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XP Deus 2, Minelab Equinox And Nokta Makro Legend On Various Size Gold Nuggets In Nevada


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Took a trip to Nevada last week and met up with Steve and Steve. While I waited for them to show up at our meeting place I got out a few VLF metal detectors to try on some gold nuggets. Nothing conclusive here just though people would like to see how they perform. One difference between the Nevada soil and what I'm used to hunting is all the salt. All the detectors were subject to coil knock and really took some fine tuning to get them to run stable. Steve F later found that on the Deus 2 sensitive would probably be the best mode to run as it eliminates coil knock issues and is still pretty sensitive to small targets.

 

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The Legend seems particularly troubled with EMI, it is quite a bad EMI area?

Looks like the Nox remains the best for nugget hunting based upon everything I've seen so far in videos out of the Multi Freakers.  I'd like to give the Legend a test run in my milder soils and low EMI environment to see how it compares though.

The Deus 2 did a little better with the 9" coil, if it had a little nugget coil it might do OK, a shame this can't happen.

I can tell how bad the soil is in that video, I think my Ace 300 would possibly hit that larger nugget in my soil at that depth 🙂

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We met up with Andy and detected a place with lots of alkali salts.  Pockets where standing water had been were particularly noisy even to the GPX 6000. 

I played with Andy's loaner Deus II with 9" coil for about an hour.  The Goldfield program really suffered under those conditions becoming very bump sensitive to even grass stubble.  The salt pockets were showing a TID in the 20's, 23 being the most common.  I switched over to the pre-set Sensitive program which I think has a notch that covered the constant tones from the salts.  I experimented with my .3 gram test nugget and it worked fine, no bump sensitivity and very little noise from the salts.  I doubt depth would be beyond a couple inches, but it would be workable in a pinch.   

The closest I came to finding gold was a small sliver of lead that showed a TID of 31.  I really didn't do the machine justice without experimenting with other programs and settings, perhaps even the Beach Sensitive program might have tamed the N NV salts.  Andy was kicking my butt finding gold nuggets in the worst of trash, so I went back to the 6000 to try and catch up.

I frankly like the D2 and will look forward to more testing once I can get a 9" coil to replace the stock 11" on my machine.

 

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Really no EMI in the area. I just think the Legend has issues with version 1.06. The audio gets choppy and unstable, sometimes would just cut out over targets. So who knows.

I agree I think the Nox was the best overall performer of the bunch. Legend might do better with the recent 1.07 update.

Soil is not all that mineralized, but the salt content is high. Really difficult to GB VLF machines and get them stable. Even trying to manual GB the Equinox I could not get it to not sound off when approaching the ground. All the VLF's were like that, the Deus was the worst. So you're fighting 2 problems in that area.

 

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Unfortunately I won't be able to do that. The Legend was Borrowed and the place I was hunting is 7 hours from my house. Its too bad 1.06 was buggy, as the results may have been different. Regardless, I think all the VLF'S are matginal performers in that area.

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I wonder if changing salt settings on both the Deus 2 and Legend in their beach modes would have any success in that soil?  Something to possibly experiment with if anybody is out in Nevada in those conditions again.  

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