Steve Herschbach

Thanks Tony. I think in a beach setting the TDI gets the edge due to the ability to turn off the ground balance. You can minimize the GB on the ATX but not actually shut it off, so the filter is always in place. Once you engage the ground balance of the TDI the differences largely disappear. Anyway, that all jives with my experiences, so thanks for confirming. I’ve generally considered the TDI to be better for beach detecting but prefer the ATX for gold prospecting due to the dual channel processing, which helps eliminate the huge depth hole that exists on the TDI on approximately 1/4 ounce gold targets when the ground balance is engaged. You will lose over 50% of your depth or entirely lose targets that fall near or in the hole the TDI creates with ground balance engaged. This does happen on a range of gold rings for people who are using the TDI on beaches with ground balance engaged. Pick the right rings and I can create an ATX versus TDI test that would embarrass the TDI. All machines have a weak spot, and that GB hole is the TDI Achilles heel. GB off eliminates the problem. The ATX is using dual channel processing which is more akin to what Minelab uses in their gold prospecting detectors to address the issue.

I in turn will apologize for perhaps being overly protective of what I call "information providers". Having been on the receiving end I may be oversensitive to what I tend to perceive as posts that question peoples motivations, generally with an assumption of ill intent such as a desire to deceive. So let's call it good and move on. It's really simple, we are here to talk detectors, not people, and to have fun doing it. If people are not here to have fun then they are taking metal detecting way too seriously. These are honestly just toys, not worth two cents drama in anybody's life.

I'm no expert but that one piece seems to show a hint of fire. My brother went big time into fire agates a few years back and you can see some amazing photos on his website here. He is quite expert at cutting and polishing fire agate. He still has claims in Arizona and lots of gemstone material but has been busy on other projects the last couple years so has not put any more material up on his website recently. There are lots of photos and information though, including photos of rough material you can use for comparison.

With Rick reporting that FT CEO Tom Walsh took the Impulse on a recent vacation and came back with things he wanted improved, I see only more delays on the horizon. My weather has warmed up and I could use this detector now, but I am instead crossing my fingers I can get one before the end of summer. This is definitely not a machine to wait around for. I honestly would not be shocked if it ended up rolling into next year.

Any VLF has to have the sensitivity reduced to deal with difficult mineralization, and the Tiger Shark is no different in that respect. Between the manual ground balance control and sensitivity setting I have no doubt the Tiger Shark can do the job, but when all is said and done I would not expect a major difference compared to the Excalibur as far as depth. The Tesoro however in fresh water has a distinct edge over the Excalibur for small gold targets, like ear rings or chains. That edge is lost in salt water. Tesoro Tiger Shark Data & Reviews

Just curious myself Tony ATX vs TDIBH. Are we talking ground balance on or off on the TDI? If it was ground balance off, was the ATX set up properly for ground balance neutral? Having run both there should be no digging false targets with the ATX... something was off with the tuning. If anything a quieter, smoother threshold is obtainable with an ATX. Garrett Atx Vs Minelab GPX 5000

I agree with EL NINO77 that when comparing an Equinox to a Vanquish that Beach Mode 1 on the Equinox gives the best apples to apples comparison. The beach modes are going to be more stable than the hotter modes when it comes to target id and all evidence presented so far that the frequency mix used on Vanquish is similar to Equinox beach mode.

What is you wedding ring made of, anything unusual about it? But in general, no, sounds like something wrong.

That's a great deal, I would snatch up a Compadre for twice that in a heartbeat. And even if not gold you are well on your way to covering the cost!

It seems to me that if there is any hesitation at all regarding the detector or suspicion regarding the sources of the information then simply waiting for as many months as a person wants after the machine is released for third party reports would be the reasonable solution. The general idea is that the forum exists for people who are hoping to get information, and not shut down contributors of information as has been the norm on other forums. If people don't like the information that anyone is presenting, the forum offers a feature for blocking other users. How To Ignore Users On The Forum

Best of luck to you Simon on your new coils and your back healing up. I have to admit to feeling left out of it all. That small coil is what I had always wanted for my GPZ and if Minelab had followed through on making one I would have been far less likely to have sold my mine. At this point I guess I'll just have to live vicariously through you and others.

Were you ever able to clean the coin up any better?

If there is anyone that has the latest version of these headphones and it appears there is a real issue with pairing, try reverting to an earlier version of the Equinox firmware and give it a another try. We are assuming the issues are with the Miccus update and overlooking that it could also be the last Equinox update involved.

I also thought the entire point of Bluetooth was to insure cross device compatibility including backwards compatibility, so I found the seller warning to be odd. Obviously they have been dealing with too many returns from people who could not get their set to pair with an Equinox. I do suspect also it is normally user error, but then you throw in a case of two where the issue seems legit and that complicates things. I am leaving the original post as is however because the seller is warning people and that puts it in the category of buy at your own risk. That is why I made note of the warning... I personally am not stating anything at all about whether the current version works well or not since I do not own a set. I felt since I had helped popularize the use of these alternative phones in the first place I had a responsibility to not the seller warning. At the same time I want to thank everyone for all the extra info provided here that sheds more light on the situation for those looking for a ML80 alternative.

Super interesting, one of the few things about the equinox that has not been discussed a hundred times.

Nice haul, love those Mercs! 👍🏼

Lower gain does of course make a difference, not just in settings but what is inherent in the detector. More modern detectors are pushing the edge looking for any possible advantage. But more to the question I think I wrote one of the only articles I have ever seen on the relationship between the number of target id "bins" and target id stability.

The reality of naturally occurring gold nuggets is that the smaller nuggets are more common than the larger nuggets. The larger nuggets are also easier to detect. Unlike jewelry, natural gold except in active placers does not replenish. That means that in order to sell metal detectors the ability to find the small gold that is left is becoming ever more critical. However, if you are prospecting for an actual income, either full-time or more often part-time, as is true for small numbers of people in Australia and the U. S. and in far larger numbers in the third world, there is the reality of diminishing returns. I have run my prospecting as a business licensed for profit operation since 1979, and turned a profit in nearly all those years. I have only shown a loss a few times, typically when making large equipment investments in a single year. In most years I have all my equipment and costs are merely food, travel, etc. Since I work for myself there is no labor expense per se. Yet the hours do matter to me. I am only willing to devote so much time to prospecting and only if it makes a reasonable return or at least breaks even. My cut off point has declined over the years as the price of gold has gone up, and was last set at an average of 1/2 ounce per week or about 2 grams a day, figuring at least 50 hours of detecting in the week. To make this happen I need to be seeing at least half gram and 1 gram nuggets (or larger) turning up now and then. To make it on sub-grain gold I would have to be parked all day in one place using the detector to find tiny bits at a fairly constant rate. I once detected nearly 100 nuggets in one day, all under a few grains, in a 10 foot area. That made my half ounce for the week. The thing is, if that is the situation a washing device like a high banker or dry washer usually makes more sense. There are places where there is a lot of small gold, and rules make using anything but a detector difficult. I have no doubt in Africa some people exist on just the tiny bits, but they live on nothing compared to us. When full time detecting one has to be searching for new ground constantly. There are many days with no gold. So when a few nuggets do get found, they need to be good enough to cover all those non-productive days. Hobbyists on the other hand just want to find gold, any gold. They will spend a great deal of time and money to find a few tiny nuggets. That’s who buys most detectors in the U.S. The problem for me is I am one of the older hard core more serious types. If all I want to do is find stuff for fun I’d as soon go to a nearby park or beach and look for jewelry, and be home for dinner. Real prospecting for me means weeks or months in the field at a time, and lots of work. I have found many pounds of gold nuggets over the years, so simply finding a gold nugget is no real challenge for me. I almost never come home empty handed if I go nugget detecting. However, I am finding it hard to justify the time spent to use a metal detector to find gold nuggets and am slowly shifting more to doing it for fun. Long winded explanation but the bottom line in my opinion is there is a place in the nugget hunting world for a detector that can handle alkali conditions, and that by default means small gold will be lost for reasons we have already covered. Tune out the salt, you lose the small gold anyway. But many gold nuggets do hide in alkali conditions. The other lesson there is that having a salt compensation mode would be very useful on the gold prospecting version of the Impulse.

This equates to around a 3.0 grain gold nugget, which for me is plenty small. There are many places in Nevada in particular where there are gold nuggets larger than this and where the ground is not very mineralized with magnetic minerals. There are however large areas where alkali salt really troubles some detectors, like the GPZ 7000 in particular. A detector tuned specifically to work on alkali/salt while still having sufficient sensitivity to small gold may work very well in some gold nugget locations, salt flats in particular. There may be areas where hot rocks prove problematic, but there will be areas I am sure where the Impulse AQ can find gold nuggets. I plan to be one of the first to find out. The photo below has 24 grams of Nevada gold I found with the GPZ 7000, with none of it exceptionally large or small, but all more than the 0.2 grams we are talking about as a cut off point for the Impulse AQ.

Wonderful finds, congratulations!

People sometimes misread the term “black sand”. Black sand is a mining term and actually has more to do with weight than color. Black sands are the heavy mineral concentrate recovered when running any form of placer mining concentration system. The most basic version is the heavy mineral concentrate left in the bottom of a gold pan. From the Glossary of Placer Terms in Placer Examination Principles And Practice: BLACK SAND Heavy grains of various minerals which have a dark color, and are usually found accompanying gold in alluvial deposits. (Fay) The heavy minerals may consist largely of magnetite, ilmenite and hematite associated with other minerals such as garnet, rutile, zircon, chromite, amphiboles, and pyroxenes. In Western gold placers, the black sand content is commonly between 5 and 20 pounds per cubic yard of bank-run gravel. Black sands are also concentrated by winnowing action on beaches derived from terrestrial sources like volcanoes or granitic intrusives... any source that can supply the requisite heavy minerals. In this context simply looking at a beach or in a stream and seeing dark or black colored material is not finding black sand. Amateur gold prospectors often do this, thinking that seeing black colored material in a stream is a positive sign for gold. All they are often seeing is just material like black slate or shale gravels and sands, not actual black sand. Unless it is heavy material concentrated by gravity action and typically with a high magnetic component, it’s not black sand in the context of the discussion. True black sands are usually very fine though I have encountered coarse grain varsities. The fine grain variety often has a glittering appearance due to the presence of many sharp edged crystals of the constituent materials, chiefly magnetite. Sands concentrated by gravity action and containing a high enough portion of heavy garnet material which confers a reddish color are referred to as “ruby sands.” Again, the key thing is material derived by gravity concentration and therefore very heavy, not simply color. Here is a picture of some gold I recovered in a Garrett 10" gold pan along with the resulting heavy magnetic black sand concentrates. Click picture for larger view. Placer gold and black sand concentrates

I had no idea they had made a 4” x 6” coil for the TDI... that’s the first one I recall seeing.

Hi Paul, I was a Compass dealer back in the day and owned the Compass Yukon 77-IB, Compass Coin Magnum II, Compass Gold Scanner, Compass Gold Scanner Pro, Compass X-70, and Compass X-80 models. I got my start metal detecting for coins in 1972 and got into gold prospecting around the same time. However, when hold prices took off in the late 70s my interest and activity metal detecting dropped way off while I concentrated more on gold dredging. The early detector models were no good on the small gold prevalent in my area, whereas I could find an ounce of gold or more in a single day of gold dredging. I’m sorry to say I passed upon a lot of prime silver coin detecting due to my focus on gold. There is a ten year gap in the 1980s where I did very little metal detecting, just sporadic outings now and then. It was not until the 50 kHz White’s Goldmaster II came out around 1990 that I got heavily back into metal detecting due to it’s breakthrough ability to hit sub-grain gold. Even then other types of metal detecting took a backseat to nugget detecting. The only other type of detecting that I devoted much time to after 1990 was jewelry detecting, with a focus on saltwater detecting. It was not until the Equinox arrived a few years ago that I got briefly back to coin detecting. My relic detecting amounts to a few trips to England. My focus now is swinging back to precious metals again, both jewelry and nugget detecting. Long story short I used quite a few early coin detectors from 1972 to 1980 with a ten year gap in the 90s where I just dabbled with a few models like the Compass and Fisher X-series models. Then back at it in 1990 with a main focus on both high frequency induction balance detectors plus every ground balancing pulse induction prospecting detector that came along. The following is fairly complete though I am sure I have left a few out. Models I used enough to at least get familiar with.... Compass Yukon 77-IB, Compass Coin Magnum II, Compass Gold Scanner, Compass Gold Scanner Pro, Compass X-70, Compass X-80, Fisher 1236-X2, Fisher 1280-X, Fisher CZ-5, Fisher CZ-70 Pro, Fisher CZ-3D, Fisher Gold Bug, Fisher Gold Bug 2, Fisher Gold Strike, Fisher F75, Fisher F75 Special Edition, Fisher F75 Ltd2, Fisher Gold Bug SE, Fisher Gold Bug Pro, Garrett Ace 250, Garrett Scorpion Gold Stinger, Garrett Infinium, Garrett AT Pro, Garrett AT Gold, Garrett ATX, Makro Gold Racer, Makro Gold Kruzer, Makro Racer, Makro Racer 2, Minelab Excalibur II, Minelab XT 17000, Minelab American Goldstriker, Minelab XT 18000, Minelab SD 2000, Minelab SD 2200D, Minelab SD 2200v2, Minelab GP Extreme, Minelab GP 3000, Minelab GP 3500, Minelab GPX-4000, Minelab GPX 4500, Minelab GPX 5000, Minelab GPZ 7000, Minelab SDC 2300, Minelab X-Terra 50, Minelab X-Terra 70, Minelab X-Terra 705, Minelab Gold Monster 1000, Minelab Equinox 800, Nokta AU Gold Finder, Nokta FORS Gold, Nokta FORS Gold+, Nokta FORS CoRe, Nokta Impact, Nokta/Makro Gold Kruzer, Teknetics G2, Tesoro Diablo, Tesoro Golden uMax, Tesoro Lobo SuperTRAQ, Tesoro Stingray II, Tesoro Tiger Shark, Tesoro Vaquero, Troy X-3, Troy X-5, White's Beachhunter ID, White's Coinmaster IV, White's Coinmaster V Supreme, White's DFX, White's Goldmaster, White's Goldmaster II, White's Goldmaster V/SAT, White's Goldmaster 3, White's Goldmaster 4/B, White's Goldmaster 24K, White's GMT, White's M6, White's MXT, White's MX Sport, White's Surfmaster II, White's Surf PI, White's Surf PI Pro, White's Surf PI Dual Field, White's Sierra Pulse Pro, White's TDI, White's TDI SL, White's Vision, White's V3i, XP Deus

The Minelab Vanquish was first reported as in development in April 2019 and is finally now shipping to dealers worldwide. I am not counting the early pre-release to one big box store, Dicks Sporting Goods. This also was not unexpected. Almost all dealers except a few told customers not to expect the detector until early 2020. In that regard the Vanquish is pretty much on target. Still, I wanted to officially note that it has been nine months passing between first mention and general widespread availability. The trend, and it’s not just Minelab, has been for ever earlier mentions of detectors on the way. The Nokta/Makro Simplex and Fisher Impulse are a couple other recent examples. It appears that waiting up to a year or more is not out of the realm of possibilities. I’m just putting this out there to generally address the inevitable “when’s it going to ship” questions that arise when new detectors are announced. The answer is, later rather than sooner, and don’t hold your breath.

The Minelab ML-80 headphone is made by another company and sold under other brand names. The Miccus Stealth SR-71 has been a popular alternative. Unfortunately an update has possibly made the latest version of these headphones incompatible with the Minelab Equinox. From this ad: "IMPORTANT NOTE FOR METAL DETECTOR USE: The current SR-71 Bluetooth 5.0 release DOES NOT work with metal detecting equipment. The reviews are citing earlier 4.2 versions of the headphones." This also for the Miccus website: "Are different brands of Bluetooth products compatible? Yes. Bluetooth manufacturers are required to make their Bluetooth products compatible with all other Bluetooth devices; failure to meet this requirement means products cannot legally display the Bluetooth logo. Just because a device is Bluetooth enabled, however, does not mean it supports the A2DP stereo music profile. All Miccus Bluetooth products support A2DP and will only work with other Bluetooth devices that support the A2DP profile as well."