Everyone who first begins down this road of metal detecting most often starts with a cheap machine and goes through many other detectors until they finally decide on what tools that they will need to do what they ask of them. Some of us are more fortunate to have good advice and help to decide on what good choices are there for us. As I have said before the real information that you will have to have is not available to anyone in the manufacturers statistics or advertising handouts.

Even the large field of hunters have different opinions but the reason for that is dependant on local mineralization difficulties or the simple requirements of the individual hunter. Many folks are perfectly happy with a detector that is very slow while someone else couldn't even use the machine but need one that fits their personal hunting traits. That is why advise is not worth much to you.

If you want to take advise then make sure that it deals with your areas from successful hunters that have the same style of hunting that you do. It won't do you a bit of good to get advise from someone half a world away on something that suits them.

To myself I see that the detectors fall into about three categories. There is the detector like the Tesoro's that are fairly good around iron trash but not very deep detectors. There is no tone ID or meter but you can fall back on the old method of reading the discriminator reading. Then there is the kind that some people want, that may take you all day to find something but you can watch meters and fiddle with knobs to please yourself if that is what you like. They get a moderate to deep range of depth but are very slow. They appeal to people who enjoy the game of stalking an old coin in the park and reading the meter all day to find that coin and that is what they enjoy doing. Another class of machine uses a combination of tone ID and meters so if you want to you can use the tone and move fast and ignore the meter reading if you so desire take your time like the coin stalker. Now just about every manufacturer tries to make one machine like his competitors best machine but they do not always work so well.

I could suggest machines for you considering the information that I have gained over the years but that wouldn't do you any good. You have to learn something about yourself. It depends mainly on weather you are seeking a quiet pleasant outing with your detector just to relax or if you are tasking yourself to find a large amount of treasures. Some don't care about the relaxation but want to truly find loads of gold jewelry or large amounts of coins or relics. I suppose it depends on whether you are type "A" personality or not. You need to consider that for yourself.

To give you an example of the kinds of machines that you might want to end up with I will describe my machines. Since I mostly water hunt at the beach the wife and I use the Fisher CZ20's and they work well where the black sand (usually high up on the eastcoast above North Carolina) is not a problem. I also hunt in competition events and use a special competition machine (the Fisher 1235X) for that. It has a frequency shifter for interference problems and is a good detector for general use too. My wife uses a Tesoro Sidewinder for competition and she likes it because it is light and easy to use without tiring on the two day events. We also have a Fisher 1266X with all sizes of coils for relic hunting. All of these machines work great in this area of low mineralization but may not work in some places. In the final analysis those are the tools that we picked and they fit our hunting styles. We may take time soon to go hunting for gold nuggets and pickup more machines. You might be able to do it all with one machine but we found that we couldn't.

As examples of the three types of machines that I mentioned I might say that the units that are slow and metered that many people like are the Whites XLT, the Garrett GTI2000, and the Minelab XS pro. The Tesoro units that I mentioned to typify the no meter, no tone ID have other brands that are somewhat like them too. They are good for beginners and for the hunters who want to spend low to moderate prices. The tone ID and metered machines like the Fisher CZ series are deepseeking fast machines which can be used to recover more in a shorter time but are a bit more pricey.

Don't let someone despise your selection of machine. If it satisfies your desire and fits your personal needs then don't argue with those hunters who think that they have the absolute best machine since it depends on the hunter more than anything else. Don't let those people who spend too much money and brag about it because one good hunter with a cheap machine can generally outhunt those big mouthed people with their expensive toy.