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Minelab Equinox 800 Vs White's V3i


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Guest Tnsharpshooter
1 hour ago, johnedoe said:

Got together with GaryC today for a couple hours at a local park.

We did some testing today of his E-800 and my V3i. we found a few coins and a little trash ... checked several targets with each machine and both reacted about the same on all checked targets. There was one small weird piece of trash that I had some difficulty hitting but that was about it.

Todays tests were farer conclusive as to each machines abilities but it did give us indications to each machines performance.

I have no doubt that for prospecting the 800 will outpace the V but for coin and jewelry I think they are pretty close... But like I said todays tests are far from conclusive..... Had a great time and was a pleasure to meet Gary.

Also met another fellow today that is from a little town just south of us .... He was running a White's DFX 300 with one of the SEF coils. He had to leave early.... And the way he kinda got out of there makes me think he found something good... :biggrin:... Gonna have to talk to him a little later....:biggrin:

On a side note........ We both experienced some pretty bad intermittent EMI which normally hasn't been a problem for me but today it got both of us... Now an interesting observation was that the EMI seemed to start when The Coast Guard helicopter was near... EMI was gone when the chopper was gone, returned again when the chopper returned....

The only thing I can figure is they either had some radio gear operating or it was a result from the discharge from the rotor tips.... Just some food for thought and I am open to others ideas.

Anyway here is what I dug today.........

fullsizeoutput_194.jpeg

Those helicopters have radios, altimeters, Direction Finder, tacan, radar,  some even have jamming equipment on board.  Then generators could toy with a detecfor too if helicopter is near.

commercial aircraft at altitude can do things to detectors too.

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Kinda what I was thinking too.......:smile:

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The simplicity of the Equinox out weighs the versatility of the V3i. I had a V3i for almost 4 years and never did conquer it. I am not knocking it but there was way to many things you could do with the V3i to get it right and I found what worked for me but never did have the success with the V3i I had with other detectors. 

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I agree Norm...

The V is really over the top when it comes to adjustability.

Every aspect of the machine can be adjusted, which also includes non hunt essential features.

I have pretty well settled into what I want and need for my hunting so not a lot of messing needed now other than minor fine tuning. 

The 800 I have to admit is gonna be a game changer for the industry .... powerful, and pretty straight forward as to adjusting .... I would go as far as saying it is a pretty good turn on and go machine..

I was impressed with what I saw while hunting with Gary.

I doubt I will buy one but .... you just never know what the future holds....:biggrin:

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...Equinox is compared to Spectra, easily adjustable but perform detector ...Spectra is a University of detection technology ...

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My main issue with the V3i has always been what I consider to be a poor ground balance system. I could never consider the V3i to be a machine I would want to prospect for gold with because of this. I really wish White’s had done a V3i with a simple MXT interface. Just give me a switch to flip between frequency options, a real ground balance option, and better yet stuff it in the MX Sport box. Oh well. The Equinox is a far better option for prospecting and for the beach and in dense trash. The V3i can coin hunt well but so can Equinox. We’re it not for my Bigfoot coil my V3i would already be gone.

Some interesting tidbits from Carl Moreland in this post. Carl was lead engineer at White’s and responsible for getting the V3i out the door. Includes this quote:

“The problem with the V3 GB has to do with the fundamentals of the MF design approach. It's a flawed system, and adding a third frequency really shined a light on the flaws. There was nothing more that could be done, short of scrapping the hardware and starting over. That was to be the V4.”

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Yes, it was very nice that Carl explained on the  Dankowski and Geotech forum....
 

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Well......................I was not doing market research but I met more than one person who wanted to buy the top of the line White's model when the DFX was the big cheese.  They typically had a bit of a mystified look on their faces and the guys with Tesoros were killing them.  After a few minutes of conversation it became apparent that they were on Cockpit Overload.  I don't know what percentage of DFX owners were in the same boat but when the V3 came out it appeared to be a modernized DFX with the same Cockpit Overload issues.

Now giving credit where it is due the V3 interface is a thing of beauty and I can appreciate the amount of coding that went into it.  But my rule of thumb is that once you get beyond two levels deep in a menu you start losing people.  Also the supposed simplified dual knob interface where you have to scroll through a dozen screens is tedious.

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On 3/31/2018 at 12:48 PM, Steve Herschbach said:

My main issue with the V3i has always been what I consider to be a poor ground balance system. I could never consider the V3i to be a machine I would want to prospect for gold with because of this. I really wish White’s had done a V3i with a simple MXT interface. Just give me a switch to flip between frequency options, a real ground balance option, and better yet stuff it in the MX Sport box. Oh well. The Equinox is a far better option for prospecting and for the beach and in dense trash. The V3i can coin hunt well but so can Equinox. We’re it not for my Bigfoot coil my V3i would already be gone.

Some interesting tidbits from Carl Moreland in this post. Carl was lead engineer at White’s and responsible for getting the V3i out the door. Includes this quote:

“The problem with the V3 GB has to do with the fundamentals of the MF design approach. It's a flawed system, and adding a third frequency really shined a light on the flaws. There was nothing more that could be done, short of scrapping the hardware and starting over. That was to be the V4.”

I'd like to see more elaboration on this by Carl if possible. What exactly about the hardware prevents an adequate or timely ground balance? Why are there V3/V3i users that insist that they did not have ground balance issues with the V3 before the "i" update? One user claims that Whites told him that in the "i" update they slowed the tracking down to gain a better ID. These claims would indicate that either software is the culprit or that software has made what began a slight hardware problem into a greater problem. This problem, whatever the source is disheartening because either way it will likely never be remedied.

It's important for me to note that in my northeastern soil, I have no problems with the V3i in terms of ground balance or otherwise. For a while I had noticed that it didn't keep up with changes like going from grassy areas to farmland, but then I discovered that I could adjust the tracking speed and I was good to go again. 

I would consider myself an advanced MD user. The complexity of the V3i that puts others off is what I love about it. I seem to have my V3i well tuned for my local conditions as so far I have not had the Equinox outperform my V3i in the couple of comparisons I've done in local parks. I was getting accurate readings down to around 8.5" with both. Both were able to pick silver out of dense trash once I adjusted the reactivity/recovery on both machines. This is a good thing in my book. I wasn't looking for something that would be better than my V3i. I was looking for something that could do as well as my V3i that I could use in the water and bad weather. Something I could bring on vacation to beaches. So far I find the Equinox to be better than the MX Sport, but I'm not ready to say its better or worse than my V3i for my local conditions. I purchased a go-pro holder setup this weekend so I can run them both through a series of tests that I can demonstrate. 

Im sure there are areas where the GB problem others are experiencing would be more pronounced, I just haven't experienced them here to a level that would bother me. But I am bothered that I may eventually encounter such issues and that they are rooted in hardware. 

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“A square-wave drive TX produces a triangle-wave current and magnetic field, which produces exponential eddy responses in targets. You can sample the RX response with early/mid/late sample windows and effectively get X and R from this.

In a sequential multifrequency (SMF) where short & long duration TX drives are temporally separated, you can easily use parallel demod channels with proper timing to extract the X & R for the different frequencies. No pre-filtering needed since the responses are not intermixed.

In a concurrent multifrequency (CMF) where short & long duration TX drives are intermixed, the RX signal is bandpass-filtered into each frequency channel for X & R demodulation. Then the signal is closer to a sine wave and can be demodulated using continuous-time methods, exactly the same as a single-frequency design. The White's V3 demonstrated that when the channel filtering isn't good enough, frequency cross-talk makes ground balancing exceptionally difficult. That's why the V3 GB doesn't work as well as it should.  - Carl- Geotech forum..”.
     Very much I appreciate the thoughts Carl Moreland ....           CMF multifrekvenci is Spectra V3 ,.....and SMF multifrekvenci  is  EQUINOX... 

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