Equinox 800 V2 update FE2 test

Nice testing and report. I have seen similar results with 11" coil. Your nail and washer findings as well as what I have seen makes me wonder if a deep iffy silver will be seen as iron or dissapear like this as well. I have not had a deep iffy silver signal to test that theory yet. I hope it will actually clean up the signal a little by cranking up F2 bias but only time will tell.

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detectorben said:

...Your nail and washer findings as well as what I have seen makes me wonder if a deep iffy silver will be seen as iron or dissapear like this as well. I have not had a deep iffy silver signal to test that theory yet. I hope it will actually clean up the signal a little by cranking up F2 bias but only time will tell.

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Thanks for posting your experiences, maxxkatt. I haven’t tested this theory yet either, but I believe detectorben’s suspicions are correct - a deep, iffy, and/or partially masked silver is probably going to react more like ferrous as F2 is cranked up, just as it would if you cranked up the original iron bias (FE). My understanding is that F2 really isn’t a different kind of iron bias than FE, it’s just a wider range and altered scale of iron bias. Higher F2 reduces falsing and is more likely to reject mixed targets like caps, but at the expense of greater masking - dig less trash, but potentially miss targets. Lower F2 means small or partially masked non-ferrous will more likely read properly, but at the expense of greater falsing on ferrous - in other words dig more trash, but uncover a few more masked goodies. Same would happen with FE, just to a lesser degree at the extreme ends of the scale. F2 0 through 3 are more agressive at calling things non-ferrous than FE, and iron will false more. F2 7 through 9 are more aggressive at calling things ferrous than FE, and non-ferrous will be masked more.

I’m basing all of this on information from various threads, but it’s nicely summarized at this link, along with an excellent graphic to help understand how the two Iron Bias scales equate:

DetectorProspector Site: New Update Has Arrived, Steve Herschbach’s post

Again, I haven’t directly tested this on iffy silver in the field, but it does match what I’ve seen so far as I experiment with the two Iron Bias modes. Also, for what it’s worth, Tom Dankowski, who apparently helped brain-child this update with Minelab, has said that F2 4 = FE 0, while F2 0 would be equal to FE -1 if such a setting existed, and F2 6 = FE 9. That information can be found by following the link in Steve Herschbach’s post given above.