maxxkatt
Forum Supporter
I find myself re-reading Clive Clynick's first book on the Equinox 800. Why?
Because when I first got my 800 2 years ago, I was not even remotely ready to use a sophisticated and hot machine like the 800.
Thus a lot of stuff in Clive's books makes more sense to me now that I have a couple of years experience with the 800 under my belt.
On the 800 you have eight modes to select from. Three different sets of tones to choose from. 2,5 and 50. You discrim out 40 notches on the display. You have a recovery speed from 1-8, iron balance #1 (FE) of nine settings, #2(FE2) of nine settings, a multi-frequency setting and five other fix settings, 5,10,15,20,40. You can hunt in the all metal mode or discrim mode and 25 increments of sensitivity. And then don't forget noise cancel and ground balance. Either one of those out of wack along with a higher sensitivity setting will result is a detector so noisy you would be extremely lucky to find a silver dollar one inch below the sand.
So the possible combinations of all these settings on the 80 is huge. You have a huge opportunity to really screw up settings and only a few custom settings to get it right for your hunt site.
So the answer for newbies is just pick the best of the eight hunting modes, noise cancel, ground balance, set the sensitivity and hunt.
The Minelab engineers have done an excellent job of going through all those huge number of possible setting to give you the best combination for the average type of hunt sites.
Why? Because they are the engineers and they wanted to design a very hot and sophisticated detector for the experienced users and a simple turn on and go detector for the newbies.
Believe it or not the engineers succeeded in what they were trying to accomplish. But woe be to the detectorists who starts screwing around with the settings without understanding what they are doing.
My advice to newbies buy a Simplex or Vanquish 540 instead of jumping into the Equinox 800.
Because when I first got my 800 2 years ago, I was not even remotely ready to use a sophisticated and hot machine like the 800.
Thus a lot of stuff in Clive's books makes more sense to me now that I have a couple of years experience with the 800 under my belt.
On the 800 you have eight modes to select from. Three different sets of tones to choose from. 2,5 and 50. You discrim out 40 notches on the display. You have a recovery speed from 1-8, iron balance #1 (FE) of nine settings, #2(FE2) of nine settings, a multi-frequency setting and five other fix settings, 5,10,15,20,40. You can hunt in the all metal mode or discrim mode and 25 increments of sensitivity. And then don't forget noise cancel and ground balance. Either one of those out of wack along with a higher sensitivity setting will result is a detector so noisy you would be extremely lucky to find a silver dollar one inch below the sand.
So the possible combinations of all these settings on the 80 is huge. You have a huge opportunity to really screw up settings and only a few custom settings to get it right for your hunt site.
So the answer for newbies is just pick the best of the eight hunting modes, noise cancel, ground balance, set the sensitivity and hunt.
The Minelab engineers have done an excellent job of going through all those huge number of possible setting to give you the best combination for the average type of hunt sites.
Why? Because they are the engineers and they wanted to design a very hot and sophisticated detector for the experienced users and a simple turn on and go detector for the newbies.
Believe it or not the engineers succeeded in what they were trying to accomplish. But woe be to the detectorists who starts screwing around with the settings without understanding what they are doing.
My advice to newbies buy a Simplex or Vanquish 540 instead of jumping into the Equinox 800.
