out searching the grass areas around the place we live for coins. The MXT has a screen that reads out what the coil is picking up. It will show if the target is a coin or trash like a pull tab or bottle cap, and how deep it is, and I was able to dig only the targets I wanted after digging the trash to prove it was telling me the truth. It was a lot more enjoyable than the other previous machines, and I was digging targets that I wanted to dig.

My hearing is not what it used to be, and so the White’s MXT gives me an advantage over having to use sound alone to distinguish targets. The MXT has an automatic ground balance so you don’t have to do it manually and the presets on the two other control knobs make it easy to use. The other key feature is that this machine has 3 programs built in; a coin/jewelry program, a relic program, and a gold prospecting program.

I had used the coin program most of the time during that first winter, and loved it. I am a gold prospector and have done a lot of dredging and high banking in the mountains of Colorado for the last 20 years. With my other machines I had tried to find gold with no luck due to the high mineralization in the ground I had been searching. On my birthday in September a few years ago, my wife Shirley and I were detecting on an old mine dump, and in between the rain and snow storms I found my first GOLD with a detector.

We had been hunting for most of the day finding the normal trash you find around a mine. We dug everything. Then, the MXT gave a good strong signal on one of the tailing piles and the meter was reading 0 on the target ID scale. I dug and sorted through the rocks until I had the one that was setting the machine off. Each of the six rocks I found was so dirty that I couldn’t tell what they were. I tossed them down to Shirley to clean them off a little with “mommy” spit, and after a little cleaning she yelled up at me, “OH, MY. Yup, I think you’re gonna like this.” I had felt that they were heavy for their size. After we brought them home and did a little cleaning, we could see the crystallized and flake gold layered in the white quartz on the sides of the vein material, and they will make some beautiful specimens.

Practicing with the MXT is the only real way to get good results with the machine, and most gold hunters will tell you that you will dig 100 targets before you find your first gold. With me, it was well over that as I ran several other machines before the MXT without success. I have even been successful finding coins and relics with the MXT at the same time I was looking for gold, and after learning about how the different metals sound in the earphones. I wasn't surprised when I dug them up and they were what the meter and read out said they were. I have been running this machine for four years, now, and learn something new about it every season. It also finds copper leaves in matrix with regularity that read in the 70 to 90 range.

Now, I get a few questions about how the MXT measures up to the Minelab, and all I can tell you is what I know from my own experience. I have had friends who have prospected with me using a mid range Minelab and I found gold and they did not. Not only that, but we put my pieces right under the coil and the Minelab did not even beep. This made us all curious, and so we asked our friend Bill Chapman at Gold 'n' Detectors about it and he explained about how the Minelab runs on a different frequency that is not designed to find most of the types of gold deposits found in Colorado. Most are geothermally put into their matrixes or in tellurides, and that makes it difficult for the Minelab to read.

The Minelab was designed to read solid pieces of gold, not crystals, wires and flakes in quartz, zinc or iron oxides, or when it is mixed with tellurium or silvanites. The Minelab reads each piece individually instead of all of them together in the background matrix, where the frequency of the Whites' MXT allows the machine to find the types of gold deposits usually found in Colorado.

That isn't to say the the MXT will not find solid pieces of gold, because it will, you just won't get the depth advantage you have with the Minelabs. However, the MXT will give you an advantage with the display that most Minelabs don't have. The newest one does now come with a display (I wonder why), but I have not known anyone who has used it, yet. Even with the new display, the Minelab will still have trouble finding gold in Colorado due to the difference in the frequency, although it should make the machine easier to read in areas where it can find solid targets. For those who have spent time digging three foot holes to find a shovel, it should prove to be a welcome addition to the line.

One more thing I would like to mention about the MXT. The cost. At around $800 new and $500 used, it is certainly one of the more reasonably priced machines that you can actually go out tomorrow and find coins with, that I have used in the past 15 years. Or, you can find a cheaper model and dig up nails until you can figure out what coins sound like. The MXT will tell you right away what your target is. Gold is a bit harder to learn, but well worth your time and effort. Wish I could show you my collection of gold, but, then you'd want to know where I hunt. LOL! For everyone to know, it is somewhere in the Colorado Rockies between Central City and Telluride, west of Red Cone Mountain and east of Tincup.

Good Prospecting to You

Additional setting instructions

Below are some settings you can try out that can make the MXT perform better in many situations. We had a friend send us some of these and we are also finding out that various tweeks work really well with the MXT. Most users will agree that having 3 coils to work with helps to cover most variations of soil, dampness, mineralization and any other variable you will come up against. The stock coil, a 6 or 10 inch DD elliptical and a 12 to 14 inch for more ground coverage. The larger coils, however, do not seem to give any depth advantage over the stock coil.

# 1

If you are used to running your detector a little "hot", while hunting coins, the MXT will seem noisy. Try running it in the coin and jewelry mode and set the switches to ground, discriminator to 2, gain to 7, handle switch to center, and threshold at hearing level. The threshold should be humming. Pump the coil a few times. If the threshold stays even, up the gain to 8 and repeat the process until the you either start to get false signaling or the threshold starts to disappear. Test it with some coins, and if you are getting false signals reduce the gain until you are satisfied you can be sure what it is telling you.

# 2

I have found that I have better results hunting gold in Colorado by adjusting the controls a little different than the presets. The gold where I hunt is in the form of wires and crystals in quartz, and is open and widely spaced. I had a friend using a Minelab right beside me and it could not get a signal on any of the gold as the minelab works best with solid gold targets, such as nuggets. He only hit targets on iron and lead, being more solid than the wires, flake, and crystal gold in these tailings. With the MXT setup in the normal factory presets, I would get a strong signal on the targets. The ID readings on the gold were slightly negative to + 4. Most were 0. Any reading above +10 was a blasting cap or bullet, and any reading lower than – 10 was iron. To be able to find the smaller pieces I had to turn the GAIN up to the +3 above the preset and the SAT to maximum. In this mode I had to use a shorter swing pattern, overlapping the swings tightly. The shorter, tighter swing pattern also gives you more coverage at depth under the coil and avoids changes in the ground which you hear as threshold changes. Most of the targets I found were around 4 inches deep and the deepest was 12”.

Copyright 2007-2009. hookedongold Larry Weilnau all rights reserved

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REVIEW AND SETTINGS FOR FINDING GOLD IN COLORADO WITH THE WHITES MXT