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Help Needed After First Trip Out


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Maybe some of the issues are coming from interference from your cell phone? Try putting your phone in airplane mode or just turn it off.

I just went thru this issue and it frustrated the heck out of me till I realized what was going on.

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2 hours ago, Jeff in Pa said:

Maybe some of the issues are coming from interference from your cell phone? Try putting your phone in airplane mode or just turn it off.

I just went thru this issue and it frustrated the heck out of me till I realized what was going on.

Thanks. I had my phone on airplane mode for this hunt, but will leave it in the car next time.

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14 hours ago, Chase Goldman said:

Walter -

First of all, hang in there.  It is going to be a frustrating journey because you are being forced out of your 14-year XLT comfort zone.  It is not going to be love at first sight.  You apparently picked a tough site situation and without experience on the machine did not have enough familiarity with the machine to be able to tweak it to compensate for a tough situation (sprinkler pipe and few targets).  The XLT and the Equinox are very different in their speed and range of target sensitivity so you can easily get overloaded by what the Equinox is telling you.  I was coming from a Deus which is similar to Equinox in terms of speed and tonality (i.e., target dig decisions are based primarily off tonal cues rather than off visual target IDs), yet still am climbing somewhat of a learning curve.  So despite your years of detecting experience, there will be some getting used to a different beast and that may take a few outings to get both your comfort level with the machine up and your confidence in the machine up.  This will come with time and certain things will click.

Couple of friendly suggestions.  First - see if you can track down Steve H. and follow behind him.  Lol.  But seriously, grab some popcorn and try the following:

Site Selection - Try taking the machine to a site you are familiar with, that produced at one point and preferably is still producing.  Do not challenge the machine or yourself the first few times out.  If you have no choice but to go to a hunted out spot, at least try to find a site that is free of other issues like plentiful ferrous and non-ferrous trash, nearby interference (power lines), and other similar difficulties that are normally fun to overcome when you are on top of your game but that you don't need to deal with when learning a new machine.  Since you are not familiar with the machine, at least go to site you know like the back of your hand.

Mode Selection - Pick the mode appropriate for the site and stick with that mode regardless of the results.  By appropriate for the site I mean appropriate for the targets you want to find and that you are most likely to find at that site, not just the landscape.  If you are coin shooting - go with Park 1 or Field 1 as those are geared towards hitting harder on high conductive targets.  If you are going after primarily mid-conductive targets (gold, brass or lead relics, small jewelry, nickels) then you can go with Park 2 or Field 2 which are geared towards those targets.  Note, however, the "2" modes are hotter and will hit hard on aluminum trash and small trashy objects which can be overwhelming.  That is why I recommend Park 1 or the oft ignored Field 1 (because it is a two-tone ferrous/non ferrous beep mode) as the best "training ground" modes for newcomers to the Equinox and to fast detectors in general.  Beach modes are also great learning modes (esp. Beach 1) if you are at a salt beach, especially.  But since this is likely not the case in Reno.  I would stick with Park or Field 1.  Don't bother with Gold modes for now because they are a different animal with respect to tones (VCO-based) and you only need to learn one detector at this point.  I am not kidding by the way about learning one detector.  Each of the modes behave so differently, it is literally like you are taking out a different detector every time you switch modes.  Folks have advised to not over tweak the settings.  But I am advising you to not over select the modes.  Pick a mode and stick with it. Learn it.  Love it.  It is a multifrequency machine after all, so even if you stick with one mode you will not be stuck finding only one type of target.  So don't be afraid to use your "go to" mode at multiple different sites even if you are looking for different target types.  Once you gain confidence, feel free to shift around and learn what the other modes can do.  But if you shift modes every half hour out of frustration, it will be like running to grab a new machine every half hour.  So avoid the temptation to do "Mode Hopping".

Settings - Once you have settled on a mode.  Your goal is to set your machine up to run as quiet as possible.  Do NOT get into a reactive mode and start tweaking settings because you are not hitting targets.  Adjust settings, if necessary, because the noise is keeping you from hearing the targets.  Equinox is set up for success when you have maximized signal to noise ratio not when you have maximized signal gain.   Here is what you do - Auto Noise Cancel - keep the coil in the air when you do this.  If you have relatively mild soil - you do not have to ground balance because the machine is pretty forgiving if GB is not set precisely to match the actual ground phase, but I go ahead and do an auto GB (hold the accept/reject button and pump) regardless and let the machine zero in on the right GB reading, especially if I know the soil has some mineralization.  Do not adjust recovery speed or Iron Bias from their defaults.  Once you come out of the settings menu if the machine is still chatty, then dial down sensitivity as necessary to get rid of the chattiness.  Don't be afraid to go low because the machine is pretty sensitive at the default and will still go deep - you need it to quiet down, though.  Take Steve's advice.  Once you think you have the machine running quiet then start swinging.  If you are using a mode that uses 50-tones (Park 2, Field 2), you might want to adjust that mode back to 5-tones to keep from getting overloaded.  The "1" modes default to 5 tones (Park 1) or 2 Tones (Field 1) which makes them a good starting point.  50 tones really gives you a feel for tonal nuances on targets so you may eventually want to go there but if you find it overwhelming, no problem just going with 5 tones or even 2 tones.

Swing technique and Target ID - Use your test garden to gage the best swing speed for the recovery speed setting you are using.  This may take a little getting used to.  The faster recovery speed of the Equinox will tend to force you to swing perhaps a little faster than you are used to in order to get a good target signal response.  You can, of course, overswing and also not get a good response but you should practice and listen to what good targets sound like and get to the point that you can just wiggle the center of the coil over them to get the response you need.  Listen to the good tones and bad tones.  Dig probable junk to verify your suspicions.  This will build your aural muscle memory and get you use to the tones.  Rely on target ID to back up your tonal ID and look for target ID bounce indicating likely junk.  Also, make liberal use of the All Metal Horseshoe button to interrogate a target and listen for iron tones which may indicate that the tone you are hearing is iron falsing.  Now I will say the depth meter has been reported to be a little wonky - I don't use a depth meter anyway so I am not missing it on this machine, but there does seem to be a love-hate relationship with it amongst Equinox users and the pinpointing feature is also a little quirky, but I have gotten used to it and like it not because it helps me pinpoint the target better (I use the wiggle off method primarily) but because it is a non-motion mode that gives you some good audible information on the target to help determine relative size and depth.

As you gain confidence in your abilities with the Equinox you can start tweaking other settings, but don't do it without a purpose (remember - the key is getting rid of unnecessary noise or falsing, but it is always a balancing act against losing target depth or inadvertently missing a target due to overfiltering - e.g., overuse of iron bias).  The default settings are good for 80 to 90% of your detecting situations.  Also, you may gain some insight based on what you wrote above.  In one post you said you went through all the modes, you tweaked recovery speed and iron bias, you dialed down on sensitivity.  In the next post you said all you did was switch modes and left the settings at their defaults.  So there may be a little new machine confusion going on.  To ensure you are starting at the default settings for your next outing, you may want to take Bill's advice and do a factory reset.

Again, Walter, hang in there and stick with the machine for awhile.  It will grow on you after a bit, you just need to snag a few keepers to gain confidence in the machine.  Once you get on a roll, you will steadily climb that learning curve.  But the best thing you can do is minimize the variables that force you to take backward steps.  Good Luck and Happy Hunting, sir.

Thanks for all the info.  Being very frustrated on my first post I misspoke when I said I changed the recovery speed and iron bias.  I just accepted what the mode was set up for , but I did start dialing down the sensitivity.  I was guilty of mode hopping , also when I did noise cancel I had the coil on the ground, and went to a park that I had not been to since 2011(big mistake).  On a better note I did dig dimes, nickels, and pennies so I became familiar with the varying signals and target Id's , dug some junk targets, dug some deep targets (that weren't sprinkler heads or pipes), got plenty of sun , and lots of good exercise.I'm very competitive with myself and set yearly goals for the coin totals I hope to find , so, it was very discouraging based on my past experience.  Based on my test garden I already know this beast goes deeper so I'm going to adjust my goals to hope for more older coins.  Do you suggest using the Auto Tracking after ground balancing? Thanks again for all the good info. and to everyone else who replied. 

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Walter - tracking seems to work well when there is enough mineralization present in the soil for the tracking algorithm to latch onto (even though you cannot determine the level of ground mineralization just by noting a ground phase reading, changes in mineralization will change ground phase and thats what makes the tracking algorithm work).  As long as your ground is not super hot causing wild swings in ground phase, I don't think tracking is needed.  Problem with the Equinox, even though it can apparently sense ground mineralization, it does not have a mineralization meter or bargraph to tell you how mineralized the ground is.  Periodic auto balancing ground phase by pumping is typically all that is needed for most situations since the Equinox is very forgiving to a less than optimal ground balance.

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On 4/26/2018 at 4:43 PM, Walter S. Fowler said:

I had all the modes still on the factory pre-sets. I started with Park 1, then Park 2, then Field 1, and then Field 2. I didn't tweak any of the settings for these modes. I was getting very few good signals.  Didn't get any quarters at all when I have averaged 20-30 coins at this park in a 2 hour period with my Whites XLT. Thanks for thew reply. 

Walter, Walter, Walter ... you are hunting in Reno?

How long ago was it you were at your parks that had lots of coins?

STEVE could be your problem and not the NOX.

Mitchel

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On 4/26/2018 at 6:06 PM, Steve Herschbach said:

Lots of noise / chatter. If noise cancel is not getting rid of this reduce your sensitivity. I have had to go to 18 in some places to deal with EMI.

I hunted a city park the other night and had to use 14 to make it quiet because of some pipes and fences but I found a few pennies up to 3" with it.  I tried to use higher but I wasn't digging anything deeper.  There were no wheats or silver.  I think the park had been scraped in this area in the 90s.

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On 4/27/2018 at 10:24 AM, Walter S. Fowler said:

I was guilty of mode hopping , also when I did noise cancel I had the coil on the ground

Do remember that each mode has separate noise cancel settings. So doing a noise cancel in one mode does not work when you switch modes unless you noise cancel them also. Treat each mode as a separate detector with separate settings.

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2 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

Do remember that each mode has separate noise cancel settings. So doing a noise cancel in one mode does not work when you switch modes unless you noise cancel them also. Treat each mode as a separate detector with separate settings.

Thanks for the reminder.  I did a noise cancel and ground balance when I switched modes, but again thanks .  I worked with Field 1 in my backyard to simplify things as strongly mentioned in Chase's excellent post.  It was wonderful to get that type of help/feedback from someone in such great detail. Now a days it's not too often that someone goes to that extent to help someone out.  It is like having 5 detectors in one. As mentioned in another post, hopefully, there are still some coins to find out there in Reno parks. Probably going out Monday AM to give the 800 another try with a whole new plan of attack(keep it simple stupid approach).  Then, probably going up to lake Tahoe on Wednesday, but don't want to use the Equinox 800 until I get more familiar with it ( heavy mineralized black sand beach) and will stick with my Garrett Infinium LS. Thanks again and love the site.

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Steve - treating each of the modes as a separate entity or "detector within a detector" seems to be one of the biggest conceptual hurdles for the new users based on interactions with my detecting buddies and what I have seen on the forums.  I think this is because most detectors treat GB, noise reduction, and even discrimination as "global" settings. 

I don't know for sure, but I suspect that even on ML FBS Detectors and the V3i, I doubt the mode differences on those multifreqency machines affect the underlying multi-frequency spectra and signal processing as much as what occurs with the Equinox and Multi IQ.  On the Equinox, Multi IQ gives each mode it's own detector personality even with nearly identical "local" settings.  

It is a pretty significant depature from the "norm" in several respects.

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