It’s well made and easy to use. Used it quite a bit on a recent camping trip, and the two 9-volt batteries still have plenty of life left in them, and I mostly ran it with the speaker rather than the headphones.

It is light and easy to carry and swing back and forth. With the “Trash Eliminator” control set all the way down it has no trouble finding even very small metal items, as low as 6″ deep. In an area with many nails, turning up the “Trash Eliminator” seems to create a different toned beep for silver or gold, though I notice that aluminum pop tops were hard to eliminate. If I were looking for artifacts made of iron in an isolated area I would turn the Trash Eliminator off completely so as to not miss anything.

Again, the Gold Digger can really find things. It seems to have a smaller coil than some, perhaps making it capable of finding smaller items. It also seems to pinpoint well. I had no trouble locating the exact spot by simply passing the coil over a few times. Within the first 10 minutes I found an old compass, oddly enough of a type I used to have when I was a kid. I did find a lot of nails, some of them very old. Sometimes it would beep along a straight line making me think I had found a long iron object, but it turned out to be a length of wire. But I’m impressed that it didn’t miss anything.

Not bad for the price. I wish I’d had one of these long ago. Now I need to go back to some of the remote places I’ve been to and do some detecting. It’s a great way to pass the time.