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Equinox Fe Vs Fe2, Set At Zero?


bklein

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2 hours ago, EL NINO77 said:

original Monte Performance Nailboard Test

I found those two tests quite informative for the settings you were using (and of course the location of both trash and coin targets).  Were any digital TID's notched out for these tests (e.g. the negative valued ones)?

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During the tests I used discrimination set to 0 ... and audio 2 tone .. so it is good to see how the detector works ... in such a test ...

This way it is good to see what quality of the unmasked signal can be provided by Equinox with different Iron Bias F2 / FE settings ...

the test shows that setting F2 to 0 works best on unmasking, and setting F2 to 6 still provides acceptable separation ...., while setting FE to 6 already severely limits the quality of Equinox separation.

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On 4/9/2021 at 12:29 PM, Chase Goldman said:

Nope.  I’ve tested masking in F2 at default settings and it is not an issue.  Not true for FE which did have issues.  It is a feature that is a side benefit of Multi IQ that should be utilized to your advantage to counter ferrous falsing that all machines suffer from and not something to “fear” in the unlikely case it will CAUSE masking (as opposed to the target being masked regardless of the IB setting).  I am still probably going to dig the iron anyway just to get it out of the way, at least with iron bias I won’t be fooled as frequently into thinking it is non-ferrous and can make the on-the-fly dig/no-dig decision with high confidence.

Did you see my videos?

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2 hours ago, bklein said:

Did you see my videos?

Did you provide a link?  I can't find the link and searching YouTube isn't my specialty.

 

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5 hours ago, bklein said:

Did you see my videos?

 

3 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

Did you provide a link?  I can't find the link and searching YouTube isn't my specialty.

 

No links provided in this thread so not very helpful but I did go out of my way to find a video bklein posted in a thread that was basically a carbon copy of this one... 

Glad I did make the effort to find the video because it basically epitomizes my issue with such video demonstrations of "concerns"...

Yes anyone can set up various target configurations (especially in 2 dimensions) that will cause any detector to miss a target under specific, precise, and worst case orientations of targets and the approach angle of the coil swing.  Down the barrel of a large rusty nail, of course the dipole targets disappear because of the way the magnetic lines of force of the nail field converge over the adjacent targets and IB will tend to favor that mixed signal and push it into the iron range.  However, what I heard was an iffy signal at the swing ends and I would definitely stop to investigate it as I would with most full up iron signals, just to see if I could coax out a non-ferrous squeaker.

To that point, no skilled detectorist swings the coil as uniformly as you did in the demo.  Everything has to line up perfectly to make those targets disappear.  If you think about the real world situation that has to occur, the odds start to stack up AGAINST you actually encountering this situation in real life.  First, all the targets have to end up in this perfect straight line configuration.  Even if you take just the nail and quarter or nail and ring, they have to lie in the same plane, most likely.  Then you also have to have the detectorist happen upon that target group at the precise swing angle across all targets for the two non ferrous to disappear.  Any deviation and at least one of the targets will likely be picked up.  That's why if really don't want to lose sleep over missed targets,, you grid from two angles, ensure swing coverage by overlap and vary your swing tempo.

Finally, from what I heard on those repeatable blips, I would not just walk over that target.  Any ferrous grunt with non-ferrous blips I evaluate by rotating around the target and using small coil wiggles (this is called coil control and is a learned detectorist skill and second nature to me).  I to try to coax those non-ferrous blips into resolvable target signals, and even then, will likely dig to investigate what is going on. 

In the mean time, I welcome that iron bias mitigates the falsing of lone pieces of iron and keeps me from wasting my time with pure ferrous signals if short on time or if I do not want to tear up a site with unnecessary plugs.  Or looking at it another way, the miniscule chance of walking over the masked ring is compensated for by more swing time giving me a fighting chance to cover more ground in a fixed amount of time vs. chasing "false" ghosts which equates to more recovered targets.

In other words, just not losing sleep over the miniscule chance that IB will cause me to walk over a target just as I am not losing sleep over missing a stack of silver dollars that null out the coil in multi (a known quirk) or sounding like iron wraparound (another quirk) or fooling myself that I am going to find a cache of gold coins or will win the lottery.  Extreme low probability events are not my concern and masking caused by IB falls in the same category.  But that's just me. 

The beauty is ML provides you plenty of options and one of those is running IB=0, so if you are really nervous about masking and don't mind digging repeated falses, knock yourself out.  That's a personal choice and is what we do with metal detectors, choose settings that best balance offsetting areas of concern.  Every detectorist has limits and values different characteristics of a detector differently for different situations.  Disc vs. All Metal, Depth vs. Separation/Recovery, Depth vs. EMI or Ground Noise, TID stability vs. repeatability vs. resolution vs. accuracy, Mid Conductive sensitivity vs. raw depth, coil depth vs. small target sensitivity vs. weight vs. swing coverage and so on.  I have made my value-based decision on IB and it is "biased" to a 6 setting as being more value than a 0 setting with minimal downside.

 

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So, going back to that thread Chase just linked and proceding to the 3rd post on page 2, I found this embedded video (which I'm linking rather than embedding again):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEMcKLbGjyI

 

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My real world beach is not nearly as clean an area as that in my videos and I would walk right over the targets you say you’d stop on because they are all over the place.  My CTX doesn’t have the issue but doesn’t have FE or FE2 either.  And if you can’t hear the target like I show, you don’t know if you are missing it.  The videos show that you likely are if you set the bias up.  Why do you care about bias if your targets are coins, silver, and gold?  Just some falsing issues? Digging too many bottlecaps? Ok do as you wish. 

 

 

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3 hours ago, bklein said:

My real world beach is not nearly as clean an area as that in my videos and I would walk right over the targets you say you’d stop on because they are all over the place.  My CTX doesn’t have the issue but doesn’t have FE or FE2 either.  And if you can’t hear the target like I show, you don’t know if you are missing it.  The videos show that you likely are if you set the bias up.  Why do you care about bias if your targets are coins, silver, and gold?  Just some falsing issues? Digging too many bottlecaps? Ok do as you wish. 

 

 

My real world farm fields have hundreds of square nails and pieces of corroded tin ration cans.  Iron bias helps to turn many of those nails and ration can pieces into pure ferrous signals. It would be a really, really low probability that it would also mask a non- ferrous.  In other words, iron bias might reduce the adjacent non-ferrous target signal into an iffy signal or blip as was demonstrated in your video or have no effect whatsoever on the non-ferrous target.  That might be worth investigating but it would be unlikely for IB to turn it into a totally ferrous target signal.  Heck, bent square nails still false with IB applied.  My targets are not primarily coins.  They are brass and lead and sometimes gold and silver coins and rarely I do have to deal with modern aluminum trash.  IB does not create a null signal for me because I turn disc off, so if there is a ferrous or non-ferrous target under the coil and within its depth limit I will hear it.  I don’t know what you mean by not hearing it.  If it is full ferrous, I have a decision to make to dig or not dig.  If it is iffy, I interrogate it further and then make a dig decision.  If it is a pure dig me signal, well then I dig it.  Iron bias is a feature of Multi IQ I take advantage of to get rid of some falsing, I am willing to roll the dice that I might walk over a masked ring or rare button, in the mean time, I also haven’t dug a hundred falsing nails.  A lot different than easily scooping falsing bottlecaps out of the sand, so I get why you wouldn’t mind doing that to ensure you don’t miss a ring.  So yes I will do as I wish.  Thanks.  Like I said before, different situations warrant different detector settings.
 

 

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Yes I agree with you Chase- the higher settings will help you out in your hunting environment. Our hunting environments and even wanted targets differ greatly. Most of the videos I’ve seen are of your type environment and targets. But guys hunting beaches are watching those videos with confusion.  If there is a major benefit to higher settings at the beach I’d like to hear more about it.  I think for most there is a risk of target loss.

Two things got me interested in the Equinox:

1) great target separation

2) it finds targets much closer to concrete steps and walls that contains iron rebar.  Much better than my CTX can do.  And there are often rings in these areas.

So I am suggesting that if bias settings are advanced, the performance amongst iron will suffer - perhaps to the point it’s then worse than the CTX.  I haven’t proven it but it would be good to test this out.

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