According to the manufacturer the Minelab WM12 Wireless Headphone Module is not waterproof.
Will the Minelab WM12 work after it falls into water?
As for my experience I can say: It can fall into shallow water and if you dry the device well – it will work.
While detecting in some rainforest creeks with my GPZ 7000, my WM12 suddenly fell into the water. I tried to recover it as fast as possible but whoop,… there it fell again. After recovering it a second time I directly turned it off. That day I did not even bring the headphones with me, so I returned to my base camp and put the WM12 into the bright sunlight. Two days later I was home again and opened the WM12. From what I could see it was already fully dry so I tried to turn it on. It worked!
Two weeks later exactly the same thing happened another time. Only after a minute I was able to recover it out of the creek. After putting it in the sun and waiting a few days – it also worked as expected.
What causes the Minelab WM12 to fall off?
The holder of the device does not fix it only slightly. If you bend forward to pick something up for example, it tends to fall off.
Solution
My solution was to fix the device with some strong tape to the holder. The clip of the holder itself is not what you would expect for a device costing almost USD 249. For that reason it’s important to carefully fix the WM12 to the holder and the holder to your metal detector harness (Minelab Pro-Swing 45).
Lesson learned!