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Swinging The Equinox At Partner Conference


Lunk

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I can offer one insight on dedicated versus multipurpose.

It is extremely important to understand that what helps one detectorist may hurt another when you design a detector. For instance, making a detector very hot on gold nuggets can also make it not work at all in saltwater. Making it work in saltwater makes it weak on gold nuggets. Fast recovery means better target separation, slow recovery more depth. Etc.

In theory it is a matter of more frequencies and more adjustments, but that also can get in the way of a person who only cares about one task. And hardware can be either general purpose or task specific.

If you decide to build a prospecting detector, all feedback and changes are made for one thing only - to make a unit great for prospecting. Even then competing desires require compromises to be made.

Now try making a detector that satisfies field hunters in the U.K., park hunters in the U.S., and beach hunters everywhere. Toss prospecting in to complete the kitchen sink. Imagine the demands made and compromises that occur.

That is why Equinox will be a great all rounder, perhaps the best ever made, but expecting it to somehow be better than a collection of separate dedicated units is a hard ask. And that in a nutshell is why detectors like the Excalibur and Gold Monster will continue to exist, and why prospectors in particular will not be ditching their dedicated units in favor of generalized units. Gold prospecting is one of the most technically demanding types of metal detecting and what makes a detector great for gold prospecting often makes it unsuitable for most other uses.

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9 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

No doubt Mark Lawrie was employing the latest firmware versions and observing dealer responses and feedback which could result in another tweak. He would be an idiot not to take advantage of such a situation and Mark is no idiot - far from it.

Just as a matter of my personal preference, I hope there is one more tweak to the Gold Mode, and that is the audio response; I mentioned to Mr. Lawrie that typically with Minelab gold machines (and the prospecting mode on the X-terra 705) the audio response changes in pitch and volume, increasing as the coil gets closer to the target. This allows the operator to approximate how deep a target is. The audio response of the EQX gold mode, however, was just a single-tone beep of constant volume and pitch, just like the other modes.

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17 minutes ago, Lunk said:

Just as a matter of my personal preference, I hope there is one more tweak to the Gold Mode, and that is the audio response; I mentioned to Mr. Lawrie that typically with Minelab gold machines (and the prospecting mode on the X-terra 705) the audio response changes in pitch and volume, increasing as the coil gets closer to the target. This allows the operator to approximate how deep a target is. The audio response of the EQX gold mode, however, was just a single-tone beep of constant volume and pitch, just like the other modes.

Are you saying that the audio did not respond as a VCO (variable volume/pitch) as described in Steve's post here:

Also, you mentioned multifrequency was an option in your original post.  Did you get to swing it in multifrequency (the default) AND single frequency during your test?  If so, was there any difference in responsiveness that you could observe?

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27 minutes ago, Chase Goldman said:

Are you saying that the audio did not respond as a VCO (variable volume/pitch) as described in Steve's post..,

 

27 minutes ago, Chase Goldman said:

Also, you mentioned multifrequency was an option in your original post.  Did you get to swing it in multifrequency (the default) AND single frequency during your test?  If so, was there any difference in responsiveness that you could observe?

Sorry for the confusion, but I just meant that the user had the option of selecting either a single frequency or multi-frequency. I only employed multi-frequency.

And yes, the response was not VCO.

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10 minutes ago, Chase Goldman said:

Sounds like what Steve was describing in his Gold Mode write-up is the audio you desire.  Perhaps Mark's machine didn't have this latest audio tweak that Steve was describing for some reason.  Thanks for the info.

Perhaps, or maybe the machine was in another mode and I just didn’t notice and thought it was in Gold Mode.?

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4 minutes ago, Lunk said:

Perhaps, or maybe the machine was in another mode and I just didn’t notice and thought it was in Gold Mode.?

That sounds more likely than the oddball configuration I was postulating.  What's cool is, if that was the case, that you were hitting on such small targets and could pick up the gold test target just fine even when you were not in gold mode!  It's intimidating to be handed a machine cold and then swing it when you are not intimately familiar with the user interface.  It's almost a little like flying blind (or when you swung a metal detector the first time out without out knowing what all the adjustments actually do) because its hard to pick up the visual clues of your selected mode off an unfamiliar screen.  Until you are used to the icons and layout, it just looks cluttered plus you are mainly focusing on the audio and target id when you have such limited time to play around with it.

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Exactly. It was a bit overwhelming with the myriad features and functions. 

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