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Minelab Equinox In Hot Culpeper Soil


abenson

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I just got back from DIV 40 and wanted to give a quick report on how the Equinox 600 performed in the hot Culpeper soil. Mind you I am not proficient with the detector yet. In addition to the Equinox I took my GPX. I used the Equinox for a total of about 8 hours in the three days I was there. I did find some good stuff with the Equinox which included an Eagle coat button, minie ball and a New York coat button. For me I found that the Equinox ran quietest using the beach mode in five tones iron bias one and everything notched out up to 5. If not in the beach modes the machine was really chattery. It can accurately ID a Target to about 5 inches but has a real hard time with low conductors in that soil. With the adjustments the 800 offers you might get better results. At one point I buried a nickel at 6 inches in one of the fields and could not get it with the equinox, the GPX easily picked it up. Overall I thought the detector performed well and was very helpful in the iron infested areas. I know there were other Equinoxes there and some good stuff was found by those using them. I know of at least 1 breast plate found with the Equinox.

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Just got back also and will write a more detailed review later.  My experience was a little different but you definitely did well getting those buttons especially using Beach Mode in highly mineralized ground where the detector is automatically going to throttle back power - which cold explain the limited VDI depth in your case.  I did not try beach mode, but there might be "last ditch" advantages to using that mode in highly mineralized situations because the throttle back may be the only thing you can do to "see through the fog".  I did not really have a chance to actually gage mineralization because I never pulled out a detector with an Fe302 mineralization meter on it.

Other then Twelfth GA flat buttons (some deep, old, and partial, others amongst thick iron) and some modern bullets and casings, I hit no period brass but plenty period lead and iron.  I have confidence the Equinox would have pulled me a button if I had gotten my coil over one or two.

Regarding chattiness three things:  1) Manual Noise Cancel helped on some occasions when Auto didn't pick the optimal channel IMO (a feature the 600 lacks).  This was ESPECIALLY important here where you could have up to 25 - 50 GPX's within a few hundred feet.  Only once or twice, though, was interference really bad such that I had to pause detecting.  Never had to reduce sensitivity below 17 and tried to keep it around 20 and no higher than 22 (again, try to stay near the presets folks, they do appear to be optimal for most situations).  2) Did not use GB tracking (except in Gold Mode which has tracking on by default) but Auto GB'd frequently and found GB (in Field 2 mode) varied anywhere from 4 to 6 in some spots and between 44-56 in other spots.  This variability could result in some adverse performance if you just went with the defalt GB setting or did not rebalance frequently.  I also noticed a strange phenomenon when GB was set high (i.e., in the 40+ range)  that the coil would false on impact with corn stalks or even if you just shook the coil in the air.  This did not happen when GB was set close to zero.  When I first experienced it I thought I had a loose coil connection or imminent coil failure until I cycled through the modes and noticed that it did not happen on all modes.  I finally figured it out when I had re GB'd to a lower number and it went away.  Will try tracking at the next mineralized site but did not want to "chance it" here.  I have more confidence in it since using gold mode - one of the things I learned from gold mode.  3) Very important to run the Equinox fast near its defaults on recovery speed.  In this soil, 7 worked well on "ground noise" and sometimes 8.  This is where the 600 maximum recovery speed limit might make a difference.  I did not have a 600 to compare but I know I would not run Field 2 below its default of 7 which is higher than the max setting equivalent setting on the 600.

See my thread below for more detailed info of how I was using the Equinox 800 in Culpeper: 

 

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Great report! I tried tracking GB and it ran OK but auto GB worked better in my opinion. I wish I had a few more days to play around with it in that soil so I could get it dialed in. I saw some other reports on Facebook and some people were doing really well and said the machine ran really good. Others were having a difficult time with the Equinox in the hot spoil. I feel like I was somewhere in between, got decent depth but felt it could be better. I can see an 800 in my future for the extra features in offers. I also had to noise cancel when near some of the GPX's but the ATX was even worse, it really flipped out when one of those got close. The thing that I never could figure out was all the iron falsing I was getting when running in the other modes. I don't know if it was the soil or if I had something adjusted wrong. Which is why I ran beach mode because it took care of all the extra noise and falsing.

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Thanks, Chase.  I like the way you give so many details about your settings, etc.  This helps me with my own hunting.

BTW, the other day you asked if I was getting any iron signal, with the horseshoe mode open, on crown caps.  Then I couldn't remember but yesterday I got out for a coulple hours running mostly stock=default Field 1 (except 5 tones instead of 2).  In that mode I did here a faint but virtually simultaneous iron whisper (hope that word isn't misleading) in conjunction with a high conductor signal on the three bottle caps I dug.  They were old, rusted caps (some missing parts of the rim), not the freshly littered ones some people find in parks and on the beach.

 

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