Purchasing Accessories
How can purchasing accessories be a tip? Good question! The answer is that Minelab has great after market gear that can greatly impact your finds ratio.
The Minelab Explorer SE is set up to be useable by all detecting hobbyists right out of the box. But depending on your condition or style of hunting, you may be missing out on many finds based off that initial set up.
The after market gear that I’m mostly concerned about are coils. Minelab Explorer SE comes with a stock 10″ Double D coil. This coil is great for depth and can cover all styles of detecting. Where I found that it had issues was target separation, especially over trashy areas.
Again, this depends on what type of hunting you’re into. I personally like to hunt private lawns and parks for the majority of my finds. These areas have usually been hunted before and have a fair amount of buried trash. This coil was having difficulty with the multitude of targets, and since I was hunting in “all metal” mode, I thought a new coil or two might fit better for my style of hunting.
Doing my research, I went with a SunRay 8″ and 5″ Double D coils. Target separation was instantly improved without losing depth for the coins I was going for. If you’re beach hunting or doing Civil War relic hunting, then the 8″ might not be the answer by large 12″ or WOT coil would be. The 8″ has proven invaluable to my hunting, and the 5″ is great to have for ridiculously trashy areas.
The next item I wanted to try was the SunRay X-1 inline probe. This is basically another coil but inline for pinpointing targets during recovery. After owning this, I can’t believe I never had this before. This has cut my recovery time by 75% at least. It’s inline, so it uses your detector’s electronics at a flip of a switch. It’s a 1″ coil giving your about 2″ of depth.
What I’ve learned, is to make the detector work for you. Optimize its handling based on hunting style and conditions. Also, be willing to change out coils on the fly to see if one is working better than the other in the area.
If you’re interested in purchasing a after market coil, I would recommend purchasing an extra lower rod assembly. If you do not plan on buying a X-1, then you might want to go with an extra upper rod as well. This makes it very nice to swap coils. The Explorer SE has the cable routed through the rods, so you’ll need to fish the cable through every time on a coil swap. If you purchased an X-1 the upper assembly needs to be customized (by SunRay) so that will never need to be swapped, so all that needs to be done is switching out the lower rod and coil and wrap the cable snug to the X-1 connection.