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Controls Are Dangerous, Keep Them Off Detectors


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I agree. Default settings, advanced user settings etc. There are ways to keep the novice out of trouble if they don’t want to learn. I understand perfectly minimization on a machine like the Simplex. When it comes to your top of the line however, it should cater to the advanced user or provide the advanced user access to advanced controls. Everyone can have their cake and eat it too it would seem. Part of the problem quite honestly is that Nokta Makro is hyper aware and very sensitive to what often amounts to unearned criticism during the learning curve. That hyper awareness is often a double edged sword. It leads to engagement with customers and incorporating feedback, but the sensitivity and the rush to get to the top of the industry often makes for bad optics. More controls are more chances for controversy in their view I’m sure. But as they are learning, controversy can arise by omission as well. Better to ensure the machine has the ability than to leave it out.

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I agree as well. Put as many controls on the unit as possible. That way if I'm late to the game, I will have many to choose from after some people start selling them cheap when they have had enough. 😄 Seriously, I'm all for having as much control as I can get. As long as the stock programs give good results, the people that just want to turn on and go hunting will be satisfied. That's how I am with my car.... took me 5 years to realize there was a secret box below the seat to hide valuables 😆 Never hurt me a bit not knowing that. The car drove me where I needed to go and I could care less about any other features.

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Very good point Steve!

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I'm all for dumbing down controls and settings for certain customers. The problem with the Legend was that it was specifically designed to go after Equinox (800 in particular, if I recall correctly) users. It wasn't designed to go after Apex or Vanquish users. Therefore, it should have had iron bias adjustability all along.

However, I understand how difficult the iron bias setting can be to take advantage of, so I don't blame N/M for their original decision.

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I must be a lazy hunter. I like turning the machine on and hunting. I'm reading about all of these adjustments to all the new machines.. I may as well be blind for I have no clue.

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11 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

We have default settings for people who do not know what a control does, and they should not mess with the default, unless they know why they are doing it.

As a newbie I for one fully understand what you are saying. I have not yet logged more than 50 hours on my grandfathers 800 and only use the factory default settings.

They work fine for me and on Saturday I actually was able to turn on the 800 for the first time this year. It was very windy, at a very old park, and only had about 30 minutes to use it.

However in that 30 minutes I found a 1957 dime and a 1967 penny close to 7 inches deep and less than 3 inches from one another.

I made my way back to the car and had to leave.

If I can find such things in factory settings why should I go messing with things that I simply do not understand yet.

Thank you Steve for not calling us newbies idiots, while I must admit at times when I am using the 800 I feel like I am when all I dig is pull tabs.

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15 hours ago, Joe Beechnut OBN said:

I must be a lazy hunter. I like turning the machine on and hunting. I'm reading about all of these adjustments to all the new machines.. I may as well be blind for I have no clue.

That's one good thing about the Excalibur.....put a brick on the gas pedal and hunt! 

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The good thing about having advanced controls if you can really even call them that is you don't need to use them, you can remain in defaults your entire detecting career and do fine however for those that have and take the time to learn them they can benefit from them when they encounter situations they're beneficial to find even more targets.

The Nox has done it well, nobody is going to accidentally stumble across the iron bias settings and fiddle around with it messing up their detector due to being basically a hidden setting, whereby you'd need to have read the manual to even know how to adjust it.   Most sensible people would remember they've adjusted such a setting and change it back to default or further adjust it when in a different area if necessary.

Automatic features are great, I've no problem at all with them, love auto ground balance and various other automatic setting adjustments that just make life easy, but I do like the idea of having some control when I think manually adjusting would be beneficial over having everything done for me. 

Nokta thought it would be a good idea to have a fixed iron bias on their machine, a bunch of their "nomads" were very defensive of it having a fixed iron bias when people were questioning the decision which was a puzzle to me as I would have thought they'd be the type of users that would like having advanced adjustments, a portion the general public were not happy at all about this decision after a video popped up showing where having iron bias would be beneficial. This was a prime example of why a fixed setting isn't always the best, where having some manual control may in fact improve performance. 

Nokta have now decided they'd add the adjustment of it which I think is a great decision, their reason for not having the iron bias in the first place was a terrible one I think, users could adjust it without understanding it and miss targets, that just about goes for every major setting on a detector, including sensitivity.  Many beginners seem to just crank sensitivity up to maximum thinking they'll get the best performance, it can be just as dangerous of a setting as iron bias, if not more so as iron bias won't affect your detecting unless you're in iron.  They might be drowning out their performance by EMI and end up with less depth, or struggling in bad ground with their sensitivity too high killing depth too.

A part of detecting I enjoy is learning my detectors, understanding their features and what they do so having a detector with adjustments is something I particularly enjoy,   Automatic adjustments are great on detectors, and in general do a good job and will likely find a bulk of the targets out there, but there are times when they won't, and then you really need manual adjustments or a different detector for the job.  Something that often differentiates beginner detectors from high end machines is the settings adjustments that you get on the high end machines when the beginner low end machines are as as automatic as possible to make life easier.  

An example of automatic settings failing is the CTX 3030 and it's automatic (default) sensitivity, although it's not a failure as it's described in the manual.  The CTX automatically adjusts sensitivity according to the ground type you're detecting, for someone like me in my mild soils the CTX struggles to see any mineralisation so it sets my sensitivity to 14 which seems to be its default auto setting when it can't determine ground mineralisation, far lower than the 20 to 30 that I can run the detector in on my ground with no ground issues, it's EMI that determines my sensitivity not ground mineralisation.

So given the Nokta example, If I didn't read my CTX manual and left the CTX in it's default auto sensitivity I'd be losing significant performance over adjusting it manually.

673726374_autosensitivity.jpg.9d2d43087ea3bcf16b3f04c7c60c77c4.jpg

I hope in the future on high end machines even though they are likely to become even more automated which is great that they still give us some control on high end machines to adjust configurations manually when necessary.

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