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The five cent piece is the smallest coin in circulation in Australia now and most of my photos where I have used a coin for scale I have used a 5 cent and the creature on the coin is the echidna. In the 7 years I have lived in Victoria I have only ever seen maybe a dozen echidnas, but what makes this guy so special is this morning he was in my back yard.??? The half grammer came from Cockatoo Bush a couple of years ago, but I have seen way more half grammers than echidnas. ? Dave

So I decided to purchase a used SDC 2300 that was posted here on the website from Fort Bedford as I have heard and read many good things about this detector. I received the detector yesterday. This morning I decided to go to the local volleyball court in my neighborhood and just dig all of the signals and see how it reacted to a location that I have detected many times with my Original Tesoro Lobo. This machine is too simple to use that you almost think you are missing something until you hit a target and dig. I only stayed about an hour and only got about a 1/3rd of the court done before the humidity and heat came on. I concentrated on a slow swing overlapping the coil on each pass. Below are photos of my finds, 52 cents, tiny bits of wire / junk and my first gold (urban nugget / clasp .5 g) with the SDC 2300. I will soon venture up north in the prescott area to detect a little and see if I can find a real in the wild nugget! Have a great weekend! Jimmy

I have been detecting for 40 years, found a lot of different coins. But there was one on my bucket list I never thought I would find.I found a beach that use to be a resort in the turn of the century and found a lot of silver coins there.Every week is a new adventure with the movement of sand. Today was one of those days. Got a 27-28 signal on the 600, dug down , got a 1907 barber dime. After checking the hole got a 37-38 signal. Called my son over with his etrac and he got a 12-40 signal. After a few scoops, down about a foot came up a 1935 Peace dollar! Wow! Never thought this day would come!

In the past I always was nervous to knock on stranger's doors so I stuck to public areas where permission wasn't necessary or asked friends and family to detect their properties. For the last year and a half I have worked part time as a union organizer. It involved knocking on a lot of doors. It also gave me the courage to knock on some doors and ask permission to metal detect. I was granted permission to detect a home dating back to the early 1800's. I had a blast finding mostly wheat pennies but moved to the base of a big maple and found the shoe buckle. I then began digging iffy signals since the lawn was loaded with cut nails and I found the large cent and then the IH. Both were 9-10" deep.

I am wanting to know more about the new pat pending XGB ground balance, how is this better than say a standard mxt or old GMT ground balance method? Does it allow more depth than older VLF nugget detectors? Does it smooth out the threshold noticeably. The 50% more voltage to the coil is pretty self explanatory and you can hear the results of that with the super strong target signals the 24K creates on targets.

Just to prove those who know how.. can find gold nugget pickers with the the Multi Purpose White's V3i.

I've asked Minelab, if there's going to be an update available anytime soon.. because that user profile thingy spoiled my mood 2 times recently. This is the answer I've got: "Thanks for your enquiry, I apologise for you not receiving a reply yet. Our engineering team are currently working on a software update for the Equinox, due to the complexity of this update they do not have a release date yet. Please watch our website for the software to be released." Good news: There's going to be an software update available! Bad news: Nobody knows when it's going to be released Concerns: If it's so complex, hopefully it doesn't change anything we like about the nox. And if it does, is there the possibility to downgrade the firmware afterwards? Just wanted to let you know! 9/5/18 - Minelab Equinox Software Update Released

Folks have been wanting to see the 24K find small gold. Heck I really don’t care to chase fly shit specs, but I did decide to hunt some ore dump piles for tiny crystal nuggets. No they may not be as small, but before you bark…please know your gold. Crystalline gold does not hit as well as solid pieces and my limited trials with test pieces of small solid pickers does in fact respond louder and farther away than these bits. Yes I am happy with the results of these finds as I had already hunted the exact same pile before, but to be honest it was before I had a manual and now the manual has taught me even more. Contact me if you are interested in the new 24K.

Nice little nugget and a cool critter too .

I had a week of salt water beach hunting in 2016 using only the TDI SL and can say for sure I dug coins and rings to over the 12" mark using the stock 12" coil. Very capable machine even in the soggy wet sand areas. I kind of cheated the water proof thing by covering the entire control box with a 2 gallon zip lock bag. Hope to go again this year, but the Equinox will by my go to machine. Now on the other hand if there was such an animal as a water proof PI from Whites it would be going for sure. That is how confident I am.

I've used mine enough that it's just become second nature for me to shut off the user profile when I'm done with it. Honestly any program you have set up once you're familiar with the Equinox can be set back up very quickly if you forget to get out of your user profile. I do understand for the new users and guys that don't get to hunt as much it can be a little frustrating. Good to know they're working on a fix. Might be easier to just change the owner's manual. lol

Good to hear that since I just got notified of one in stock and went ahead and ordered it!

I'm really liking this 6"coil.

Fine gold......... So fine the static charge holds it to the sides of the vial. Give the vial a tap and it drops back in with the rest.

It's obvious you were having a blast at this site. Awesome detecting and finds !!! Thax for sharing...

We discussed the problems in some threads. I can't get them all together.. Or here: Basically I use beach1 with adjusted tonebreaks for eurocoins most of the time. I've saved a park1 profile as user profile with changed tonebreaks, tone pitches and frequency as a special coinshooting / verify profile. I've been out with a fellow detectorist - if I am in multifrequency, I disturb his machine plenty.. so I switched to my user profile 10kHz - no interference anymore.. but I've simply forgotten to switch back to beach mode before shutting down the machine (habit, because I use beach1 98% of the time and the user profile only temporary). So I ended up with beach1 having my user profile settings, which are completely different, because a 2€ coin rings 16 in beach1 and 20 in park1 for example. I detect based on tone most of the time, so the machine isn't usable in this state anymore.. you'll have to correct all the settings or reset the profile and begin from scratch - If you still remember your hard earned settings! That's a real pita, if you only have 1h left to hunt .. and you got used to your settings for 100s of hours... it's like a complete different machine.. I've taken photos of the settings now, for a fast recoverytime

I'm leary of doing updates. I had an early MX Sport and it ran perfect. I sent it in for the update and it came back not working right. They sent me another one and it still wasn't working right. I wish I had never did the update. So if it's working good don't change it. Rick

Yeah, I like what I have. I don't have any problems that I can't overcome. And, if it ain't broke I don't want to fix it (until the update is proven out by experienced users to their satisfaction).

Folks, My conditions could be totally different and probably are. The sites I have been detecting are not typical mineralized soils, but more of old worked tailings and ore dump piles. The 1st pic piece was only 3 to 4" and it was a screamer as expected for that size. The 3rd pic, which is the 2nd nugget was maybe 3" at most. The last pic was actually the deepest and it was 5 to 6". Guess I messed up on the photos as I do not have a pic of the 4 posted...sorry. I'm not an Engineer so I could not say for certain if the new XGB alone adds more depth, but I am a believer of the smoother a detector can operate, the easier my ear can hear distinguish a faint signal. I do feel in the sites I have tested, it does run much smoother and less EMI as well. Also, I am able to operate literally 5 feet away from another 24K. This is from White's - Detection of the 24K is better in certain situations up 40%. Yes, even an ugly nugget can look good if you know how to take a picture with right lighting and background. My 4 biggest LIKES of the 24K so far. 1st is User Friendly Operation. 2nd is the Smoother/Fast Ground Balance. 3rd is price. 4th is...I'm finding some nice gold...and having fun doing it.

Great if they do, but still detects well either way.

Thanks for the info. But until I hear an actual release date, I am assuming ML is not actually working on anything. I too am afraid that fixing one thing (that can be worked around, though annoying) may indeed break something else. I don't heavily customize tone breaks so when I do manage to blunder may way into the user profile bug, I haven't lost much in terms of saved settings. But I know a lot of users do, so I am not saying ML's most apparent true Equinox bug should not eventually be addressed. But frankly, fearing some sort of unintended consequence, will definitely wait until the dust settles to see how the first SW update goes before I even think of downloading it.

Impressive finds, Mark! Reality is that a promising site trumps detector and even detectorist. You appear to have all three.

Thats a nice haul! love the watch...way to sniff them out...thats a lot of stuff. strick

Hunted an iron infested yard this morning that has been hunted a lot. I was very impressed with the 6" coil. I hunted in pk1, 5 tones, recovery set at 7, all metal with the iron volume turned to 1, sensitivity 21. I started swinging slow but after a bit I found I could just swing it and when I heard a good sound just zero in and if it was repeatable good I'd dig. There is a difference between repeatable and good repeatable....I think that's why guys dig way too many rusty nails. I used to be one of them. Lol Only one time out with the 6" but right now I'm very happy with it.

I love my MXT... And my V3i.... With those two machines I have everything i want to do covered.

Very hot bedrock in there, difficult to run a VLF. And gold, if you are lucky enough to get over any, is small. It would be a good place for a Minelab SDC 2300 but not very good odds of finding gold. Lots of loose rock and boulders, not so much in the way of detectable ground. I have found gold in Hatcher Pass with a Gold Bug 2, but the ground was so hot I just eyeballed quartz specimens, and ran them under the coil by hand. http://www.detectorprospector.com/steves-mining-journal/metal-detecting-lode-gold-hatcher-pass-alaska.htm Gold Ore From Hatcher Pass Found With Gold Bug 2