Eq800, First Hunt

[Redneck]

I picked up my Eq from my local dealer on Wed. Nice valentines gift , I must add!.   I charged everything last nite, loaded everything in my truck this am, and drove 70 miles to my favorite beach area.

75 degrees today.  Perfect day for forgetting about work.  i hunted for 5.5 hrs.

I used the 2 park settings only .  I auto ground cancelled, noise cancelled,  ran the sensitivity 20-22.  turned up the volume a few notches in the detector, and  maxed the headphones.  Man I sure love cordless headphones.  I also turned up the threshold so I could barely hear it.   Thats about all te settings I messed with today.

The beach here in the Ozarks consists of rocks, rocks, rocks, with some areas have dark red clay in between, and some areas have a bit of sand.  Its tough ground.  My se pro I had found its share of hot rocks here, but I did pretty well with it here.   Numerous other detectors I have used were very chatty, I had to turn down the sensitivity to make them run stable, but then they had no depth.  Running the EQ ,  the threshold sounded like machine gun fire as I  went. And yet the detecor ran smooth.  I think the IQ part was cancelling out the bad ground. 

22 was a bit high on sensitivity, so I dropped to 20, that took out the falsing I was getting on the sweeps.

Running in Park 1 reminded me of the se pro I had.  Rather quiet, but barked well on coins.  That program is geared more for coins, or biased more towards lower frequencies.  Park 2 , and man, the ground came alive.  Its set up more for jewelry, and higher freqs.  BUT, I also dug alot more of everything in this mode, including trash!  lots of iron, bottlecaps were a real pain, as they read all over the place.   Also Alum pulltabs were all over as well,  but there are also a great variety of shapes and thicknesses here, as some get tumbled in the waves for years , and become very thin.  I did not disc anything out, as I was hoping for that elusive gold ring, but no luck.   I have not found one here in over 7 years.   I have found a few dozen silver rings .  Not many rich folk use this beach.

The EQ handles  the bad dirt/ rocks real well.  Good depth, and accurate target ID at depth. 7" was the deepest today.  One target read 20-22, which is a cent.  I dug down and hit a nickel at 7".  That ID is off!  in the same hole, I found a 5" dime, then a cent, and 2 large rusty steel fish hooks.!    

Machine is comfy to swing all day.  I'm 59 , and  my arm held up real well.  Unit also seperates targets real well.

I finished the day with 7 nickels, 8 dimes, 8 quarters, and 25 pennies.1 silver ring.  No recent drops.  I also found a $20 bill laying there . Thank You very much!

I was a bit surprised how much Iron I found.  But then again I pretty much dug everything to get a feel for the machine.  But alot of it read  near the coin zones.  Screws read out at 19-20 then a 1 would pop up.  Steel bottle caps also showed up too often in my opinion.  Maybe it has something to do with the nasty soil, or my sensitivity could have been too high, or there  are settings for that I just am not familiar with?  I have alot to learn yet,  5 hrs is only a start!  Overall a fun machine, and I did not miss work one bit!!!

HH, Redneck.

[Thegoldenone]

I think you have to play around with the iron bias setting... Look on the next page of topic's for "iron bias what is it"

Got to love those $20 bills laying around!

[Chase Goldman]

Hey. That's my twenty!  Nice hunt.

 

Good tip on iron bias tweaking.

[Steve Herschbach]

If you have ferrous rejected you can get high tone false signals from ferrous. Accepting ferrous so that you can hear the ferrous low tone component of the signal will eliminate the vast majority of ferrous because you will then discern the target is throwing off 95% low tones with a few high tone squeaks. Equinox is super powerful, and you will find many targets can be detected well away from the perimeter of the coil. Back the coil off center of the target, and a bottle cap that squeaks high when you are dead over it will go massively ferrous if approached from the perimeter.

That said, I highly recommend continuing to dig in excess while incorporating these types of “tricks” to gain confidence in your ability to separate ferrous from non-ferrous. No detector situation is 100% predictable due to ground conditions. Mixed trash in the ground with a good item can also give mixed signals i.e. something like a dime in a hole with three nails. What I have found is I can pass on nearly all ferrous when I want to, but when I get aggressive looking for that dime in the same hole as nails my ferrous take will jump way up. There is a balance there you have to reach because digging too much trash wastes time that could be better used going after better targets. In areas pounded for decades however only the most aggressive techniques will get results. We have to decide for ourselves as individuals where that line is drawn.

You just did what I would do with any new detector. Dig darn near everything while paying attention to responses and experiment with settings like iron bias. So far I have run mine at zero since it was a late addition to the feature set and I was too busy to mess with it at all. I don’t mind digging a little junk and in fact worry if I don’t!

[steveg]

EXCELLENT post there, Steve...

Steve

[Redneck]

I made it back to the same beach  yesterday.  What a difference 20 hours  experience makes !   I have the nickel and coins area " notched in",  With higher volume and tone, with the aluminum  and iron areas set up quiet and low tone.   Now instead of avoiding the trashy part of the beach, I spent 1.5 hours in it,  and pulled out 17 coins,  and not much trash at all.   4 were nickels.  Some alum and lead sinkers come in the coin range, as expected, but this was fun digging today.   It sure pays off to get to know your detector!. I still have a lot to learn, but sticking with park 1 , til I decide to graduate and move to the next level.    HH  

[StevenB]

Just curious, where do you have your tones breaks set at?

[Redneck]

Steven B,    look at the video below about setting up for coin hunting. By Bill S.  I set up my 800 very close to his settings. 

It works very well. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[StevenB]

Thanks for the video link.  I've tweaked my settings less drastically since I'm not interested in zinc pennies; we'll see how that works out for me tomorrow!  I love the customization possible with this machine.

[flakmagnet]

I think there are a lot of us who owe DirtFishing a big thank you for taking the time to make a video of how to set up the tone breaks. I know it would have been weeks if not more before I figured out how to do this.