Greetings all,
I am having trouble settling on my first MD investment, I am planning on making my purchase in about 2 weeks.
I am fairly certain that I won't be quitting the hobby any time soon once I get started so I am not afraid to make a reasonable investment (~300) to get a durable, quality, user friendly machine.
Thank you for any advice.
Hi and welcome
It depends on a number of factors... most importantly, what type of detecting are you going to do?
I read from your other post that you became interested in this hobby because of your coin collection, so I'm going to assume here that this is your main goal (finding older coins) rather than relic or beach hunting for example.
I have not used the ACE 350 (you indicated an interest in this detector in your intro post) but my first MD was the ACE 250. I used it a few months and ended up upgrading mainly because of two reasons: 1) the inability to ground balance the machine to compensate for highly mineralized soil; and (related reason) 2) poor depth and target ID accuracy (because I had to turn the sensitivity down very low to avoid falsing in my highly mineralized soil). However, for general coinshooting the ACE 250 was great, and a lot of fun.
The ACE 350 has a DD coil (versus a concentric coil on the 250) so it should be better in mineralized soil and salt water sand with better target separation, although a bit more challenging in terms of pinpointing. I have also heard that it is more of a relic machine than the 250 because they added more differentiation among the iron signals. In doing that they also collapsed a couple of the target ID categories for coins that the 250 had, so some people say that the target ID is a bit less accurate among coins. However the DD coil should get more depth and more accurate target ID overall at greater depths than the ACE 250 had. Also they added a higher frequency (theoretically should be better for smaller high conductive targets) and a volume control (something the ACE 250 definitely needed).
In any event, in that price range what you are going to get is an entry-level detector. If you are going to detect primarily old homestead sites or other areas that have not been previously hit by other detectorists, then the entry-level detectors should be able to find most coins unless they are very very deep or masked by iron (the latter is often the case at old homestead sites). The target ID may not be perfect but if you dig the deep signals you should find the coins. Limitations of the ACE 350 in my opinion are the inability to ground balance, no threshold audio, and only three audio tone ID... still, these are limitations that you will find true to most detectors in that price range.
Your limitation with an entry-level detector (in my opinion) is if you wish to detect in old parks or other areas that have been heavily detected by others previously. Many of the old coins in these areas have already been found. The ones that remain are harder to come by, as they are often mixed among trash, masked by iron, on edge, or very deep.... in which case, a higher-end detector is for the most part going to be a requirement to find and dig most of these coins.
So if you plan primarily on hitting public areas that have been heavily detected, in an effort to find old coins, I believe you will be better served to save up and buy a higher-end machine, even a used one. If your interest is in general coinshooting (not necessarily old coins) or if you will primarily be detecting in areas that have never before been detected, where there is not a lot of iron or other trash, then an entry-level machine might work fine for you in those situations.
Hope this helps.
