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General Questions About The Nox And Setups


Kentucky

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I’m in Kentucky. Highly mineralized ground. Full of square nails and horseshoes. What is everyones go to to hide the iron. I feel like I can’t get it to lock on? Why 50 tones over 5? Coming from at pro. Numbers have me messed up as I tried to pay attention to both Vdi and tone. I mainly hunt fields and some house sites. If u were to choose one setup from top to bottom what would it be. Deepest I’ve dug a bullets is 10 inches with the nox. Beach settings. For the future. Lol? 

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If you are starting out stay simple. Jumping into 50 tones or anything you are not comfortable with will just make your life harder. Why 50 tones? More audio information for those that hunt by ear. More information overload for those that may not need it. If all you want to do is dig non-ferrous there is nothing wrong with two tones.

I am a proponent of the default stock modes for beginners. Beach detecting? Beach 1 for dry beach, Beach 2 for water. Adjust sensitivity as high as is possible while keeping the detector stable.

For hunting iron make sure you have the latest update so you can access the new Iron Bias 'F2' settings, which have an improved capability to reject a much wider range of difficult iron targets, including bottle caps. I prefer Park 1. Use the defaults and lower sensitivity and adjust the F2 setting to get the degree of quietness on iron you prefer. There is no numbers for settings I can give you as I adjust differently for every situation I am in. I adjust to get the machine to act like I want depending where I am and the settings just end up wherever they need to be to make that happen.

 

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11 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

There is no numbers for settings I can give you as I adjust differently for every situation I am in.

Steve,

You are so right with that statement. I have hunted in a park just 7 miles down the road and have had great luck with factory settings.

I then go to my back yard and have to adjust the 800 on several settings just to find pennies.

I then go 3 blocks away and it too is a different setting all together.

I have read more in the forum just to understand the 800 and have learned a lot from the topics here.

When I get another chance I will be back out there swinging my 800 because it is mad at me right now. It thinks we have to go even if it rains or is freezing.

Good luck with your new 800 and take your time to learn what it will do. Practice in your own back yard if it means cleaning out all the trash, because you will know your unit a lot better.

 

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On 11/24/2019 at 8:43 AM, Kentucky said:

I’m in Kentucky. Highly mineralized ground. Full of square nails and horseshoes. What is everyones go to to hide the iron. I feel like I can’t get it to lock on?

I don't have much experience with horseshoes as I've only encountered a few.  Large targets close to the surface reveal themselves by the longer (not sharp) drawn-out tones, and especially in pinpoint mode.  Deep targets get sharper (and quieter) and are thus more difficult to reject as they sound more like desirable small targets.  Nails on the other hand -- every old site I've ever been to has those, and typically a lot of them.  Square nails in particular seem to be problematic for most everyone, regardless of detector being used.  Bent modern (that is, round cross section) nails can also be an issue.  Another problem nail is the roofing nail because its head gives a 22-23 signal on the Eqx.  Depending upon its orientiation you may not get any iron grunt, and even under best orientation you are going to get both and have to decide if it's a roofing nail or a desirable target very close to a nail.  Even modern nails with small heads that aren't bent will sound good if they are oriented very close to vertical.  (Try an air test with one oriented parallel to the coil axis = perpendicular to the coil plane.)

Iron bias setting, recovery speed setting, and even cross checking in certain single frequency modes will probably help some.  IMO you are going to have to put in the hours with the Equinox, listening carefully to the tones and digging a lot of junk targets to tune your brain on what to listen for.  Even then you likely never will be 100% sure of the dig / no dig decision in the more difficult situations.  The perfect discriminating metal detector doesn't exist.  The only detectorists who never dig any nails are either in sites where none exist or are leaving good targets in the ground.

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The highly mineralized soil part of your equation is going to make this tougher on you VS someone else that is just wanting to eliminate iron.  Any detector has trouble dividing the ground minerals from iron and then again to divide the iron from non iron...particularly in ground where the mineralization IS a form of iron ore.  What typically happens is that the non iron targets will start to "read" as iron on most machines, or at least the ID is dragged down into the iron range (or up, depending on how you look at the iron scale). 

Now, for nails and such...that is hard to say too.  It depends on what metal the nails are made of to start with, and what degree of decompose they are in.  I have been in several sites and encountered nails that MUST have had some kind of copperish metal applied to them or something, because they read well on most any machine.  

I agree with Steve though...play around with the newer iron bias settings.  You can set it aggressive and that will cut out a lot of the iron falses but you will also lose some depth.  I tend to go the opposite direction and try to find a good balance of depth but not to the point that I start getting into a lot of iron that fools me.  That number will vary so it does take some experimenting while out in the field.  I can set my Equinox up in the test garden and especially with the new FE adjustments, can make it sound off perfectly on a 12 inch minie ball.  The original iron bias settings couldn't make it do that...it was a mixed signal, mostly iron sounding.  The catch to that is, that a lot of the deeper iron will also now start to make a good tone at that setting.  

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On 11/25/2019 at 8:28 PM, GB_Amateur said:

Another problem nail is the roofing nail because its head gives a 22-23 signal on the Eqx.  Depending upon its orientiation you may not get any iron grunt, and even under best orientation you are going to get both and have to decide if it's a roofing nail or a desirable target very close to a nail. 

I realized this recently, and it's super annoying. I have noticed that they tend to give a double tone, whereas good targets usually give a single tone.

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