Equipment • Alisha's Metal Detecting

Minelab Sovereign Elite

Minelab Sovereign Elite purchased by the end of December 2020.
Some guy on the secondhand website asked me whether I wanted to buy his Sovereign Elite. Actually I thought he was asking too much for a detector that I didn’t know the condition of, and I said I might come over one day. Then I looked up the available Sovereigns on the WorldWideWeb, and there were only 2 for sale on ebay for at least 2.5x more. And one of them was ‘collection only in UK’ while the other came from USA so forget about it. So I was bummed and then tried to set up a meeting, which worked. He didn’t reply anymore to my questions before on whether it still worked, so I thought he had left me hanging. He was nice and gave a lot of extras: headphones, AA battery compartment (which i didn’t know so i had ordered a new third party battery on Ebay France – 40 euro), protective pouch, extra screws and an Id Meter. It had some ‘problems’ but nothing I couldn’t solve:
– his dog ate the coil cable so he cut off the cable from the meter and replaced it with this. He didn’t use and shrink tube but only used tape so I had to fix this. Also put a new piece of cable on the meter. I still have cable lying around from the time that I had to fix the Excalibur’s coil cable.

Maybe this will become my detector of choice since it doesn’t deal with the bulky headphones and it does work with the 3rd party coils.. something that bothers me with the Excalibur and The Sovereign 1991. With teh old Sovereign, I can only use the 8″ Coinseach coil. The other one, 10 inch Tornado coil, is alraedy quite heavy.
Here is my first try-out with the Sovereign Elite on the beach. The one thing I learned is that you better wear headphones because the sound isn’t loud enough on a noisy day, even on maximum volume. Not using headphones and putting the volume on max will drain the battery within 6hrs. Or so it did with mine.

Minelab Excalibur 1000

Ordered that detector from a store in Holland. They phoned me up to say they actually didn’t want to sell it via online because they want me to pick it up and see what it looked like. I said I bought another secondhand excalibur before which looked way worse for the same price. So they agreed to send it 😀 It arrived with the entire outer cable cracked, which isn’t their fault, so i decided to suck it up. I had to order new cable, which took ages to arrive. The coil was too heavy anyway so i sold it quite recently for a silly 45 euro.

I attached the unit to a camera-harness so it’s not bothering me at all when i hunt. Also had to replace the battery. It was only 23 dollar but putting it in was hard since it was just a bit too wide. LAter on I realized that I had been hammering it in with one of the wires squeezed between battery and wall.

THe headphones were also a pain soI ordered custom made headphones but they were also heavy for me. Now I soldered my old Bose headphones which don’t have a very good sound quality anymore but they are very light. I guess there’s no other option for now. Sucks though that I cut off the original blue headphones because I can’t use them anymore. THere are some elctronics components in the resin of the endcap to modify sound so it would work on those blue headphones. Now the electronics are unusable and so is the headphones. I can order some expensive underwater headphones but then they’d be too heavy again. Guess I’ll leave it as is. If I ever want to sell it, i’ll attach the new custom ones eventhough they aren’t waterproof. THey are still good quality.

Category: Equipment

Collection 3: Minelab Sovereign Elite

Collection 2: Excalibur