Steve Herschbach

Well I’m not sure about the 2020 vision and “seeing” and slogans so I’ll have to pass on that part. The only thing I want to “see” is a new detector in my hands! Nothing I’m “seeing” in VLF is of serious interest to me. The last two years I have been “looking” for a machine to replace my Garrett ATX and Minelab GPZ 7000. The only real contenders have been the Interfacion QED and new Fisher Impulse detectors. I’ve narrowed it down the the Fisher pulse induction units as being of the most interest to me personally so I will be following the developments there in 2020. First up will be the Impulse AQ, a detector very specific to people who detect for rings on beaches and in saltwater. This model appears ready for release in first quarter 2020. It will be followed by a land version aimed at gold prospectors. That model will hopefully appear before the end of 2020, hopefully by summer.

Well, I have to say that was wonderful to watch. The Busby family are great folks and run a fantastic operation at Chicken, Alaska. I have had the good fortune to have spent a lot of time in that area over the years. It is never easy to find gold, but with persistence and hard work some good finds can be made. The little hot spot you found was one of those hard to find places that pay off with nice amounts of gold. Getting over a half ounce in a day screening and shoveling into a sluice box is impressive! It looks like you had a very successful and varied Alaska adventure... I am happy for you. The video was very well done, thank you for sharing!

I'm not asking you to go by memory so much as by this photo. It's the last best look we had at an Impulse, so any differences between it and what you get would be a great first report. And one that does not require a beach! Besides weight, another easy one is run time. Charge that baby up, give it a medium threshold setting to act as a drain, and let it sit until it runs dead.

I'll set you up with my pre-question when you have time to report Rick. My big one is simple - what, if anything, is physically different about the machine you get and the prototype we have seen for months above? Any difference in controls or configuration? And if you are allowed - the weight!

What Chase said! The BIG difference between all metal and disc is that all metal with reveal targets without a target id. The targets that do not show up in a disc mode. You get that faint whisper with no target id, you have to decide to dig or not. Those are the really deep ones only a PI can get. Try disc mode out with an air test, target under the coil. Sharp hits in the axis of the coil. Now try all metal. All metal expands the area that will give a signal by a large factor, giving you more ability to pick up off center targets. I love hunting with the F75 in all metal mode and just watching the numbers when I need to. Disc mode is more a cherry picking mode for me.

It does not matter what people say. The detector in your hands is the only thing you should listen to. When you get where you are going, locate a target in the ground, and switch back and forth and play with the target to determine what setting you want to go with. DST is a noise filter, nothing more, nothing less. If you have too much EMI noise employing it makes signals clearer. If you have no noise, employing a filter you do not need generally steals a little performance. Not enough to obsess over. There should be no effect on target id either way.

Wow, that's very exciting Rick... congratulations! Fisher Impulse AQ Data & Specifications

The large coil is a real favorite of mine and I just loved it for UK style field detecting. Going to an 11” under those circumstances was like taking baby steps. I would use the 15” on the dry beach for the same reason. In water though I’d also probably stick with the 11” personally. I’d actually like an 8” or 9” for water use as my tendency would be to go smaller, not larger. But the 6” is a little too small.

Yes... contact the dealers at the link I provided. You wanted to know where to buy DDX coils... the dealers are where you buy any coil Nugget Finder makes. You can’t however buy coils not yet made for sale. You could contact Nugget Finder directly for more information as to when those coils may be available.

One main design goal in the Equinox was to increase the sensitivity to low conductors compared to FBS and BBS detectors. Multi-IQ is hotter on small gold and therefore inherently more reactive to saltwater. Simply getting it to settle down in saltwater via the beach mode was challenging.... keep it as hot as possible while not being overly reactive to saltwater. It was tuned for the 11” coil. The larger coil is “seeing” a far larger volume of saltwater, in a giant globe around the coil. The detector becomes more reactive to the salt, requiring reductions in sensitivity by various means to stabilize the machine. If reducing recovery speed too much makes the detector too unstable then you have to up it again. Salinity levels vary at different locations and what works for one person may not work for another at a different location. This scenario is similar to what prospectors face running large coils in extreme ground. The bottom line in both cases is getting the large coil stable my leave you with little more depth than what you have with a smaller coil. For gold prospecting in the worst ground a VLF can get less depth with a larger coil, which is why so many prospectors go PI to run large coils, since PI detectors are less prone to the problem. However, even if the large coil on a VLF gets no more depth it’s often still worth it just for better ground coverage. While prospecting with Gold Mode in extreme ground I run at fairly high recovery speeds, 5 - 6, or coil knock becomes an issue at high sensitivity levels. Long story short I have no specific tips other than higher recovery for you Clive but I’m not surprised by what you are reporting. I’m not expert at running the Equinox in saltwater but I can understand why running coils larger than the stock coil would be problematic. For huge Florida type beaches I personally still might do it even if I ended up with no more depth just for better coverage, but as you note the big coil is also harder handling in the water. It’s this sort of stuff and decisions that make detecting fun for me... the strategy!

I was happy to get Reg posting here. Then another forum member made him angry, and for some reason he seemed to get angry at me also... I still don’t know why. He left and unfortunately has not been seen here since. I think he was on Findmall awhile after that but I stopped looking there some time ago. Long story short I hope he is well.

https://www.nuggetfinder.com.au/where-to-buy

Me too. But we went moose hunting or duck hunting or caribou hunting. I guess that’s why I go nugget hunting. We never went moose shooting. So nugget shooting still sounds odd to me.

If Reg has given the ok it’s fine with me.

If anyone is aware of the double entendre it would be Doc!

Here is another one for sale for only $895. Nope, no reason to make these or even the simple to manufacture DD version like the Tesoro Cleansweep. This one is only $500 but I have never seen a Bigfoot in black except for some poorly made copies a few years ago, so I'm not sure this particular one is the real deal. Note I would not personally pay these high prices myself and am not advocating anyone do so. I'm just amazed that not even NEL or Core or anyone will give it a go so I like to bring it up every year or two.

Looks like a great trip. Not sure why you lost the post. The editor normally holds work in progress even if you log off and back in as long as you don’t start a new post somewhere else. For real long posts however doing offline and pasting in when done may be safer for some people depending on the hardware and browser in use. Anyway, I’m sorry to hear about the lost effort.

I’ve wondered about using an inline equalizer on a detector but never got around to actually trying it. Seems like it might be a good idea though. I’m sure it would depend a lot on the particular tones a detector made and how well the equalizer separated them out.

Excellent results, that must have been a lot of fun! 👍🏼

The pirate thing comes from people looking for pirate treasure, not from being pirates. But it seems to have morphed into something other than that for some people. They used to call it coin shooting and nugget shooting. I never was fond of those terms and have never used them. Why did anyone ever decide to go “shoot” for coins? Even treasure hunter has negative connotations and for archeologists it is synonymous with looter. I am none of the above. I am a detectorist and gold prospector.

Getting to know your metaldetector and its features can be very demanding. This video explains how to quickly adapt the XP ORX Gold program for inland use along with other metal detecting top tips.

Since you have so many different rocks you would like to learn more about you may want to seek out the nearest rock club, or the geology dept at a nearby school. It’s hard to identify many rocks just going by photographs. When you have a lot of them it is more efficient to have somebody lol at them in person.

At this point they missed the Christmas selling season so it does not matter much from a marketing perspective at the moment. A spring 2020 release along with other machines like the new Time Ranger Pro would be a good reason for a website revamp and a new set of 2020 literature. The website in particular is really looking dated. FT should hire me as their webmaster/social media guy - I would kill it! There are probably more moving pieces here than we are aware of.

I did at least invest in some electronic calipers due to this subject and got exactly the same result for the outside diameter - exactly 6.00 mm. No idea on the thread type though. It still seems to me it's all guesswork in the end since DetectorPro admits to possibly using different sizes.

The hearing aids will not mess with the GPX 5000 in any way. In general the GPX will not mess with the hearing aids unless you get real near the coil with your head, in which case currents could be induced into the hearing aid enough to interacts with them and be heard as interference in the hearing aid. At normal distances I would expect no issues. As a side note I just got a new set of Costco KS 9.0 hearing aids (made by Phonak) that have Bluetooth that connects to my phone, plus I bought the extra transmitter box. It will be interesting to see if they will pair directly with my Equinox, and if not the transmitter box will... but how is the latency? Something for a new thread soon.