The fluxgate magnetometer was invented by H. Aschenbrenner and G. Goubau in 1936. A team at Gulf Research Laboratories led by Victor Vacquier developed airborne fluxgate magnetometers to detect submarines during World War II and after the war confirmed the theory of plate tectonics by using them to measure shifts in the magnetic patterns on the sea floor.
A fluxgate magnetometer consists of a small magnetically susceptible core wrapped by two coils of wire. An alternating electric current is passed through one coil, driving the core through an alternating cycle of magnetic saturation; i.e., magnetised, unmagnetised, inversely magnetised, unmagnetised, magnetised, and so forth. This constantly changing field induces a voltage in the second coil which is measured by a detector. In a magnetically neutral background, the input and output signals match. However, when the core is exposed to a background field, it is more easily saturated in alignment with that field and less easily saturated in opposition to it. Hence the alternating magnetic field and the induced output voltage, are out of step with the input current. The extent to which this is the case depends on the strength of the background magnetic field. Often, the signal in the output coil is integrated, yielding an output analog voltage proportional to the magnetic field.
A wide variety of sensors are currently available and used to measure magnetic fields. Fluxgate compasses and gradiometers measure the direction and magnitude of magnetic fields. Fluxgates are affordable, rugged and compact with miniaturization recently advancing to the point of complete sensor solutions in the form of IC chips, including examples from both academia  and industry. This, plus their typically low power consumption makes them ideal for a variety of sensing applications. Gradiometers are commonly used for archaeological prospecting and unexploded ordnance (UXO) detection such as the German militarys popular Foerster'.
The typical fluxgate magnetometer consists of a "sense" (secondary) coil surrounding an inner "drive" (primary) coil that is closely wound around a highly permeable core material, such as mu-metal or permalloy. An alternating current is applied to the drive winding, which drives the core in a continuous repeating cycle of saturation and unsaturation. To an external field, the core is alternately weakly permeable and highly permeable. The core is often a toroidally wrapped ring or a pair of linear elements whose drive windings are each wound in opposing directions. Such closed flux paths minimise coupling between the drive and sense windings. In the presence of an external magnetic field, with the core in a highly permeable state, such a field is locally attracted or gated (hence the name fluxgate) through the sense winding. When the core is weakly permeable, the external field is less attracted. This continuous gating of the external field in and out of the sense winding induces a signal in the sense winding, whose principal frequency is twice that of the drive frequency, and whose strength and phase orientation vary directly with the external-field magnitude and polarity.
There are additional factors that affect the size of the resultant signal. These factors include the number of turns in the sense winding, magnetic permeability of the core, sensor geometry, and the gated flux rate of change with respect to time.
Phase synchronous detection is used to extract these harmonic signals from the sense winding and convert them into a DC voltage proportional to the external magnetic field. Active current feedback may also be employed, such that the sense winding is driven to counteract the external field. In such cases, the feedback current varies linearly with the external magnetic field and is used as the basis for measurement. This helps to counter inherent non-linearity between the applied external field strength and the flux gated through the sense winding.