Big Boys Hobbies

Equinox 800 missing silver

It's funny I have never seen a silver the CTX or Etrac could hit the Equinox couldn't. That's including the Equinox giving you a pretty solid I.D.. I have though on numerous occasions witnessed the Etrac and CTX not giving a reasonable I.D. when on the Equinox the I.D. was solid silver coin numbers. As far as depth goes in mild ground I am yet to see the CTX or Etrac hit a coin the Equinox couldn't. I think the CTX and Etrac are great machines that have a well deserved reputation for finding silver, but I don't think either is better than an Equinox by much at all. I certainly don't think they are better for finding anything be it low conductor or high conductor in iron or heavy trashy park situations.
 
I've never used an Etrac or CTX, but I have watched a lot of videos about them :)

What I've observed in all the comparison videos with those detectors against the newer SMF detectors (from the 800 forward), is that the newer SMF detectors match or beat the Etrac and CTX in every type of comparison test. Especially the separation and unmasking tests.
 
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Digalicious I've never used an Etrac or CTX, but I have watched a lot of videos about them :)
Longbow62 It's funny I have never seen a silver the CTX or Etrac could hit the Equinox couldn't.
Even though minelab states that fbs bbs is better for high conductive silver coins in all situations you digalicious who has not operated a ctx or e-trac say different okay.
Then longbow says he's never seen a coin a e-trac or ctx hit that the 800 would not .I have the 800 ctx and deus 2 and if the deus does not work because of low battery I grab the CTX and not the 800 .
The 800 was made to hit ever thing and from my testings did not hit as hard as the CTX on silver coins with nails .
Because of the frequencies it runs on it hit's nickels much harder than the CTX you can't have ever thing .
I see you have a manticore now has it hit on any coins the 800 has not . Then ask yourself why would minelab waist there time putting a high conductor mode on the manticore ?
Which is a 800 with more bells and whistles . sube
 
Digalicious said:
I've never used an Etrac or CTX, but I have watched a lot of videos about them :)

What I've observed in all the comparison videos with those detectors against the newer SMF detectors (from the 800 forward), is that the newer SMF detectors match or beat the Etrac and CTX in every type of comparison test. Especially the separation and unmasking tests.
Click to expand...
The only advantage the newer SMF detectors have is for finding EMI.
If someone claim's the Equinox finds all the metal in the ground with horseshoe on what are they basing their claim on? What detectors have they run in the same exact area? I base my findings on running detectors on the same exact corn rows in the corn fields and narrow strips of ground in parks. For the detectors that I have run in the same places they are DFX,CZ3D, F75LTD,X-Terra 705 and Etrac to name a few of them. I know for a fact that the Equinox 800 will NOT hit all the metal in the ground using horseshoe on.
 
graybeard said:
I know for a fact that the Equinox 800 will NOT hit all the metal in the ground using horseshoe on.
Click to expand...
Once again:

That is irrelevant to the OP's issue, and also and misses the point.

Here's an example of my point:

Not too long ago, someone posted on another forum that their detector wasn't hitting a coin they buried. As it turned out, there was also iron in the hole that significantly dragged down the ID of the coin. The coin wasn't being detected, because he was using a discrimination pattern that notched out the dragged down ID of the coin.

That is why I suggested using All Metal. Better yet, before burying the coin, check the darn hole and plug to make sure there is no other metal (especially ferrous) present.
 
Digalicious said:
Once again:

That is irrelevant to the OP's issue, and also and misses the point.

Here's an example of my point:

Not too long ago, someone posted on another forum that their detector wasn't hitting a coin they buried. As it turned out, there was also iron in the hole that significantly dragged down the ID of the coin. The coin wasn't being detected, because he was using a discrimination pattern that notched out the dragged down ID of the coin.

That is why I suggested using All Metal. Better yet, before burying the coin, check the darn hole and plug to make sure there is no other metal (especially ferrous) present.
Click to expand...
I know the topic is about the lack of silver while using the Equinox. And I fully agree with them because I also found very little silver with the Equinox 800 and I used almost 3 years. I found over 300 nickels in one park plus lots and lots beaver tail pulltabs and can slaw.
 
graybeard said:
I know the topic is about the lack of silver while using the Equinox. And I fully agree with them because I also found very little silver with the Equinox 800 and I used almost 3 years. I found over 300 nickels in one park plus lots and lots beaver tail pulltabs and can slaw.
Click to expand...
The factory preset, FE 6, certainly isn’t optimal for finding deep silver with the Equinox. That said, I’ve had success pulling silver from relatively(I live in an area with a small population, but lots of retirees) heavily hunted areas using F2 2. There are many others who run F2 down to 1, and even 0, for cherry picking deep silver. Some of those guys kill the deep silver, even in high iron trash and heavily hunted areas. Their successes, in pulling deep silver, make it difficult to make an argument that the Equinox can’t find silver.

How do you run your Equinox in those parks where you pull old nickels, and presumably old pennies, without hitting any silver?
 
Here is a video by The Hunter GT depth testing the Equinox 800, Legend, Deus 2 and CTX 3030 in iron mineralized ground near Sacramento CA in the Spring of 2022 using an 8" buried US silver dime and a 10" buried US silver dime.

Before anyone says "I told you so" there are several issues with this testing no matter what the video maker claims or says in the video.

The Equinox 800 being used in Park 1 Multi has tracking ground balance ON, Recovery speed 1, iron bias on Fe 0 instead of F2 0 and all iron target IDs are rejected except for 0. None of those settings are optimal for deep, edge of detection targets including silver coins while hunting in high iron mineralization. Some iron responses are a given with those settings but they are mostly being rejected in this video. I do sometimes use tracking ground balance ON at saltwater beaches, but not on iron mineralized dirt.

The Legend is setup very well except for the 1 recovery speed and the fact that it is using pre v1.09 software so the fixed iron bias/filter is set to maximum 8. In high iron mineralization those settings are guaranteed to produce iron responses on edge of detection targets, even silver coins.

Deus 2 is using V0.71 software and Deep High Conductor. Iron volume is on default 3 and simply can't be heard through the external speaker especially since the user is talking right over the responses. This was corrected with much better iron volume control settings with V1.0 software. Deep High Conductor and high iron mineralization do not get along very well out here in the Western USA and even the Manticore suffers out here using All Terrain High Conductor. The iron mineralization seriously hurts any programs weighted below around 18 kHz . Recovery (reactivity) speed 1 doesn't help very much in Western USA high iron mineralization on edge of detection targets either.

I own or have owned and regularly used the Equinox 800, Legend and Deus 2 in similar soil conditions and have found deep 8 to 12" silver US dimes with all three of them repeatedly. The audio and target ID responses of the Equinox 800 even with the seriously flawed setup that The Hunter GT is using are "DIG ME" responses in the dirt out here.

CTX is setup really well for this test, M4 Silver, wide open pattern, full tones, still giving some iron responses too however. It did great.

I love it when testers say things like "Nothing", "As you can see we got nothing" and "Nada Tostada" while each detector is giving audio and target ID responses on the 10" silver dime target.

For you Deus 2 owners, the results in this video are absolutely not the results that I have experienced. Deus 2 using post V0.71 software and setup well in General, Sensitive or Sensitive FT using the 11" or 13X11" coil will easily hit those targets with plenty of non-ferrous tones and good IDs where I detect in Western USA high iron mineralization. Ditto for the Legend using V1.09 or later software.

 
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Thanks for posting that video Jeff. I've seen a heck of a lot of depth comparison videos with those detectors, but I don't recall seeing that one.

All those detectors had trouble on the 10" dime, but all were (at least) detecting the dime with an iron grunt. Granted, the CTX gave an occasional nonferrous tone, but I trust your word that it was the only one set up properly for the test.

The Legend was close to identifying the 10" dime as nonferrous, and he did mention that in field mode he could get a one way hit on it. No doubt, that if he had the iron bias control, and it was properly adjusted, the Legend would have pulled that dime out of the ferrous range.

Taking into account the improper settings you mentioned, I'd say that all those detectors had similar depth performance in that ground.
 
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jmaclen said:
The “finding high conductive silver coins in all conditions” that you highlighted is simply not true. Just like Multi IQ made all single frequency VLF detectors obsolete. The word ALL is simply not accurate in either case.
Click to expand...
I totally agree with you Jeff but what about minelabs flashlight and muti-iq only lighting up the treasure and not pull-tabs can-slaw and cans :?: yea ALL is what they tell you till you use it in your ground .
Then again you need a fast detector as they say but ever one runs them as slow as they can to get depth , As far as mineral ground running faster will work better but then there gos your depth . I was going to watch the video but after the intro I said (NO) :dash2:. sube
 
This argument reminds me of the guy who blames his rifle because he missed a deer at 50 yards. I got news for him,..... it ain't the rifle.

I have no experience with any of the detectors mentioned in this thread except the 800. But after 1000s of hours hunting mostly old parks and curbstrips, with an occasional yard or empy lot thown in, I have come to the conclusion the the 800 misses nothing that is detectable within its individual settings. However, I as the detectorist have missed a lot, either due to not understanding what I was hearing, or not getting the coil over the target.
In one particular park, I started out finding very little with the 800, but as I gained experience , I began finding more. Hunting over the same areas, but gridding in different directions, digging the " iffy " signals and putting up with bucketloads of falsing Iron, pulltabs and bottlecaps, I was able to find even more good stuff. Eventually, good targets became more and more rare. And just when I was coming to the conclusion there was nothing good left to find, I found my first and only seated coin --in an area I had been over at least a half dozen times-- and it was not even that deep. I could say the detector missed it before, but if I am being honest, it wasnt the detector. It was the detectorist that missed it.
Most of the people on here know a hell of alot more than I do about the technical aspects of many differet detectors. And I have to trust that the engineers at the detector companies know even more. But let's be truthful here. All of the modern detectors will detect metal. Some have a bit more depth capability , some are tuned to different levels of conductitvity, some handle mineralization better than others, but I don't believe any of them "miss" detectable targets if they are properly set up for the conditions.
 
Hmm.
Quite an interesting thread.
Folks need to remember what was said about any model detector was based on the time in question. Yes Etrac/CTX back when were very good. Not matched really in the industry.

Times have changed. New detector models released.
Minelab has really been working on making multi freq work better on more difficult ground (higher mineralization).

I’ll even add here. Some have wondered why Minelab didn’t make a newer etrac/CTX. Basically put the guts in a setup for lighter weight. I don’t know the answer for sure. Some thing folks need to think about. USA has likely more higher conductive coins vs lot of other countries in the world. But USA sales alone don’t keep a company afloat. It takes users buying from many countries. Hence lower and mid conductive targets are important to other folks living in other countries.

Cheers.
 
sube said:
I totally agree with you Jeff but what about minelabs flashlight and muti-iq only lighting up the treasure and not pull-tabs can-slaw and cans :?: yea ALL is what they tell you till you use it in your ground .
Then again you need a fast detector as they say but ever one runs them as slow as they can to get depth , As far as mineral ground running faster will work better but then there gos your depth . I was going to watch the video but after the intro I said (NO) :dash2:. sube
Click to expand...
Even from a comparison video like the one I posted, there is always something to learn. Hunter GT segmented the video so it’s easy to just watch the part about your favorite of the four detectors. 9 minutes total.
 
matt93 said:
Silver has already been cherry picked…just throwing it out there
Click to expand...
Bingo. The OP doesn't want to except that.
MTtrashdigger said:
This argument reminds me of the guy who blames his rifle because he missed a deer at 50 yards. I got news for him,..... it ain't the rifle.
Click to expand...
Amen brother. Like you I have found a good deal of silver with the 800. If you can't find silver with the 800 you need to change locations or slow down and concentrate on your swing, But the debate rages on. I guess cabin fever will do that to ya. :lol:
 
graybeard said:
The only advantage the newer SMF detectors have is for finding EMI.
If someone claim's the Equinox finds all the metal in the ground with horseshoe on what are they basing their claim on? What detectors have they run in the same exact area? I base my findings on running detectors on the same exact corn rows in the corn fields and narrow strips of ground in parks. For the detectors that I have run in the same places they are DFX,CZ3D, F75LTD,X-Terra 705 and Etrac to name a few of them. I know for a fact that the Equinox 800 will NOT hit all the metal in the ground using horseshoe on.
Click to expand...

More lip service with no back-up. This was taken this week on a very harsh Black Sand beach with Horseshoe ON.
Two items are gold and two are other metals. Are these small enough??? I have 100's of other recoveries of larger NONFERROUS metals [of all kinds] .
IMG_2431.jpg
 
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markinswpa said:
Bingo. The OP doesn't want to except that.

Amen brother. Like you I have found a good deal of silver with the 800. If you can't find silver with the 800 you need to change locations or slow down and concentrate on your swing, But the debate rages on. I guess cabin fever will do that to ya. :lol:
Click to expand...
I am speaking from experience. Owned AT Pro, 800, CTX3030, XP2. With my 800 I never really got a good command of the advanced features, yet tried to use them. So often I was using a detuned 800 that was not capable of finding deeper silver beyond the 4-5 inch clad depth range. So this may have been an issue with others using the 800 not properly set up for a hunt site.
 
Digalicious said:
Once again:

That is irrelevant to the OP's issue, and also and misses the point.

Here's an example of my point:

Not too long ago, someone posted on another forum that their detector wasn't hitting a coin they buried. As it turned out, there was also iron in the hole that significantly dragged down the ID of the coin. The coin wasn't being detected, because he was using a discrimination pattern that notched out the dragged down ID of the coin.

That is why I suggested using All Metal.
Click to expand...
What machine was he using? Minelab machines HATE recently buried coins... I set up a test garden in a grassy area of the RV Park we live in for the manager to learn the DFX she bought from me in. A week after setting up the garden I ran my CTX and My E-Trac over it and got hits at all the coins but just barely. They were certainly hits but nowhere as hard as I would have expected. So I ran my 'Nox 800 over them and missed 3 of them entirely. Then I ran my MX Sport over them and nailed them all, harder than the CTX and E-Trac. Now, over a year later, the CTX and E-Trac scream at me (same settings as before) on all of the coins. My 800 hits all of them including the 3 it missed before but the 3 deeper ones are unstable on the numbers. My MX Sport hits them about the same as before and on a lark I took my Surf PI over the garden and it hit all the coins better than any of the other detectors did... go figure? Of course being a Pulse Induction, it only said there was metal there, not if it was good or bad.

Digalicious said:
Better yet, before burying the coin, check the darn hole and plug to make sure there is no other metal (especially ferrous) present.
Click to expand...
Excellent advice!

 
jmaclen said:
Here is a video by The Hunter GT depth testing the Equinox 800, Legend, Deus 2 and CTX 3030 in iron mineralized ground near Sacramento CA in the Spring of 2022 using an 8" buried US silver dime and a 10" buried US silver dime.

Before anyone says "I told you so" there are several issues with this testing no matter what the video maker claims or says in the video.

The Equinox 800 being used in Park 1 Multi has tracking ground balance ON, Recovery speed 1, iron bias on Fe 0 instead of F2 0 and all iron target IDs are rejected except for 0. None of those settings are optimal for deep, edge of detection targets including silver coins while hunting in high iron mineralization. Some iron responses are a given with those settings but they are mostly being rejected in this video. I do sometimes use tracking ground balance ON at saltwater beaches, but not on iron mineralized dirt.

The Legend is setup very well except for the 1 recovery speed and the fact that it is using pre v1.09 software so the fixed iron bias/filter is set to maximum 8. In high iron mineralization those settings are guaranteed to produce iron responses on edge of detection targets, even silver coins.

Deus 2 is using V0.71 software and Deep High Conductor. Iron volume is on default 3 and simply can't be heard through the external speaker especially since the user is talking right over the responses. This was corrected with much better iron volume control settings with V1.0 software. Deep High Conductor and high iron mineralization do not get along very well out here in the Western USA and even the Manticore suffers out here using All Terrain High Conductor. The iron mineralization seriously hurts any programs weighted below around 18 kHz . Recovery (reactivity) speed 1 doesn't help very much in Western USA high iron mineralization on edge of detection targets either.

I own or have owned and regularly used the Equinox 800, Legend and Deus 2 in similar soil conditions and have found deep 8 to 12" silver US dimes with all three of them repeatedly. The audio and target ID responses of the Equinox 800 even with the seriously flawed setup that The Hunter GT is using are "DIG ME" responses in the dirt out here.

CTX is setup really well for this test, M4 Silver, wide open pattern, full tones, still giving some iron responses too however. It did great.

I love it when testers say things like "Nothing", "As you can see we got nothing" and "Nada Tostada" while each detector is giving audio and target ID responses on the 10" silver dime target.

For you Deus 2 owners, the results in this video are absolutely not the results that I have experienced. Deus 2 using post V0.71 software and setup well in General, Sensitive or Sensitive FT using the 11" or 13X11" coil will easily hit those targets with plenty of non-ferrous tones and good IDs where I detect in Western USA high iron mineralization. Ditto for the Legend using V1.09 or later software.

Click to expand...
**DISCLAIMER** I AM NOT calling out this guy in particular with this statement...

I have seen plenty of allegedly "unbiased" reviews from guys who have tweaked one machine for better performance than the other in videos and it's obvious in a few, especially when you have a self-proclaimed fanboy of the detector that comes out on top. The only comparison I find valid is where two guys compare their respective machines that they have been swinging for at least 100 hours each. That way there can be no bias against either machines.
 
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