I live in Scotland in an area where the landscape has been seriously altered as a result of a century of Coal Mining and because “good” finds are few and far between.

I am very passionate about history and metal detecting gives me a direct link with history. The machine I use for this is an E-TRAC and before that, for a number of years I have used a Safari – which I swear by!

Ok, so myself and my little brother headed off to Yorkshire for a week to see an old friend who has not been too well due to chemo and other illness related things. He has not really detected for approx 6 years or so.

We went down with the CTX 3030 and E-TRAC and brought my mate a pro coil to keep for his Explorer II.

Winner of Find of the Month - October 2012

My name is Mal and I have been a metal detectorist since 1978. I live in a small village just outside Oxford with my wife and son surrounded by beautiful countryside steeped in history going back to the Iron Age and beyond.

I was first introduced to metal detecting by a stranger I watched in a field next to where I was fishing. He was walking about strangely with this flying saucer on the end of a metal pole and every now and then he dug a hole and put what he found in his pocket. Well curiosity got the better of me and I wandered across to see what he was doing. He said he was hunting for old coins and he brought out of his pocket an assortment of old pennies and half pennies he had found. I was hooked, excuse the pun, fishing forgotten and went about finding out where to buy one of these strange machines.

A short afternoon search on my favourite field was coming to an end since the sun was setting, early as always in Denmark in the autumn. Sadly, without any good finds, just a few cartridges of the rimfire type.

I headed towards the old church where my car was parked, swinging the old faithful X-TERRA 70 without much hope of finding anything on the last few meters. When I actually got a good signal. I figured it would just be another cartridge.

I recently upgraded to the new CTX 3030 and am impressed, not just by its superior build quality when compared with other detectors, but the CTX 3030 inspires confidence as soon as you take it out of the box.

On my first detecting session in a local field I found artefacts that my fellow club members failed to detect. Depth on the CTX 3030 is amazing as well as stable IDing of the target.

The CTX 3030 sets the standard. Well done Minelab!

Nick - UK

While hunting a construction site with a lot of trash, the GPX 5000 sniffed out a not-so-common 31 cal volcanic pistol bullet along with these other finds.

Tony - Virginia, USA

After some weeks of research, I finally came across some area I wanted to detect. So, early one morning off I went. And after only 2 minutes, I got my first target... an 18 carat gold ring.

From there on, I just kept getting signal after signal. At the end of the day, I found 43 good targets and 28 pieces of junk.

As the year winds down, I was 1 away today from my goal of finding 30 silver coins for the year. I decided to head out about 40 minutes from my home, to a park in an old town that was established in 1887. The town sits on a lake surrounded by several counties and was once a camp site for Seminole Indians.

I detected the main park for 3 hours and only came up with a 1945 wheat cent. I finally gave up and decided to head a few blocks away to the lake front. About an hour of swinging added .75 cents to my bag. After talking to a local, I asked about another piece of land I saw on my way in and he said that is the original park that sits behind city hall.

After two weeks of tracking down the owners of the site, I finally obtained permission to metal detect some farm fields that once had dwellings from colonial days. There is still corn stubble in the field and it was difficult in places to get the coil close to the ground.

I set the E-TRAC on a two tone ferrous program and quickly located the debris field.

I hunt for civil war relics in Virginia. I've been doing it for ten years. I have around five places I mainly hunt. I used a White's Dfx for the first seven, then I purchased a Tdi. Now I'm not saying I didn't find anything with these machines, but the differences in the trash I've dug compared to my new E-TRAC is phenomenal!