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Help With Equinox Ground Noise


67GTA

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On 2/18/2021 at 7:17 PM, CalReg said:

67GTA, I am having the same challenges you are facing...and I thought it was just me! At first, I thought the shafts weren't tightened enough, but when that didn't fix it, I decide to try other things, I ground balanced then tried to manually try to eliminate some of the falsing, but to no avail. I currently run on park 1, with sensitivity at 22. I do the noise cancelling and ground balancing. I have tried switching to different modes, but still nothing. I am only one month into my Equinox and I'd sure like to find an answer!

CalReg, rf1 and 67GTA, I live and often hunt in a suburban/urban area with tons of EMI and moderate to high mineralization. No amount of ground balancing or noise cancelling will eliminate it completely if one or the other or both in my area, are really bad. Ground balancing here is a moving target and the auto noise cancelling could best be called possible auto noise reduction. That is a sign of how sensitive to a full spectrum of target signals Multi IQ is.........

There is EMI from above ground and below ground power lines, EMI from Wi Fi/ethernet/Bluetooth, Broadband, there is EMI from traffic signals and even from wireless municipal sprinkler systems, airports, law enforcement and military installations, and from normal tv and radio signals. So I don't run my Equinox at a pre-set sensitivity. I run mine depending on the ground and EMI conditions. Sometimes that means I can't go over 18, sometimes I can run it at 20, very rarely do I have the luxury of running mine at 21 or 22 and I have never run it at 24/25 within 50 miles of a large city. If I tried to do that, I would not know a real target from ground noise or EMI and my numerical target ID display would never read --  -- but would be constantly changing with numbers throughout the target ID range including -9 and +39/40 and in 50 or 5 tones my ears would be bombarded with noise.

Despite this situation, since purchasing a Nox 600 in early 2018 and an 800 a few months later, I have mostly only been able to run sensitivity at 20 or below while finding over $3,000 in modern clad, over $4,000 melt value in gold jewelry, almost a pound of silver jewelry, 48 silver US coins from the 1850s to 1963 and silver Canadian coins, too many V nickels, buffalos, wheats and indians to count and several really nice Plains Indian Wars US Cavalry relics from the mid 1800s. Many of the best finds were deeper than 10" and some were at 14" running below 22 sensitivity, just with the stock 11" coil and all of those deep targets had numbers and tones that let me know they were a low, mid or high conductor non-ferrous target. I was able to correctly call most of them before digging them. The Equinox is that good even at 18 sensitivity.......

I am not spouting off, bragging or blabbering to get attention with those figures. I am just trying to help you. Running sensitivity so high that ground and EMI conditions prevent hearing good, shallow or deep signals is totally counterproductive. Des Dunne who died recently, bless his soul, was one of the pre-production field testers that asked Minelab to cap sensitivity on the Equinox at 20. The areas he did his testing in just had too much EMI and/or mineralization to run it any higher. I'm glad that Minelab left it at 25 but for instance, I rarely drive my cars over the safe speed limit even though one of them has 120mph on the speedometer.

So, feel free to run your sensitivity as high as you want..........but you may be bombarded with so many ghost signals that you won't know what to dig.

 

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Not sure. That was the main reason for starting the thread. It has me scratching my head. I haven't had a chance to test the theory because of the weather, but someone mentioned fertilizer as a possible cause. I hunt a lot of rural areas. 

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That's right, I remember now. I must have lost track of the topic. I have too much snow here so I can't get out to test either.

 

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7 hours ago, Jeff McClendon said:

...Very rarely do I have the luxury of running mine at 21 or 22 and I have never run it at 24/25 within 50 miles of a large city. If I tried to do that, I would not know a real target from ground noise or EMI and my numerical target ID display would never read --  -- but would be constantly changing with numbers throughout the target ID range including -9 and +39/40 and in 50 or 5 tones my ears would be bombarded with noise.

Great post, Jeff!  Did you notice any improvement (less sensitivity to EMI) with the software upgrades?  I thought I did with the 2.x software release, but EMI is such a moving target (varying in both space and time) that I was never sure about that.

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The only time I get EMI is when running Multi near powerlines.  Rather than lower the Sensitivity and lose depth, I just switch to one of the single frequencies and that usually solves the problem.  I rarely go lower than 24 on my Sensitivity.

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Yes Jeff, very good post most of yours have helped me out with detecting in downtown Reno, and in general. 

happy swinging! 👍 ht

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2 hours ago, Badger-NH said:

The only time I get EMI is when running Multi near powerlines.  Rather than lower the Sensitivity and lose depth, I just switch to one of the single frequencies and that usually solves the problem.  I rarely go lower than 24 on my Sensitivity.

I would love to be in your situation. Even when I am in a remote area in my part of the world, most of the ground is so mineralized that running at 22 is about all my Equinoxes will do even with recovery speed adjustments. 

I have done a good bit of testing on in the ground targets and in my test garden, but all of that is in moderate to high mineralization, so my results are just my results and may not apply to you. Lowering sensitivity for example from 22 to 18 while in Multi to help alleviate EMI does not result in massive amounts of depth loss where I am. Changing to a single frequency that is not bothered too much by EMI and keeping my sensitivity at 22 doesn't result in the same depth capabilities as staying in Multi, in fact I lose depth capabilities and the enhanced ability to hit poorly oriented or partially masked targets. Also, target ID completely goes out the window here and all deeper non-ferrous targets give numerical and tone IDs from the mid 20s to high 30s or even 40. So discrimination is pointless and I have to dig everything or risk missing good targets. Again, those are just my results in pretty bad dirt and EMI. I will try to stay in Multi even with lowered sensitivity instead of changing to say 4khz or 20kHz and keeping sensitivity above 20.

Chuck, I did not notice an EMI stability improvement in Multi frequency after any of the upgrades. Adding a quiet 4kHz single frequency in the last upgrade is really great especially when I get the chance to detect on mild ground for deep high conductors. I do wonder what sort of filtering may be happening in 4kHz to help keep it quiet that might effect depth.

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