Minelab E-Trac metal detector Review

Hello, this is Richard, username Ponguru, with a review of the latest metal detector that I bought about two months ago or so. It's an E-Trac made by Minelab, factory fitted coil, quite a detailed display on there, lots of options, which I don't know how to use properly yet. This is my first proper machine. I did have a pretty good one before this, Garrett Ace 150, found loads of good stuff, bronze snake, like a Roman thing or something. Spindle whorls, all sorts of bits of, bits of all sorts really, you know, a lot of old coins. But this is taking it to a totally different level. This for me, the learning curve was extremely steep, and I imagine it'll be about six months before I know how to properly use it. As I say, I've only been using it for two months, and so far I've found it excellent. The display... At first, it is almost impossible to decipher if you've never seen something like this before, but once you get used to it, you get to know where your decent targets are going to fall. For example, a £2 coin will give a reading that's different to silver. Likewise, copper, gold, silver, all of these lot make different noises. You can make them make the same noise if you want, it's totally customisable. They have different numbers as well. They have the ferrous content and the conductivity. And learning what good targets are and what bad targets are is probably the key to understanding this machine. There's a modern 10 pence there. A load of pennies, 20 pence. A pound coin, one 2 pence. King George the, I don't know, fifth, sixth? I'm not too good on history, even English history, I'm terrible. But it's a 1930, a half penny anyway, a lovely tone on it. And there's a silvery earring, and a silver, you know, like a patron saint of travellers sort of thing. It says silver on the back anyway, you can see that. It says silver, might not be, who knows. But that's not too bad. I've probably dug, I don't know, 16 coins there, and a couple of silvery things. That's 18. I would have dug probably equal amounts of trash out, so 50-50 is pretty good. There has been reports that I've read of people thinking that the machine's heavy, but... To me it's well balanced. I don't know how heavy it is, but to me it's fairly light. It's well balanced. I don't use it for more than two or three hours at a time, I suppose. If you were doing a marathon 18 hour stint it might pull on the arms a little bit, but I find it no problem at all. It's comfortable. Everything's at a nice angle. The menu's reasonably easy to read and understand once you get used to it. Best to read the instruction manual, any other books that come with it. So, get out, have a go, read the instruction manual again, get out, have a go, come back, read through your books again, watch the video that comes with it. Alternate between going out and doing your homework and it becomes understandable fairly quickly. Perhaps the biggest plus point of this machine is the ability to discriminate against things that you don't want. i.e. to make up discrimination patterns. To be honest, I try not to. Because I don't want to miss anything when I'm first starting. I want to dig as much as I possibly can so I can recognize what's a bad target and what's a good target. As I get better with recognizing that, I can then knock out the bad targets and keep the good targets. It'll always be the odd one that slips through, but if you want to quickly pick up good targets, if you discriminate against the bad ones, you'll tend to only dig good targets for the most part. I still dig some crap, but... I would say on a good site it's probably 50/50. I've got a 17th, 13th century mansion house that I metal detect around and whilst it's been used for hundreds of years it's really only been used heavily for the last hundred years or so. So I found a lot of coins from the last century. I would say Probably is about 150, 160 since I started going up there. A lot of them at over 8 inches deep, which I simply wouldn't have found with my previous machine. Also, a lot of them have been in or near the same hole as rusty nails, ring pulls, you know, all that sort of crap that you don't want to dig. This machine seems to have the ability to filter out the rubbish and home in on the good target. But depending on how you set it up, That'll depend on how effectively and efficiently it does that. Here's a brief rundown of what I found in probably about five hours metal detecting near a local mansion house. I've just got permission to go on there so I was just pretty close to around the house. I haven't spread out into the fields where they've been kind of farmed since medieval times yet so I will find better stuff. These are all pound coins, Old fifty pence, 30 bits. Modern 20 pences. Modern five pences. Old five pences, old ten pence, two pences, some horrendous religious tat, I don't know what it's made of, like plastic-y stuff, it's metal, well it's metal of some sort but it's pretty awful, isn't silver though, unfortunately. And these are old pennies, not very old ones, they range from about 1930 odd or over, old six pences, again 50s and 60s, old half pennies, 50s and 60s, old shillings, again 50s and Old ten pences. Half pences, all of them ones down there, and pennies as well. There was a few other coins. I think they totaled probably about, I don't know, 100 maybe more, but that's in two nights of detecting with the e-track. When I first started going out, I just jumped straight into the coin pattern, which is that one there. As you can see, there's a lot of the screen is black. It quickly finds coins, you know, all the modern stuff shows up in there, no problem at all, and it rejects a lot of iron. I've since started hunting in with that pattern which has minimal discrimination. I think I've set it to reject iron from 27 down over and I've put a little few black dots there where the ring pulls that have been the bane of my life have shown up. So when it goes over the ring pull it doesn't give a strong signal. It sometimes clicks a little bit and makes a little bit of a whine but it isn't a strong signal. Whereas the majority of the good targets, you know, the silver things, the coins, and also the modern stuff, modern coins and copper and so on, still gives a good signal, even if it's near the ring pulls that are blanked out. Here's an example of the discrimination with the e-track. We've got a rusty washer here, which sometimes gives off pretty good signals. We set it to reject that. And here's a silver Saint Christopher, patron saint of travellers or some sort of necklace thing. We're going to put them quite close together, I'll put them probably as an inch apart now. The only signal we're getting is from the silver, so that's pretty good. It refreshes itself very quickly, so if there's two signals together, it'll pick up on one, quickly drop it if you don't want it, and then pick up on the one that you actually want, and that'll override. Even a huge piece of rusted metal here, see if it makes a noise, That's pretty good with copper coins. This is a big old one penny from 1967, really you just cannot miss them. The machine comes with a cover which goes over the coil, quite a snug fit, protects it from bashing on rocks and branches and so on, you know the crap that's lying on the ground, gravel and so on. There's a local park that I hunt which has a lot of Victorian coins and so on and I went there with a standard coin pattern. I couldn't really find much so I just made a few changes to the threshold level and the sounds and so on just based on what I'd read in the instruction manual and also the guidebook that I got with it and straight away I started finding coins. The smallest little changes make such a difference and being able to make those small changes is really good and I imagine that when I learn how to use the machine better. that I'll be able to go onto a site and instantly make changes to make the most of the machine. When you first switch it on and you're hunting in, you know, a park which has got loads of different coins, cans and ring pulls, bottle tops, rusty nails, all sorts of rubbish, the sounds can be absolutely bewildering. I know the word to me, I mean I've put some coins on the ground down here listen to this. If you know what sounds you're listening for and also what numbers you're looking for roughly anyway you know roughly what numbers what whereabouts you expect to find your good targets when you put your coil over that target it'll trip something in your mind you know think ah yes good target um first week i found a big roman coin which was fairly knackered and then went to the local park and since found hundreds of coins perhaps the best find i found so far is a 1898 silver 3 pence, which is absolutely perfect condition. So you're probably wanting a mark out of 10, or a percentage or something. If my other one was a 4 or 5 out of 10, this would be probably a 9, because it doesn't actually dig the coins up for you. But it does the next best thing, which is to locate them effectively, It zeroes in on them very well as well, it's got a pinpoint mode on here, so you can zero in on it, but to be honest I tend not to use that, because with it being a double D coil, it detects right down the centre of here, the other sort of coil is a concentric coil which detects across the whole lot, and it kind of cones down, this sends a flat signal out all the way down, so once you go over this way, you kind of make a mental note of where the beep is, you turn it 90 degrees, you go over that way, Make a mental note of where the beep is and that should make a cross. The middle of the cross is where you dig and so far that's worked pretty well for me. I do have another tool that I use to help me zero in on the target once it's actually been located which is that the Garrett Pro Pointer. This is excellent, it just saves dragging all the muck out of the hole and passing it over the top of the detector or passing your detector over the hole. Once you've dug the hole, you basically just stick this in, and if you're anywhere near, it zeroes in on your target, and when you hear the constant beep, you know that you're very, very close, it's an excellent machine. Well that's it, hope you've enjoyed this review, I didn't go into all the masses of features that it's got, I mean you can even download patterns from the internet, I tend to just go slow and steady, I don't thrash it around the place, but I do find plenty of stuff.