Just To Add Fuel The Equinox Fire...

[Cabo Chris]

Hi and my first current post here.  Guess my detecting passions lean towards gold nugget hunting, but mostly Caribbean shallow water treasure hunting.  For years I have travelled with a group in search of such Caribbean Adventure, sharing comradery and expenses.  I and others in our group have pretty much tried every water detector available, including customized land machines in waterproof boxes/bags, in search of the best Caribbean gold jewelry finder.  There have been some Winners and mostly Losers for our style of hunting.  On a 1 to 2 week treasure hunting vacation one needs an efficient detector that finds the most gold in the least time.  I'll come right out and say the Top Dog for us has been the Minelab Excalibur- Period!  The Excalibur consistently finds the most gold for us in the least time and so much so, all in our group use them.  (our trips could almost be ML infomercials with a pile of Excaliburs in the back of our rental van!)  I call the Excalibur a Caribbean Gold Magnet!  (as many others already know).  The Excalibur has a good balance for shallow water vacation travel.  By that I mean, good in salt, loves gold, takes the abuse, long battery life and packable...  The CTX 3030 has done well, but needs to be handled more gently, the battery does not last as long- with potential leak problems and is not easy to securely pack.  The Garrett Infinium was the only PI that could give the Excal a run for the money and clearly outperform it in black sand.  But listening to Infinium Hi-Lo and Lo-Hi tones some 8 hours a day becomes buggy!  The ATX was interesting, but a heavy beast to pack.

For quite some time I have suggested to ML that they come out with a new, smaller and lighter Excalibur... because the technology to do so is here!  (I've been told an Excalibur can be stuffed into just headphones today!)  A waterproof simplified BBS machine for beach/shallow water.  Easy to pack so I can travel with 2 (one as back-up) and hot on gold jewelry.  It does not even need an all metal mode, nor discrimination.  With an Excalibur none in our group use discrimination- we hunt by ear/tone and rarely do we use pin-point.  What I dreamed of was a lightweight Excalibur package and it looks like I will finally have to settle for something potentially even better- the Equinox!  I want the new Equinox to work as I imagine so bad I can taste it!  The ultimate Caribbean shallow water travel machine! Will it be?  I sure hope so because just 1 or 2 gold/platinum finds will pay for this detector easy!

I've decided to go out and join on the Equinox limb with others by ordering an 800.  All it needs to do is find gold jewelry in the sea similar to an Excalibur.  But can it?  I suspect yes, because of what one can read between the lines.  Like... Steve sold all his other similar machines!  What doesn't that say about Equinox capability?  Plus it would be very surprising ML would build a new technology multi-frequency waterproof detector, that didn't work well in saltwater?  Then ML writes in plain English, talking about their Multi-IQ Technology "This enables maximum target sensitivity across all target types and sizes, while minimizing ground noise (especially in saltwater)".  No, ML did not say their Equinox is a Killer saltwater machine here, but it sure is implied!

I sure hope the Equinox release is soon, as I would love to take an Equinox on my next scheduled Caribbean trip this mid January!  So Santa do you hear me now?             

                 

[Steve Herschbach]

Welcome to the forum Chris! I am back now and am going to plow through the backlog starting with oldest first.

I personally am not worried about Equinox from a performance standpoint. I just know how water hunters are when it comes to gear and the Excalibur as a true diving detector will continue to have fans, just like the CTX and E-TRAC etc will continue to have fans. It will be interesting to see how it all sorts out over the next year - that's part of the fun as far as I am concerned!