Minelab 11" DD

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Many new detectorists and even some old hands tend to write off the stock coil as a dud. This may be due to the heavy promoting of aftermarket coils on the various forums as well as the fact that the stock 11" has undergone some modifications over the years which have adversely affected performance in comparison to the original.

To clarify, there are at least 3 versions of the stock 11" DD coil that have been released with the Minelab PI machines over the years. Most recently, the coil has been a hybrid mono/dd coil. When this coil is run on the GP units, one can either run it in straight DD mode or, by changing the settings on the GP, effectively turn off half the coil and run it as a pseudo mono. When the GP Extreme was released, the machine came with a black mono/dd which some consider to be a very insensitive coil. Then there is the original which was issued with the SD units and it is a standard DD.

This standard DD coil is the one I use. It runs smooth in very hot ground. Recently, my partners and I were working a patch that had an inordinate amount of black sand which was driving the detectors nuts, especially with the mono's. Running the stock 11", I was able to move at a normal pace with little or no ground noise and few if any signals from hot rocks. Rod even made the rare choice of running his black GPX DD, theorizing that this "dead" coil would handle the mineralization well and perhaps pick up on targets that were missed with noisier coils. I was able to recover 2 nuggets near the surface that were in the 2-3 grain range with the 11" SD coil. I was shocked. Reading the forums had led me to believe that one needed a GP and and aftermarket coil to accomplish this. Obviously, not so.

Don't write off the stock coil just because you may have heard it does not work well. Minelab made several different versions of the coil and while some of them may not be very sensitive, the non-hybrid versions of this coil excel in a number of circumstances commonly found in the field. I know for a fact that the 11" DD goldsearch that came with the SD units is a hot coil. Check it out.