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Love me or hate me, I belong to The Ringfinders and I got a call last night to rescue a men's gold wedding band from the surf up in Santa Barbara. My customer had just applied sunscreen and waded out into the surf, brought his hands up and you can figure out the rest. Off came the ring. I had one chance to get out there early enough to hopefully locate it in the wet and not have to fight the shore break so I got left this morning at 4:30 and headed to the beach. He had mentioned that he thought he was near an area of rocks and guess what, there were large rocks everywhere so I stood there in the dawn and made a decision to search an area I thought made sense. This beach was hopping with iron, targets were everywhere but because of the oncoming tide I decided I would only did solid tones 62-86. After about my 5th pass in my grid I got a LOUD 72 and I mean LOUD. It was screaming "here I am, please dig me" and two scoops later I had the ring. When I met with the owner to return it he shared that even though it was a simple band it was made in the exact image of his father's wedding ring so it was more than just a ring for him. Some of the best moments I've ever had detecting have included giving things back to the original owner and this one was the same. To see a grown man crying for joy that he got his ring back is a feeling that can't be adequately described but it's good. I hope your weekend was at least half as good as mine because if it was, it was great.

These are my 3 treasure finds I had in less than two years a 1500bc bronze age hoard , 1250/1360 medieval coin hoard and a 1450/1550 silver religious devotional heart pendant

Finally had a free day "rained very little,so I called mental health day!" I pointed my work van east of i65 alybamy and began the intensity training needed to suck these delicious targets out of the gummy clay I knew was a strong adversary awaiting my unsheething of D2! 🙂 no laugh or smirk go away! I've had the pleasure of more than 100hrs on this site over 4 yrs and it has always treated me well! I'm absolutely indebted to the land owner "he like my hunting buddy have passed unfortunately" now his girlfriend who he left it to! Fortunately they,she have always been so good to me and as we all know this is a luxury to our kind/hobby! So the last few trips maybe combined 7 hrs with nox800 the decent signals had all but dried up or atleast I encountered very few in recent trips! Small area 50yds×30yds of egg shaped earth built up higher than surrounding area! D2 fast program pitch 0silencer,0bc,2reactivity,1stability,no ground balance as ground stayed 79 to 87 over 2 hrs one evening 7hrs more today is absolute fire! I tried sense ft,sense with 3 tone,5tone and they dont compare to pitch in iron imho not even close! Sense with pitch basically the same settings 1.5 reactivity though I ran a good bit as well and for me pitch is lightyears ahead in the extreme nail universe like the old sights we all seek these relics in! Heck just trying fulltones and the 5,4,3 just doesnt take long of swinging same little areas to see just how non comparable they are to pitch imo"we all have these thing,opinions!"?. To me it's not close and also hurts my heart as I want to use fulltones! Awesome hunt though can't stress how blessed and thankful i feel about it! I think that is kshot? Scabbard finial"i thought was a rare bullet" lol, ornamental hangar thinging may have came from back in tn now that I'm writing! Lol all others are from this hunt haha artillery cuff,infantry cuff! Are these officer buttons or just run of the mill artillery/infantry fellas? Fork is awesome and the thing with holes like a salt shaker is cool but I have no idea what it may be,nice rivet,percussion cap and i think a 32cal rimfire casing or 36cal. The kshot have always been right there whr I have spent 100+ hours probly pushing 200 at this point and if not for pitch audio and d2 I would still be walking over them even if hearing them as I'm certain I have! Anyone have ideas on big square thingy mobob? Chime in let me know what things are or any knowledge I'm missing or opinions not stated all is welcome! Thanks fellas,have a great day

I have almost 100 hours using the Legend mostly on coin and jewelry turf sites. All I can say is I am very impressed with the Legend as far as its ability to detect at a high level, its outstanding features, its SMF technology and its ergonomics/build quality. That doesn't mean my experience has been all positive and blissful. Definitely not. I have been using my Equinox 800 for the past three days since my Legend control unit is over the Atlantic Ocean right about now headed to Istanbul and a replacement is on its way to me. More on that in the future. So, I have not used my Equinox 800 since I got the Legend except for two hunts where I ran them side by side. All I can say is: the Equinox 800 is an amazing detector. Putting the Legend in the same sentence as the Equinox 800 is paying both of them a big compliment. I bought a Legend because I was a bit "detector bored", it was my birthday, I was helping my mother recover from surgery and I thought I might get a couple of hours of testing/hunting in dirt that is not nearly as nasty as where I often detect. The main reason however was that I wanted a freshwater detector that could run at high enough frequencies to gold prospect in streams, that I could trust for submerged coin/jewelry/relic detecting, that wouldn't need an antenna (I would be using it in fast moving boulder strewn water), it has a vibration feature that eliminates the need for headphones when submerged or near noisy water, no need for extra elaborate waterproofing of components and it very likely wouldn't leak and since both of my Equinox 800s were out of warranty. For my budget ($600) that meant a choice between the Legend and the Equinox 600. The choice on paper and from the Equinox leak history and lack of a vibration feature for target alerting was obvious. So after almost 100 hours, I believe I made the right choice between the Legend and the Equinox 600.

I had a few hours out yesterday morning in the uk not to many finds but did unearth and 1600s james 1st silver halfgroat and this superb 16/17th century pewter spoon it's rare to find a intact one .

This is not about which detector is better or worse (we've been down that path before).. I can tell the difference in audio and TID for both detectors on what is likely to be foil, that's not the point.. I'm saying it's too tempting not to dig a target which could be a gold ring, even when it's probably not.. Also the rings I'm finding are never the same size or thickness, they can be large and heavy or tiny and thin.. This makes for a huge range of audio and target IDs.. This is why I don't pay too much attention to the guides, in the real world it varies wildly.. when in doubt just dig it.. 😁

Yeah and don’t forget to look up when you think there’s a target under a bush. I dug a pretty big hole only to realize there was a piece of foil in the branches above my coil!🙄

Hi my name is pete. I live in cumbria uk . I use a equinox 600 and been metal detecting for just over two years . I have found two hoards among lots of awsome finds look forward to exploring this forum.

To those that remain as followers of the journal - remember the ending is still to come. As I promised, I will continue to post until the dramatic ending and beyond to a second season. Also remember, the journal, although fiction, is based on a real gold strike on this ground. I think we have shed the tag alongs and now the true fans remain. Cheers, GM.

Minelab did exactly the same thing in the manual at the time of release. The frequency thing was literally beaten to death at the time on these forums. So for lots of us now that's an old subject, not some bright new thing XP came up with. The key is experimentation with settings on your own ground and your own targets, to learn what works best for you. Multi-IQ Explained Equinox - What Mode to Use and Where My own D2 just showed up.

Reading between the lines, looks like those bikinis on the beach are distracting you somewhat, ya gotta get a discriminator installed in the RAM to keep the eyes on the game.

Well I wholeheartedly agree with you. Erik. Foil is evil and it is a cruel joke of the detecting gods that aluminum and gold sound and ID so similarly. I also agree this is not about which detector is better, Erik. I have both D2 and Equinox and the both excel at different things, that's why I have and continue to use both. Definitely not trying to retrace any path. I simply misunderstood in your post when you said "it sounds good" as meaning you had trouble differentiating foil from gold audibly and were looking for tips. Not just simply lamenting about having to dig Easter candy foil wrappers. My bad. I was just trying to throw out some suggestions on settings that I have recently discovered to be of benefit in this regard. Just thought I would provide my thoughts based on a very recent beach run where it was very noticeable to me the stark difference in audio feedback and TID diffentiation in the mid conductor range between two popular detectors and, in fact, the difference between discrete 5 tone audio, pitch audio, and full tone audio settings on the D2. Was digging it all and after the most recent update and was blown away by the experience because I have relatively little beach experience with anything other than my Nox and it was very apparent full tones on D2 contained very expressive audio information on foils and aluminum vs any other audio mode on the D2 or Nox. Well I am embarrassed to admit that I can't easily tell foil from gold in terms of audio or TID on my Nox detector (foil freshness seals are especially troublesome as they sound great and ring up a solid 7 on my other detector and there are a hell of a lot more freshness seals than gold rings but a lot of gold rings show up between 7 and 12 on my Nox). The expanded TID range on my other detector gave me more differentiation as I was digging it all and comparing trash to actual gold ring test targets of various sizes and weights. At the end of the day, for me, those trash targets were noticeably easier to call with one detector in full tones vs. the other detector regardless of its settings. With generally lower IDs and gnarly audio than the good targets, the D2 excelled. I mainly search in Beach with pitch tones which will give a good sounding, attention grabbing tone when acquiring just about any non-ferrous target while walking about. If the target is in the foil/gold range I shift into the adjacent custom program which is also Beach with all settings the same except tones are selected as full tones. This target interrogation approach results in audio that gives me a better sense of tonal nuance and distortion that might indicate foil trash vs. gold treasure. At least at that point I can make a dig decision that is informed by some additional clues and can decide to play the odds (if pressed for time), or Scoop it and move on. If you don’t scoop it though, your absolutely right, no detector audio or TID scheme can give you 100% assurance you didn’t just leave gold in the ground. If I’m going to scoop it no matter what, at least I can set expectations accordingly put myself in the frame of mind that what I am scooping is likely trash, so I’m less prone to disappointment. 🤔 FWIW So kudos to you Erik that you are able to call and pick out the foil with both detectors (but still don't leave it up to chance by digging it all anyway despite the frequent frustration). I'm not an avid beach detectorist. Mostly a land hunter for relics on sites that don't typically have a lot of modern non-ferrous trash unlike beaches and parks. You’ve probably dug more rings than I’ve dug beach foil trash since the beaches of your island are available day in and day out. I have to drive an hour to get to a bay beach and nearly 3 hours to get to an ocean beach. Guess I'm more reliant on the beach newb assist features of the D2 than more skilled and experienced beach detectorists such as yourself. If not helpful for you, Erik, maybe the post of what I personally found to give me an edge on dreaded beach foil will be of use to someone else who is also struggling with foils. Cheers and Happy hunting.

I'm not much for them either, but the place does have some surprises of its own, being there since the early 1700s. A woman with a GPX got an incredible 1 Reale coin. It was not seeded. The odds of finding that with 70 other detectors are slim, and she said it was about 8" deep. 🙂 That's a hard working hand. She was only about 5'3" and in great shape. Tough woman! They probably shouldn't use red paint either... 😀

Thought I had about a half oz. Gnarly nugget in my scoop until I went to pluck it out and it squished like a sponge. 😂

I have had my Golden uMax for years and only used it lightly as I have other detectors as well. Anyway I have recently been able to get back to detecting due to some improvements in my health. I finally have had time to appreciate the notch settings on this machine. Nickels no longer hide from me. It is just like a new machine and I have noticed that you can't hardly even find used ones for sale. I think I will be hanging on to this detector for sure!

We were able to get out and hunt the lake beaches today. Enough snow has melted and they haven't started to fill the lake yet. Tough day though. Not much worth showing from the tourist swimming hole. Had hopes but only a few clad coins and trash. Drove to the head end of the lake to find only a little beach not snow covered. Trash, melted aluminum, fishing sinkers and some more clad coins. BUT I found one cartridge I knew was old. Cleaned up a little I was able to make out the numbers. It's a 40-82 Winchester. They stopped loading for it in 1935. This part of Idaho is remote and wasn't really settled untill the early 1900's. So I found something old. Im stoked! Then on the way to the pickup, I found a nice whitetail shed. Good day in a beautiful spot.

SEPTEMBER 23 2012 We were up bright & early and i had a breakfast of freeze dried bacon & eggs (MRE'S). Just add hot water. The Forest Service agent had also told us there was a crew down at the bottom of the mountain working with equipment on the floodplain of a creek. We were up on the old commercial hydraulic mines about 300 ft higher in elevation but we could here their heavy equipment running. We had claims that captured part of that creek as well. I told Dustin that before the day was over we ought to go down and say hello. After breakfast we set off with buckets and shovels and started prospecting and marking out test areas. We ran the gravels through a little recirculating highbanker and processed the concentrates with a Gold Cube. Then we finish panned the material. There were good signs of color from what we were testing. We worked pretty hard and had a late lunch. Then we hiked down the mountain to say howdy to the miners. The crew was on break and they had two big guard dogs that stopped us at the camp entrance. The crew leader came over and called the dogs back and told us to come in. They had a table set up under a canopy. There was a bottle of Jack sitting there and a few of them were smoking joints. None of these guys looked too friendly but the crew leader said his name was Gary and they were out of Nevada. He had a 45 on his hip. They had been hired by the claim owner to run gravel and had a nice washplant set up and a shaker table. He asked us if we wanted to hang out with them until quitting time and work on the washplant. I was pretty excited for the opportunity and took him up on it. When they processed the concentrates there were lines of fine gold coming down the table. He said this was coming from the mountain where our claims were. He said the old timers had shot tailings down the mountain and they missed a lot of the smaller stuff. I told Dustin that this gold had probably been up on our claims at one time. We were really getting excited about our prospects. After quitting time we hung out with them for awhile before heading up to our camp. We had a couple shots of Jack and Gary told us his story of mining. He had been rich and he had been broke. He'd been through two wives. He seemed to know a lot about geology and we soon made friends with him. I invited him up to our mine and he said he'd come up and have a look at the claims sometime when he had the time. With that we shook hands and Dustin and I hiked back up to camp. As we left Gary hollered out that now that he knew we were up there they would shoot their guns in the other direction. I said that was mighty nice of him.

That was my biggest problem deciding on which detector, as my favourite detectors it doesn't work on. It's got surprising depth for a 4" wide coil, deeper than I was expecting that's for sure.

I'm so torn on the Legend thing, I'd like to try out a Legend for a day, just so I know how it'd do for me as I'd be easily able to make a decision by the end of that day. I've been thinking about one but I'm really not in need of another VLF when I mostly just look for gold these days, the more I use my GPZ the more I see I would be wasting my time using a VLF for prospecting. When I'm finding down to 0.02 of a gram with more depth than a VLF would give me anyway with the GPZ anything smaller than that is a fun thing to find for sure but it really adds nothing to your tally at the end of the day. I hear people worried about their out of warranty Equinox drowning, but after talking to Minelab and them saying if my Nox was to drown outside of warranty I could send it's control pod in to the service agent and they'd sell a replacement control pod, and for a very reasonable price then I'm fine with that, I'm not concerned about it drowning after knowing that although I'm not overly worried about it drowning anyway, just imagine how many Nox's are out there that haven't drowned, yes some do, usually the heavy duty water hunters who are possibly on occasion exceeding it's depth rating or just spending so much time in the water their chances are higher than most. Some people are unlucky and theirs drowns the first time it hits the water, mine I know won't do that as it's spent 3 days at the bottom of my spa being tested 🙂 I think the thing that'd push me over the edge to get a Legend would be coils, if it gets coils I want that'd be enough to do it. The other thing I use a detector for is deep silvers, and I'm about as well equipped I could be for that in my soil with the Nox and CTX. I am very happy Nokta and XP have both gained ground on Minelab though, there are really no clear winners in the VLF's anymore, if only the same could happen to high gold prospecting detectors where competition is desperately needed. I completely understand your logic for the Legend though Jeff, in that position of buying an Equinox 600 when you already have an 800 would be pointless, better off to try something new and the Legend was a fine choice for that. The big unknown with the Legend is how much better it'll get with firmware updates, they're obviously actively working on improving it, so I doubt we've seen the final product yet, that is a big bonus for buyers.

I found quite a few melted aluminum nuggets today... Is there a market for those?

Thanks for input. I'm getting better at the audio signals and have dug almost everything to this point. Went out today and really paid attention to the sounds. Turned my recovery speed down and was able to tell a lot more about the targets. I'm getting there. Didn't dig as much iron today. But lead and aluminum with solid signals have to dig. A pic showing not so much iron. My stuff on the left, my fiancee stuff on the right.

Learn how to use full tones PCM audio on the Deus 2 and foil pieces become very distinguishable from symmetric gold rings. Also, on the Deus 2, smaller foil tends to ring up in the 30's which is generally just at or below the lower TID range for gold rings. Foil is much harder to distinguish both in audio and TID on the Equinox.

My Detech Arrow arrived today, not too bad of a shipping time really, only two to three weeks from Bulgaria. I'm thinking I might buy one from my Gold Bug Pro as well, I wanted one for the AT Gold as I only have the stock coil for it but the Gold Bug Pro has more stable Target ID's and I love target ID's 🙂 I am happy with the quality of it as expected, Detech make good coils. It came with a nice fitting black coil cover fitted which is nice, seeing Garrett coils don't come with them it was nice to buy a Garrett compatible coil that comes with a coil cover. Included in the package was a 10% discount off my next order from Thrace metal detectors in Bulgaria. I might use that to get another Arrow for the GBP and a 13" Ultimate coil for my AT Gold. That's it next to my stock AT Gold coil. Depth so far seems similar to the AT Gold coil with some very basic testing on coins in my test garden. I've thrown some little gold nuggets over the top of it and it's doing OK for a 18 kHz detector, it's not even remotely competitive with the higher frequency gold detectors with any coil but it does OK on the nuggets for it's frequency I think, at least as good as the stock coil, perhaps better towards the tip and toe, further testing required to have a definitive opinion there. It handles EMI about as well as the stock coil too, so the extra size hasn't contributed to any EMI difficulties over the stock. It's a nice cooling coil, I don't mind the weight, some may find it a bit different to using smaller coils, I struggle to complain about VLF weight as most of my time detecting is swinging the far heavier GPZ so anything else feels very light. I'm happy with it, I just wish it was available for my better detectors, I'd absolutely love this coil for my Equinox and CTX 3030, even the Vanquish but sadly that's not going to happen, thanks Minelab, appreciate it. Perhaps if it comes out for the Nokta Legend that will be my next move.

Got out yesterday and today, pictured are both days. Had some fun, tried to say howdy to another coin hunter, but he was having none of that. I won't be sharing my chocolate chip cookie with him I guess.

All shown were 14k with the exception of the single band which was 18k. I did forget to show one 10k during the first month.... here it is. Bracelet was 7.13 gr. hollow 14k. I believe all could have been in range of either the Nox or MDT. The baseball glove pendant I may have passed over with the other machines only because it was in the foil range. Being a new detector, I'm still digging and learning the machine so I've dug my fair share of foil in the dry sand whereas I pass a lot of foil when using the MDT. Nox hasn't been out with me in 3-4 years other then as a loner machine.

Yesterday JW and I went for another gold hunt to the same place we'd been going on all the previous missions I've posted about in the past couple of weeks, I've always liked this spot, it's been my favourite. You do deal with a lot of junk here though, mostly shutgun pellets but I guess it's good practice for me sorting the junk from the gold. I felt like I was up to a bigger walk this time, JW invited me up to the spot he did last time we were at this place, If you recall I stayed right at the start and spent the day in a very small area last time while JW went for a stroll far further into the area and he managed to find 8 nuggets. This a photo of the 8 nuggets JW found in the area on the previous day when I stayed at the entrance to the area. It seemed a worthwhile spot for me to take on a big walk to get to, my broken foot seems to never feel better, it's been a long time now and it feels no better than it did at the start, although it has its good days and bad days and it felt like it was going to be a good day. We walked up to this area and JW showed me around and told me where he'd found some nuggets in the past, I hadn't been here for a couple of years back when I was using my GPX 4500 and I found nothing with it in this spot from memory. So we fired up our weapons and off we went. I headed up higher and JW went off to the right and down from where we stored our packs, the higher ground looked alright to me although my detector was nutting off constantly on pellets straight away, big pellets like someone had been hunting elephants in the area, only NZ doesn't have elephants, but the really large size rusty magnetic pellets, I don't normally encounter these sort often, usually it's the tiny little lead ones. They were absolutely everywhere and driving me mad. I kept going in the area anyway and then I encountered a target noise that was not like the others, a softer quieter sweeter sound, a few scrapes to remove the chances of it being a small lead near surface pellet and the signal improved, I kept digging and digging and the signal was better and better, this was getting exciting although I'd dug so much junk since getting here I had it in my head it's 90% chance some sort of junk, maybe a boot tack or something so I wasn't overly concerned about doing any video. Once I was fairly deep I decided it might be time to flick on the phones camera just in case and I'm glad I did, now I have some memories of my second biggest ever nugget find! Over a gram nuggets or even gram size nuggets are an extreme rarity here, so it's a happy day when you score a gram size nugget, this one however was a lot bigger than a gram. This is it's hole, and if you'll see the video you'll see it wasn't a fisherman's story about the size of his fish catch, exaggerating the depth on the hole, this is precisely the depth of the nugget. A beauty, and very odd for a NZ nugget based off what I've found before, mine are generally always pretty smooth, this one was a chunky rough looking nugget, more like the nuggets found in Australia. And here is the video, I'm so annoyed I didn't film the entire thing from the start as I like having videos for my future watching of my nugget finds, especially when it's a nugget out of the ordinary for me. Oh well, at least I got some of it on video. Pretty happy with this one, my second biggest nugget so far and only just behind my biggest by .1 of a gram. I ran down to show JW, we were both pretty shocked a nugget this size was found here. I now had a dilemma, the likelihood of me finding a nugget now was low, usually if I find a nugget right at the start of the day I find no more 😛 Hours passed and exactly that, plenty of junk and no more nuggets, I had some lunch and figured I'd move out of the bigger nugget area and see if I can find something down lower on the hillside. I didn't really want to walk too much on steep ground with my foot but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. At this point JW had found one nugget also from memory so I didn't think my hopes would be too high down lower on the slope where he was but that's gold for you, you never know. It wasn't even 20 minute and there it was, my second nugget. A nice easy signal, the 8" loves small gold, even a bit of gold weighing 0.03 of a gram is a booming signal compared to a very small lead pellet. This piece wasn't exactly small though, well for me 🙂 within a few steps of that nugget I found another one almost straight away, another easy target signal. Here is what the ground looks like we were hunting, from a cut out the old timers had done. Things dried up again for a while now and JW appeared crossing over a ridge into sight, he was heading back to his bag for lunch so I decided I'd go sit with him and have a break, we had a look at the nugget again after the initial shock had passed and at this point he had 3 little nuggets with his GPX 6000, so we were sitting on 3 each at this point. his were similar size to my smaller two. Back at it, this time we both just hung around near our bags for a bit where I'd just found the two nuggets, and after an hour or so of nothing we gradually moved on, I decided I'd go back a fair bit in the direction of the car so I took our bags to save us having to go back for them as JW was slowly heading in that direction too. I went for a walk to some thyme bushes on the downward slope hoping the little 8" would give me an advantage over anyone else who had detected there as the spaces between the bushes are so small it takes a small coil to get between them and the 8" had done extremely well doing this in the past, it slides between the bushes no problems. I don't know why I didn't take a photo of them. I was only in the bushes for 20 minutes and digging plenty of pellets and junk and then I had a signal that seemed different to the others, I scraped away the grass and could clearly see I was on some bedrock. The signal was pretty good, unmistakable, although tiny it was a nice little bit of gold. It was my smallest bit of the day so I wanted to see how it responded on JW's GPX 6000 to compare it in my head to how it responded with my GPZ and 8" X-coil. I was very satisfied with how good the target response was on my GPZ so it would have been good to compare, I walked over to where JW was to find him fiddling with his GPX unplugging the coil and removing the battery and so on, he said it was doing its usual EMI thing where he just turns it off and does a factory reset and it seems to clear up the EMI, however this time when he switched it off and on again it came up with an error so he was unplugging everything and making sure it was all secure in an attempt to revive it. After many attempts it was clear the thing had died. Either the coil or the detector. We took a video of it which you can see here. This put a bit of a downer on what was otherwise an excellent day. Minelab have really outdone themselves with the build quality of the GPX 6000, for the price things are not too great I think, it's pretty disappointing. I told JW we should just leave now, I didn't want to continue with him having to sit around and wait for me to finish, it was sad enough his detector died without having to sit around watching me have all the fun so we left to go get some Chinese food on the way home, we got there right as the place opened for dinner so the buffet had all the good stuff! We got ourselves an excellent meal. Once we got back to JW's house we tried another coil on the detector and it worked, so it was the 11" coil that failed. My theory is the security chip in the coil has failed, my reason for this is the detector was working fine until it was turned off, so a fault with the windings or cable connection or anything like that is HIGHLY unlikely to be the problem, the EMI he was getting that prompted him to turn it off and on was nothing out of the ordinary, he does this many times during a detecting session to fix the EMI when a noise cancel doesn't seem to do it. When the detector was turned off and on it uses that chip to verify the coil, if the chips dead the detector will error exactly like what's happened. A bit of a downer on what was a good day. JW ended up with his 3 little nuggets, I can't remember his weights but his total was about .3 of a gram from memory, I'll put up his total photo if he sends it through on email, he normally sends me his photo of gold weights. We also weighed my gold at JW's house, I wanted to know if my big one was my biggest ever, it was close. The little one I wanted to check and compare with the 6000 came up as 0.03 on JW's scales, when I arrived home checked the weights on my scales as they're more accurate and it came up slightly heavier than on his. It's not my smallest GPZ nugget which is 0.023 of a gram on my scales but it's getting down there. It's heavier than it looked. Here is my junk for the day lots of tiny little metal shards, they were so annoying as they're a great signal. I think I lost a fair few pellets out of my pocket, it happens pulling my scoop in and out all day. And my days total My best day in about a year I'd guess, pretty sad about JW's GPX though, now he's got the hassles of dealing with the warranty.

First month beach hunting, dry, wet and water using modified Beach Sensitive and Dive (in the water). Really liking this machine and still so much to learn about it. Not shown are two 925 necklaces and all the misc coins and pull tabs. Roughly 80 hours on the machine so far give or take a few hours. Cliff

I was back at the spur spot yesterday afternoon for 3 hours of well deserved therapy. It was hot but there was enough breeze to keep me cooled down. I sometimes hunt with a buddy that has all his detecting needs perfectly kept in a little back pack... his boots are already on and he's ready to go detecting...the minute we turn off the truck he's out the door and hauls ass to the spot...he's usually about 10-15 minutes ahead of me. One time after he did this I walked up to the area he had already been detecting for 20 min turned on my detector and immediately dug a nice seated quarter about 15 feet from where he was standing. As he looked at me in disbelief I calmly told him that the reason I found the quarter and he didn't was because he hauled ass to the spot and the detecting gods don't like to see greedy detectorists. So in following with my superstitions yesterday instead of rushing to the spot where I found the spur I made a wide fishhook pattern so as not to appear too eager to find the other one...The plan worked perfectly it was the 4-5th target I dug...On the deus 2 it was in the mid 80's and sounded not that great...as I was excavating it out of the ground I noticed why... there was a large piece of Iron covering about half of the spur...I would have put the odds of finding the other spur at zero to one...how many times have we set out to find something with our detectors only to find out it was the only one there... I had a nice little 3 hour hunt.... the matching spur will sit in my display case next to the other one...I got a few more relics and even found a coin if you can believe that. The ground is rock hard...A shovel is out of the question. Once I break through the hard upper surface I am able to use the Leshe tool to get the target out but its lots of work to not damage the target. Heres a few pics... a couple showing the landscape. Happy hunting and don't be too greedy when you go detecting 🙂 strick

An Easter egg hunt for the kiddies along a tropical beach might sound like great family fun, but it's my worst nightmare come true.. Not that I begrudge the kiddies their fun, just go have it somewhere else (or don't unwrap your eggs and eat them the moment you find them).. For weeks now I've been digging foil.. Every time I get my hopes up it's a gold ring.. It sounds good and the target ID doesn't jump about too much.. It's deep enough for a ring to have worked its way down into the sand over the weekend.. Even when I start digging I don't give up hope.. Maybe it's a small ring a lot shallower than I thought.. Oh, it's out of the hole already, the thing really is tiny.. Every time I go through this process only to find another bit of foil.. It's beyond heart breaking.. Even underwater you'd think that wave action, tides and currents would carry light foil pieces far away.. They don't.. There's a never ending supply of foil on land.. Maybe metal detector manufactures should concentrate less on iron filters and more on aluminium filters (if that's even possible without filtering out gold signals).. I'm sure that even in the bush or the desert, small pieces of foil can be a nightmare..

Nice work lots of digging..I'm liking the iron fork never seen anyone dig one of those before.. I can help you with the square thing it's called a Leaverite strick

Simon, I can’t think I of a single reason why you need a Legend other than you just want one. It is not going to significantly outperform your Equinox 800 at this time or at least until its iron bias settings are added. It is not going to hit deeper silver coins than your CTX 3030 in your hunting conditions either with the Legend’s 11” coil.

You have a picture of your head phones, the cup design is a major factor. I hunt in the water with winds of 30mph, and I have gel pads to help with the wind noise. I've tried to use the fur on the ear cups,...kind a helped, used hoodie, little better. But the best is a low profile ear cups and gel pads, than work in the direction that the wind is blocked on one side. You turn a certain way you can get away with this, wrong direction you can't hear nothing. At the ocean there is the pounding surf, nothing can help that... I am a true believer in headphones, I'm not sure how the 6000 works but for me it's a matter of hearing the faintest of targets in All metal, as a water hunter, blocking the ambient noise is one of the most important things. https://www.aircraftspruce.com/menus/av/headsetx_ear.html

If you want a machine that has the ability to do some gold prospecting, then the Legend is the obvious choice. Legend is better built too. I've used one for a few hours and decided not to get it. But that's only because I already have an Equinox 800. For the money it's easily the best detector in it's price range.

Thanks, Yea, I really love the little coil, it's got some raw horsepower 🙂 I wasn't sure how well it'd go on big deeper gold as that's an extreme rarity here however it surprised me on this piece getting it at good depth. I generally use it for depth on the little bits. I have detected a cut out sidewall like that before at another spot and found some gold in it, I started doing this sidewall but below it is quite a slope and my sore foot hates standing on sloping angles so it was hurting so I gave up pretty quickly. The old timers would work an area until it was no longer viable for returns I would guess, or until they heard rumour on the grape vine of a more rich area and rushed off to it before everyone else did and abandoned their current area. One thing I can be sure of is the old timers never got it all. I'm sure there are plenty of areas around here that the old timers tested and found gold but not enough to make it viable for them to mine it, I hope one day I come across one of those areas 🙂

This also happens when digging embankments.. on a few occasions there's been a piece of foil higher up from where I was digging.. very frustrating until you work it out.. foil is evil.. 😬

Big Culpeper hunt today. Liberty Hall Plantation. Chase was nice enough to invite me to go along, it was a 2.5 hour drive but well worth the trip. About 70 detectorists were there, it was a seeded/natural Civil war camp for both armies at one time or another. 200+ acres of rolling farm. Here's some genealogical history: http://signup.libertyhallva.com/ I was first to get something in the bag, but Chase maintained his mentor status overall. 😀 There were 3 large spots that were "seeded" with some great relics, and places you could dig some serious stuff from the civil war. We put in a few miles today, a morning and afternoon hike. This place is really well maintained and run, the hunt was fair and fun. At one point we hit on a plan to find more seeded stuff and it paid off. We both started out with Deus 2's, later Chase switched to his GPX to find more bullets. We couldn't go in the paddock areas, but there were a lot of great photo ops. 😀 Here's my take for the day: I got possibly 4 "seeded" bullets, two Sharps bullets on the right, a .69 caliber Minie on the left, a Williams cleaner center, and a .52 Three ringer. Anything white was probably seeded. On top is a ~60 caliber round ball, possibly colonial. The brass ring was the only non-lead Item I dug that was worth keeping. Here's the trash, the place was loaded with nails, staples, and wire. 😀 Really not bad! I dug an ancient cowbell with the clapper still inside. It's the large item on the bottom left. There was a building there, we searched around it for a bit but moved on. So, how did the Deus 2 do in this soil? 🤔 Great. Sometimes there were mineralization bars across the screen, sometimes nothing. I didn't notice any lack of depth although I'm sure there was, and the ground was pretty hard due to the slight drought we've had this year. I ran the detector in pretty much vanilla Relic program, except Reactivity at 2, and 00 notched out with a little bit of threshold. (Thanks Chase) Sensitivity was 93 default, but I bumped it to 96. It was basically a "go/no go" day. Some stuff, particularly the wire and nails managed to get past me, but I used my Quest pinpointer to leave a few behind. 😁 We both won prizes, I was first to win the raffle, and got a book. This was my first organized hunt, and I had a blast. 🙂

I went on a brief hunt this morning, and while I found nothing interesting, some of it was fairly deep.

All cleaned up

So, here's my frequency analysis post resurrected, plus an additional Youtube video on the topic: A poster on the Geotech1 forum found this Youtube video, showing a 'scope examination of the coil drive voltage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2AYJp2uH2U It's not really worth watching, it's dull and nerdy, and in Russian or Ukranian, I just included it so you know I'm not making stuff up ... So it's broadly similar to the Equinox / DFX , forcing complex square-edged signals onto the transmit coil. I have no idea what Mr. Youtuber is saying, so I just observed what was shown, and interpreted it from an engineers view. The modes: P1 : General P2 : Sensitive P3 : Sens FT P4 : Fast P8 : GoldField P12 : Beach; all run at 8.08 kHz & 40.4 kHz, a 1:5 ratio. ----- P5 : Park P9 : Relic P11 : Beach; all run 8.08 kHz & 24.24 kHz, a 1:3 ratio. ----- P6 : Deep HC P10 : Dive; both run 4.76 kHz & 14.3 Khz, a 1:3 ratio ( not unlike the Fisher CZ range, but a different waveform shape ) ----- P7 : Mono, does what you'd expect, a single freq square-wave, just like the Equinox. It looks like P6 / P10 run a three-level waveform, possibly to reduce power consumption, obviously important for a coil with a small internal battery. How they process the freqs is of course the important bit. It's probably safe to say the GoldField mode is going to emphasise the 40 kHz. And the Deep HC will be using the 4.76 kHz as it's dominant one, to target the milled copper/silver coins. Another Youtube video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QgAVNWaDD4

This is a special thread I am starting. It is my story up to now at our claims & Jed's dig site. The gold strike was a real event in 1936 and the exploration following over time is covered in the book. Here I want to convey my own experiences and adventures at The Whiskey Jack Mine and claims. I have kept my own journal concerning activities and events there. It is not a day to day and some of it is written after the fact from my recollections. It starts in 2012 and may give some hopeful prospectors and miners an insite into gold exploration and the ups and downs associated with it. I hope you will enjoy it. Cheers - G.M.

That's great! What a saga. Whiskey Jack from the 1850's, Jed from the 1930's and Ghost Miner in the 2000's. Telling a tale of one mine. Thanks GM for doing all this. It's a great read!

Thanks Mike. Besides making my book by hand one volume at a time I will also be writing my true adventures on this mine and posting. Thanks for reading.

More important to have shades on a beach than a pinpointer. Ya knowwww , for UV protection.🙃

Every detector talks a little differently. It's like learning French , Dutch or even Japanese..! It can be quite confusing at first.... The more you use the Nox , the more you will understand what it's language is telling you. I would dig that target just to learn that "word". (Sometimes the "word" sounds like aluminum but there's a gold ring there.........) You found "treasure" in this forum . Lots of experienced answers are the "gold" within. Good luck learning "Equinox" .

Yep. Legend has a lot more other features than the Equinox 600. It has been easy for me to switch from Legend to Equinox and back. They are really similar in so many ways. These are just my opinions. I am not recommending anyone else make the same choice I did.

Mule deer mostly, but the whitetail have been moving in. The cartridge was popular for elk here. One other case is what I'm guessing is 32 long rifle.

I find APTX LL Auto Noise Cancelling (ANC) do a good job of knocking down wind and surf noise on the beach. Here are some options: I use these APTX LL noise cencelling headpones and they are excellent under windy conditions due to their switchable Automatic Noise Cancelling (ANC) and have great audio fidelity and tonal range. A little pricey but you get what you pay for. Avantree Aria Me Personalized Audio Noise Cancelling Bluetooth Headphones with Charging Stand & Microphone, aptX HD & Low Latency, Enhanced Volume Clear Voice Wireless Headset for Music, Call, Seniors https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083FTNG3Z/ Great budget ANC APTX LL headset with not quite as effective ANC as the Avantree with decent audio FALWEDI Active Noise Cancelling Headphones Apt-X CVC8.0 48H Music Playtime Wireless Bluetooth Headphones with Microphone Type-c Fast Charging Deep Bass Over Ear Headset for Travel/Work, Black https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085DKHY5K/ Middle of the Road APTX LL ANC Phones, priced accordingly: Paww WaveSound 3 Bluetooth 5.0 Headphones – Active Noise Cancelling Headphones / 16-Hour Battery Life with Precision-Engineered Sound/Foldable Travel Headphones & Over-Ear Headphones (Black) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01IEHIMLY/

Pretty good summary but with some inaccuracies. Pretty Accurate: Deep HC does punch deep and favors high conductors because of its frequency profile (4.76 khz and 14.3 khz) and lower than average reactivity for the non-beach modes. Not good for areas with high trash target densities (hence woodlands). Not So Accurate: Deep targets do not take longer to process. But they are more easily bypassed at depth due to their reduced signal strength and profile, so going slow is a better approach with this mode. Park runs 8 and 24 khz. More info on the frequency combos used by the Deus 2 programs below...

Two seperate and totally different things. The speaker induced EMI is random and not repeatable in the same sense a subtle target is repeatable, and a noise cancel doesn't make actual target signals go away. The speaker induced EMI is unrelated to targets or the coil position relative to the ground. And it gets so bad that the entire detector loses stability until a noise cancel is performed, it's nothing like "ghost signals". It's random, meaningless noise. It is replicatable though, and I'd be happy to demonstrate it to Minelab if they would like. Which I doubt they will, because every 6000 I've used has the exact same problem so they surely know about it already. I have a feeling where the problem is. Things are way more complex (and secret) than this in the detector obviously, but to simplify an example processing workflow if I had to guess, the FPGA or MCU doesn't have enough power to run full real time Fourier analysis along with the rest of the detector functions, so it takes a series of discrete "snapshots" of the atmospheric EMI as it runs, to analyze with it's noise cancelling algorithm. EMI is random, sometimes there might be 5 different sources, sometimes it might just be the speaker. But the speaker EMI is always there. I'm guessing when a snapshot is taken with just the speaker EMI, things are ok (and in a lab, it would appear ok as well). But in places like the US where there can be 10's or hundreds (or more) sources of EMI randomly turning off and on, occasionally a snapshot is taken with too many sources when added on top of the speaker EMI. The algorithm can't find a happy balance and keys in on a noisy channel, and the detector looses stability. The noise cancel process might just manually reset this whole process and starts from a fresh snapshot, which hopefully was taken with less EMI sources, except just the speaker again. Something like this would also explain why it apparantly seems much more common in very EMI-ridden locations like the US and less so in Australia or other parts of the world. And even within the US is much less common in more remote places, and much more common in noisier locations.

Deep HC to me just seems to be more responsive overall and seems to do better than the other modes in thick iron (I have not used the beach modes/Dive) and so this may correspond to your f and 3f processing speculation.