maxxkatt
Forum Supporter
on one posts or reply to a post I pointed out that air test were worthless in comparing different detectors.
Now I have to correct myself. It depends on the type of air test. If you are just doing depth air test, I still agree they are not of much value.
However other air test are very valuable for a newbie trying to learn the Equinox 800.
This is where you have a mixture of iron and good targets close together and especially bottle caps.
This is where you experiment with recovery speed, FE and F2 settings. Plus learning to hear silver mixed in with other iron targets.
Play around with these settings and you will soon be able to totally eliminate bottle caps and learn the effects of fast and slow recovery speed and low and high Iron Bias settings especially the new one added F2.
You can not visualize what is happening underground where you can only hear and see the TID display in real life. But on such an air test as in the picture you can really connect in your brain what you actually see in the air test on the board with the audio and TID display. It simulates what is in the underground mixture of iron and good targets.
Unfortunately in real life in a trashy area you hear a mixture of signals, not a separate silver tone and separate iron tone. Often a blended tone and blended average on the display. This is called masking when iron or other trash garbles the signal of the target signal. These are often called iffy signals.
hunting in a field or beach with no trash is somewhat easy compared to real life hunting around trash. Humans drop valuable coins, rings etc, but even more trash. This is reality.
On wet ocean beach hunting, you have a helper in the tide, wind and currents and gravity which will separate targets by weight. So you will find coins and rings among the lead weights and typically not among the lighter trash such as pop tops, pull tabs, bottle caps. If all you are finding is the latter then move til you start finding the former.
Now I have to correct myself. It depends on the type of air test. If you are just doing depth air test, I still agree they are not of much value.
However other air test are very valuable for a newbie trying to learn the Equinox 800.
This is where you have a mixture of iron and good targets close together and especially bottle caps.
This is where you experiment with recovery speed, FE and F2 settings. Plus learning to hear silver mixed in with other iron targets.
Play around with these settings and you will soon be able to totally eliminate bottle caps and learn the effects of fast and slow recovery speed and low and high Iron Bias settings especially the new one added F2.
You can not visualize what is happening underground where you can only hear and see the TID display in real life. But on such an air test as in the picture you can really connect in your brain what you actually see in the air test on the board with the audio and TID display. It simulates what is in the underground mixture of iron and good targets.
Unfortunately in real life in a trashy area you hear a mixture of signals, not a separate silver tone and separate iron tone. Often a blended tone and blended average on the display. This is called masking when iron or other trash garbles the signal of the target signal. These are often called iffy signals.
hunting in a field or beach with no trash is somewhat easy compared to real life hunting around trash. Humans drop valuable coins, rings etc, but even more trash. This is reality.
On wet ocean beach hunting, you have a helper in the tide, wind and currents and gravity which will separate targets by weight. So you will find coins and rings among the lead weights and typically not among the lighter trash such as pop tops, pull tabs, bottle caps. If all you are finding is the latter then move til you start finding the former.