This would have to be the first time I have ever tested a coil and come away absolutely delighted from the get go. I've had a prototype Nugget Finder 16” XP DD coil for well over three months now and haven’t had the opportunity to even put it on a lower stem let alone go out and give it a try, just too much to do and too little time to do it in unfortunately.

If you are a DD fan then you are going to love these new highly innovative coils from the Nugget Finder stable. The first thing to strike you when you get hold of one of these little beauties is the strange looking switch off to one side of the mounting bracket (which BTW are a work of art in themselves), on first blush you could be forgiven for thinking that perhaps you have bought yourself a coil for some sort of secret de-mining venture not a died in the wool prospecting tool.

Now as most of you are aware a lot of advertising these days is aimed squarely at selling you something you absolutely don’t need for a huge amount of money. Well I can tell you that the XP coils are far from it, in fact I would say that they are a necessity for any dedicated prospector to have in their armory because they work and work well! They do exactly what the manufacturer says they will do, if you want small gold turn the switch to N (for Normal) and listen to how much better smaller targets sound, they give the traditional high/low response we are all familiar with for small gold, but when you go into XP mode you are also greeted with the same response but this time it heralds a larger piece.

This ability of the XP range really comes into its own on deeply buried objects no matter the size, the human ear is more receptive to a High/Low response rather than the other way around and the guys from Nugget Finder have discovered this during their many hours of experimentation in some of the most highly mineralized ground on the planet, Victoria’s Golden Triangle. What better place to test a coil than in some of the most iron rich magnetic ground available, not only that but also the home of some of the worlds truly monster nugget finds, as was evidenced recently in the Australian Gold Gem and treasure magazine.

I can’t sing the praises of this coil enough; right from the moment I switched my 3500 on I knew this coil was going to be a winner. The morning I tried the coil the temps were already climbing into the uncomfortable levels so I knew I only had a few hours before I would have to call it a day. The obvious choice was to head for a well proven patch and see if I could scrounge out a few more pickers for the collection, plus it would also be a good litmus test for the coils capabilities, gold in flogged ground can indicate better performance, so why not try it there?

Sure enough after I walked from our house to the patch (about a 500 meter stroll) I plainly heard a sweat little chime in the speaker on my chest. This was the most encouraging thing I found during the testing process, the XP makes a beautiful mellow response on gold that is easily recognizable once you focus in on the sounds. The next most obvious thing was the complete lack of noise generated by touching grass or rocks. In the past it has been often talked about how smooth the Nugget Finder’s run which is an added bonus when you also have the major benefit of the overall lightness, but this test coil was even quieter than that. I could not get a peep out of it which was highly unusually for this time of the year as we build up to the early summer storms.

Being in a switch fiddling kind of mood I decided to have a play around with the XP/N switch to see how the target would behave in the different switch options. Nothing was the surprised reply when I tried it in the XP mode, which explains why I missed it the last time I worked this spot (I was using a dedicated XP only Nugget Finder DD coil). Now before I go on I should tell you my settings on the GP3500, all the switch positions were exactly the same as I use with mono coils except this time I was also using Sensitive. Sensitive mode is the unsung hero of the GP series, especially when used in conjunction with a DD and now even more so when used with an XP Nugget Finder. The other added blessing was the Normal Tracking speed option; no matter how hard I tried I could not balance out the target which turned out to be a point one gram piece at 4-5 inches.

Fifteen minutes later I had another one of those soft little sounds that can mean only one thing, and sure enough after a bit more of a switch fiddle, I had a neat little flat point two gram piece to add to the growing collection. OK now I was having fun, not large but fun. The sky was blue the birds were calling a light breeze had sprung up and I was on cloud nine as I put my new coil through its paces. Now it was time to go for a gallop, I had two pieces for the time spent so I had nothing to lose, so off I went swinging the 16”XP in a lazy loop as I crossed a little creek and started to work my way up the gentle slope on the other side. As I neared an old fence I was blasted by a loud signal that sounded too good to be true, removing the obligatory lose rubbish and cow poo from the top the signal was still there, “hmm” I thought to myself, “This sounds good”.

Once again the fiddling finger came to the fore and the switch was once again moved over to the XP mode, but this time the target didn’t diminish, in fact it improved. I played back all Rohan Johnson’s advice when he was enthusiastically telling me about the new features of these coils, and one thing came to mind “If the signal sounds good in Normal mode but improves in XP mode then it is probably large and deep”, “Hmm” I said once again. Dig, dig, dig and finally the signal was out of the hole, a piece of quartz as big as a pigeons egg seemed to be the thing which was making my GP squawk like it was the one that had laid the egg!

So there you have it, it took a while for me to get around and test it but once again Nugget finder have come to the fore with an innovative entirely new approach to improving our odds of finding a nugget. I would even dare to say that this coil will eventually end up in just about every prospector’s kit throughout the world, because to me it is fast becoming an indispensable tool that does what the makers say it will “make finding gold that much easier”.