Review — Performance & Use

The Minelab Safari sits in that very particular British sweet spot: an older FBS machine whose manners on mineralised ground and wet sand still embarrass a lot of modern budget detectors, yet it asks for patience and a slower gait than today’s “fast and sparky” rigs. In UK conditions—pasture, plough, stubble, and shingle—it remains a serious coin-and-relic hunter if you lean into its strengths: stable IDs on high conductors, depth, and a knack for keeping its head when the soil turns noisy.

Let’s start with behaviour over typical farmland. The Safari’s Full Band Spectrum (FBS) platform runs multiple frequencies at once (nominally across roughly 1.5–100 kHz), which tends to iron out patches of mineralisation that can send single‑frequency VLFs chattering. In practice, that means fewer falses from hot rocks and a cleaner threshold when you’ve noise‑cancelled properly. The ID system uses negative numbers for ferrous and positive for non‑ferrous, and UK users report hammered silver popping mid‑teens through low‑20s depending on size and soil, with later milled silver and chunky coppers gravitating higher. On pasture, that translates into a detector you can drive by tone first and confirm with the number—classic FBS workflow.

Depth is the headline. With the stock 11″ DD the Safari will confidently call high‑conductive coins at the edge of spade depth on undisturbed ground, provided you moderate your swing and keep sensitivity sensible rather than heroic. Where some rivals pep up with aggressive recovery, the Safari asks you to slow down. High‑Trash mode helps in busy fields by forcing the machine to update tones and IDs more quickly over closely spaced targets, but this is still not a Deus/Equinox in separation—expect to work angles and use coil control to pull non‑ferrous from amongst iron. When you do get the classic FBS “long” high tone, it is often worth the dig.

On arable and plough, FBS’s composure continues to pay dividends. Automatic ground handling (no manual GB) keeps the machine simple, and that simplicity is a feature for newer UK detectorists who want “switch‑on‑and‑go” with room to grow into custom patterns. The four presets (Coins, Coin & Jewellery, Relic, All Metal) are useful starting points; many UK users ultimately settle on a lightly‑opened pattern with a threshold, sensitivity around the high‑teens to low‑20s depending on EMI, and deliberate, low swings. The negative ID range is particularly handy for “hear the iron but don’t dig it”—several long‑time Safari hands advocate leaving a bit of low iron audio in, so nails register as a telltale buzz rather than disappearing and masking adjacent keepers.

Beaches are where the Safari still earns its fish supper. Multiple independent UK reports show it is very steady on wet salt, and you’ll find plenty of videos and forum diaries of ring‑hunting along the shingle and tide line. The caveat is physical: the coil is waterproof, the control box is not, so don’t lift a water‑wet shaft above the head unit or let water track up the stem; this is a “wader’s friend,” not a submersible. With a slow, low sweep in Coin & Jewellery or a tailored pattern, it will hold threshold and report deep, round targets without the salty stutters that plague simpler VLFs.

Ergonomics are the trade. By modern standards the Safari is on the heavier side—roughly 1.8–1.9 kg in “ready to hunt” trim—and recovery speed is notably slower than mid‑2020s SMF machines. That weight can be mitigated with a harness or by fitting lighter aftermarket coils (there’s a healthy ecosystem for the FBS platform), and the balance is better than a raw number suggests, but this is not a featherweight scout. Battery life on 8×AA cells is fine; many UK owners run rechargeables and carry a spare pack.

Audio and target language are classic FBS: musical, information‑rich, and initially confusing for some. The learning curve is real—but the payoff is a trustworthy, repeatable “dictionary” of sounds. Experienced users use the threshold intelligently, accept that foil and tiny shrapnel will creep into “maybe” numbers (and that some hammered can live alarmingly low), and dig by consistency, not just by the highest VDI they see. Pinpointing with a DD is precise once you learn the coil’s blade.

Compared with newer platforms, the Safari’s case is straightforward. You do not buy it for lightning separation or Bluetooth everything; you buy it because you spend time on pasture and plough where depth and composure matter, you value stable IDs on coins, and you want a machine that still behaves beautifully on the beach. If you can live with the weight and pace—and you can, once you stop thrashing the swing—it’s a legitimate UK workhorse at sensible second‑hand prices. Treat it as a deliberate tool: slow down, set it up cleanly, and let FBS do the heavy lifting.