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First time with Sovereign Elite

Did you ever see the snowy white beach ?? Of course, metaldetecting postponed.

I arrived Saturday when I was already driving through 30minutes of dusty snow, but near the end of my drive it became Solid snow, all ovr the road. I almost had an accident because I couldn’t stop the car at the end of a road. And I’m already a very careful driver.. Next day there was just a lot of wind so I could go detecting.

First hunt with the Minelab Sovereign Elite and the Nel Thunder 14″ coil


I did 2hrs on the wet beach, mostly in De Panne where I found almost nothing except some scrap metal in the wet part.

Koksijde beach – high tide

In the afternoon we went to the West of Koksijde, where there’s a big cut. The upper side is a leftover from the storm months ago -I think, someone said they put the sand there on purpose but I didn’t see that- that blew all sand towards the city. Nothing there on the high sand (where bulldozer tracks went up and down), except on the edge that was closest to the water. It was almost high tide but despite the limited space between water and edge I found 2.70 euro and several dead sea urchins. They are quite rare here. Couldn’t stop myself from gathering a few 😀

On the second day, I went to Koksijde again, where the tide was low.. meaning: again I wasted one hour on the wet sand before I gathered my leftover dignity and again strolled toward the high tide line. At least 2x 2-euro coins and 1.7 euro ! And didn’t pay parking on week days 😀

Massive beach during low tide in Belgium – Koksijde

Some problems occured while detecting:

– I was walking with a ‘singing’ Sovereign for half an hour, thinking there is something wrong with sensitivity and then turning that down – which didn’t help AT ALL- before I tried the screw that connects the coil to the unit.. yup. It would help if i would turn the connector screw under the unit till the very end at the start of detecting. Lesson learned.

-Second day I was on my third stroll in the , and almost done when my battery started giving the high pitch, which means it’s almost empty. DOH. After 5.5 hrs of use ! I guess having the volume on max together with a loud threshold is the cause. In contrast with my oldest Sovereign, whose loudspeaker is too loud at its best, this Sovereign Elite needed its volume and treshold upped to the max because the wind and waves are too loud to get a good sound. I guess that’s draining the battery. I thought I’d be using the Elite without headphones, as I’m not a fan of that thing on my ears with glasses, but yeah.

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New cable on Minelab Excalibur unit

This post deals with replacing the cable on the Minelab Excalibur’s unit. To read about how to replace cable on the coil end go here

Minelab Excalibur’s good old cracking cable

Removing old cable from unit

a. Cut off cable just outside unit if you dare. Otherwise leave it and try to get the unit opened up first. If it doesn’t work out, be happy you didn’t cut it. Continue using Excalibur with broken outer shell.


b. Opening up the endcaps: Take off the black plastic cover around endcap. You will need it again. Screw off of the black thing that sites over the cable entering the unit with a small wrench. And Don’t forget to put BOTH over your new cable BEFORE SOLDERING. Screw the 2 screws in the endcap out (they are under the black cover), then fiddle with some thin flat screwdriver or a razor (seems dangerous) to get the end cap to move. It’s all in this video.

c. In order to slide out the motherboard, you will need to open the end cap on the other side to release the 2-pin audio cable. It’s only a connector, so no need to solder. There might be a third ground wire that needs to be cut, but this is not with all Excaliburs. This is how it looks without the unit’s cover.



d. Turn all knobs to the utter left position. Pinpoint and treshold are pointing downwards, the rest points to the 0 or extreme left. This creates a free passage for the board’s components to pass through. You can look inside while trying to get it out and see how it is sitting.

Pity i don’t have pictures but there are other sources if you google it.

Don’t forget to figure out how the wires are going to go. Look at what you have, or make a picture to be sure. Just make sure, whatever wire coming from the coil is attached to its original end hole in the unit board.

Original wires on the blue Minelab Excalibur 1000. You also have to disconnect the brown and blue power wires to work on the board.

The old wires have to be removed from the board. First cut them off near the endcap, then remove the solder and pull them out.
The cable goes through the end cap resin, so you need to drill that out. I cut off the cable as far as I could, then started drilling through the cable from the outer side with a smaller drill bit first. Takes a while to get a grip but it worked in the end. Just see that the hole you drill is big enough for your new cable. It doesn’t have to be bigger.

Drilled out hole in endcap. Make it just wide enough for the new cable. The less extra space, the less you have to close it to keep the resin inside. Resin is from hell !

Now you have to stick the old black endcap cover and cable end over your new cable before plugging it into the endcap:

Put cable through endcap hole and solder the right wires to the board:

I KNOW this is a terrible soldering job. It was a bad soldering iron that didn’t get hot enough. I didn’t know back then but i have a better one now.



Add resin to the endcap to waterproof it.

Time to put the board back into the unit. Good luck with that 😀 Remember, if the endcap doesn’t seem to close, the 2 holes in the inside are supposed to go over the green board so twist it a bit and see if it gets to that.