Nokta Legend First 10 Hours

[Calmark]

I received my Legend WHP package +6in coil yesterday and have spent 2 half-days putting it through its paces.  So far I've enjoyed the time spent with the new detector.  

 

Thankfully I have experience with 2 other SMF detectors, so the transition to the Legend was no problem at all for me personally.  It didn't hurt I watched some Legend videos and read the manual this past week before the Legend arrived.  I tried running all search modes except for beach.  I feel like I have most all of the controls and features figured out now, and in the future it will just be a matter of learning the nuances of the audio and doing fine-tuning.  I fiddled with a lot of settings and one thing I noticed was its pretty difficult to make mistakes by changing things. 'A beginner would do great in the stock search modes.

The overall ergonomics and build quality of the Legend are quite nice.  With the 6in. coil I didn't feel it was too heavy at all and the detector felt easy to swing.  The small coil was awesome in the thick trash. I liked the feature set of the entire detector and the v1.09 sure added a lot of them!  This is one nice do-it-all detector and handles my heavily mineralized soil well. 

I noticed the Legend also handled the EMI in my area extremely well, and maybe the best of all 3 SMF machines I've owned.  I could run at max 30 sensitivity if I wanted, but I kept it at 28 most of the time.  The only chattering was at times when the detector was on the ground while I dug targets.  It was not really affected by some underground power cables to street lights that gave my other machines some chatter.  The machine quickly and easily ground balanced to my 2-5 bar mineralized soil, according to the Legend's mineralization meter.  I ran mostly M1 Field on day 1 going for older coins, and today ran mostly Park in M2 going for jewelry and clad.  The Legend was very sensitive today to smaller targets like foil, small pieces of lead and can slaw and I dug a lot of tiny targets in areas I'm slowly cleaning of junk.  Unfortunately I found no gold, but did get 2 pieces of small silver earrings.

One area the Legend was very good at, but didn't excel in was VDI# stability.  It was better than most other detectors I've used though and plenty able to ID both trash and treasure pretty reliably.  I have hot dirt with a lot of iron content and that naturally affects depth and target ID.  The Legend would give ID# that would vary a few numbers, but still lock on fairly tightly on targets up to 3 inches.  I rarely dig any coin-sized targets past 5 inches, so that's really decent.  With just a few hours of practice I found my brain would "average" the numbers and give me a good idea what would be under the coil.  The 6in coil had me digging targets down to about 4 inches for now, but I can run a slower recovery speed or use the 11in. coil if I want to go deeper.

I dug a lot of targets in those 10 hours, with a lot of lower conductors.  Those really stand out in M2 frequency and makes this my choice when looking for gold.  I found some older wheat cents and the highlight, a 1920S Mercury dime on day 1.  All were shallow somewhat iffy signals but with higher tones mixed in.  I'm nearly certain the dime at only 2.5 inches deep was on edge from how it looked in the plug.  It gave a low ID#, but in 60 tones I knew to dig it with some high squeaks coming through.  

I'll let you all know more about my future experiences with the Legend as I get out and use it more.  

 

  

 

 

[JCR]

A very good write up. Please keep posting you experience with the Legend.

Thanks,

[Rick N. MI]

Good to hear the Legend is doing good. Nice finds too.

[Calmark]

I did another 4-5 hour hunt session today in a couple of parks.  I hit the right location and lucked out and scored some BIG men's silver rings next to the basketball court at the first park.  They were ID# 51 for the honker pinky ring and 55 for the other.

Here are a few things I am liking about the Legend:

Virtually no EMI noise in the city I've where hunted in 4 different locations.  That's running mostly 28 sensitivity and I can go to 30.  The only chattiness comes when the machine is on the ground as I dig and the coil is vertical.  I love the lack of distracting noise.

Handles the ground really well.  The descrimination patterns are really well thought out.  The "Ground" pattern is working great!  On my Equinox 800 the ground chattered like crazy and I ran sensitivity at 19 to help with that.  I realize now it was EMI rearing its ugly head and the horseshoe "all metal" mode let ground signals through.  The combination was unpleasant and I actually gave my Nox a 2 year break after the first year.

Expanded VDI range.  0 to 60 seems to work really well for having a decently wide range of numbers for gold and for silver.  Sometimes I think a bit more of a range would be good, but 60 is a nice middle-ground.  I do notice to the downside, a lot of targets get stacked at ID# 11, the lower foil range.  Since most people like to skip foil anyway, I guess that was a good choice by Nokta to stack small aluminum and gold there.  I don't plan to go after micro gold much anyway since parks and fields are so polluted with foil its crazy.  

I'm sure I'll think of more to add later, but so far its been a very fun detector to hunt the turf with and the performance and feature set are great as well.

[Rick N. MI]

Nice hunt. The rings are great. The Legend is doing it's job. Gold rings in general are above foil. The tiny gold is in the foil range. I would knock out the foil with disc at 11. If you start getting gold rings then go thru in the foil range to see if you can get tiny gold.

What settings were you using?

[Calmark]

Rick,

I used the following settings today and yesterday, though I was at 28 sensitivity yesterday and 5 recovery speed.

Today to find the rings, Park M2, 8 recovery, 4IB, 3stab, 60 tones, tone break 8.  I used G(round) descrimination pattern to knock out ground noise.  I left everything else pretty much stock settings and was able to hear iron on low volume. Soil was 2 bars today instead of 4-5 on the mineralization meter.  VID# seemed a bit more stable.  Nice.   

I did skip a lot of foil yesterday and today, but did dig some "11" signals to see what they were.  I like your idea of going for the big gold first and skipping "11" until the place is already somewhat cleaned out.  

[Jeff McClendon]

Legend target ID 11 is kind of a "catch all" "don't know" target ID from my experience. So is 1....... 11 is also a ground response target ID similar to 23 to 25 on Deus 2 and -1 to +2 on the Equinox. Coke, charcoal, slag, magnetite and weird, wet or extremely dry ground conditions can cause those responses from my experience.

[Matt4gold]

Thanks for posting the reviews, just picked up the Legend myself and taking some time over the next few days to put some time in on it.  I'd love to see some postings on how it does finding nuggets.  

[Rick N. MI]

1 hour ago, Jeff McClendon said:

Legend target ID 11 is kind of a "catch all" "don't know" target ID from my experience. So is 1....... 11 is also a ground response target ID similar to 23 to 25 on Deus 2 and -1 to +2 on the Equinox. Coke, charcoal, slag, magnetite and weird, wet or extremely dry ground conditions can cause those responses from my experience.

That's interesting. Thanks for the post Jeff. 

[Jeff McClendon]

Just now, Rick N. MI said:

That's interesting. Thanks for the post Jeff. 

11 can also be an actual target ID for borderline ferrous/nonferrous targets.