The 17" CT coil for the Minelab CTX 3030
At first I thought this coil was a little to large for my detecting requirements, but after hearing some impressive reports from Luke and Mark at Joan Allens I decided I had to get my hands on one to give it a try just to see how it performed on my familiar sites.
 
Removing the standard coil and fitting the 17" coil to the lower stem was easily accomplished in less than a minute so that put one of my concerns to rest, I had imagined it to be a much longer process, do not over tighten the coil bolts as it is designed to be movable with slight friction.
The machine needed no tuning, simply plug and play
 

Initial thoughts
Naturally this coil is heavier than the original, I found the machine could be better balanced by shortening the stem, almost so it was touching my boots when in the normal search position, the wearing of steel toe caps is not advised with any form of metal detecting, I guess even more so with the CTX 17 coil.

The build quality is very impressive, everything has been taken into consideration to save weight, even the coil cover was made from wafer thin soft plastic. But don't be fooled this is still a heavy beast to swing weighing in at 1.9lb compared to the stock coil which is 1.3lb including lead and plug assembly, the 6" coil weighs just 1lb.

In the field
As this once productive patch of ground has been cleared of most targets over the years I wanted to use this coil to hopefully find some large deep items other machines may have missed. Assuming this large coil would be less sensitive towards low conductivity items I decided to set the machine towards high conductivity targets so loaded the default silver program which has quite a heavy discrimination pattern and reject most iron, I then opened up the left of the screen just in case the lower conductivity targets wanted to make an appearance.
I love using open discrimination patterns and running machines as "on the edge" as possible but so far the CTX appears to be different from others, I have found it can be used with high discrimination settings which are normally shunned by seasoned Minelab Explorer users including me.
Naturally experienced CTX users will have their own programs to suit different sites depending on what part of the country they live.
 

Discrimination settings and set up
The picture on the left shows the heavy discrimination settings used on my CTX.
Audio set to smooth
Filters to High Trash
Deep to On
Fast to Off
Tone profile 50 tone Conductive.
The reason I prefer a heavy discrimination pattern in 50tc is because the tones operate from right to left of the screen...high tone for the right and low tone for the left, anything in between is on a sliding audio scale.
So the Iron signature falls bottom right of the screen (high tone) highly conductive targets such as silver and copper fall top right (also high tone) so you need to eliminate iron out of the tone equation as you don't want to mistake Iron for a high conductive valuable target.

Pin pointing
Pin pointing with the CT 17" coil does take a little practice, I found using the pin point button was less accurate than the draw back method which is....Locate a target and swing the coil in short left to right sweeps while drawing the coil backwards, listen out for the point where the signal is lost under the front edge of the coil, that point is the target location.
Weight
Yes this coil is quite heavy and to be honest I don't think I could use it for long periods, I can see the advantages of extra ground coverage and it's unbelievable sensitivity to low conductivity targets will make the CTX fantastic on the beach.
The Results !
Things never go to plan and to true CTX standards it still loved low conductivity targets, despite the single tick under small targets in the coil chart, during my 2 hour wander I just kept digging small to medium sized items, which was really impressive for a coil of this size. My finds included a couple of Roman Grotts and a badly worn Celtic bronze.
Sadly no big deep targets on this visit but it was a good test.
Keep an eye on this review as I will be reporting back very shortly when I try the CT17" on some different ground where hopefully we can locate those elusive deep targets.

More Minelab CTX 3030 information