Steve Herschbach

The ground balance preset for all modes except Gold Mode is Manual set to 0. This is good enough for most low to moderate ground conditions when using Multi-IQ, which has built in ground processing sufficient to the task. That is why the Quick Start does not include it as part of the process. From the Minelab Equinox Full Instruction Manual, page 40: “The default Ground Balance setting of 0 is recommended for Park, Field and Beach Modes because these locations typically have less mineralisation than goldfields. However, if the ground is generating many noise signals (and/ or the Sensitivity level is set very low), then using Auto Ground Balance is recommended. If the Auto Ground Balance process does not greatly reduce ground noise (due to highly mineralised ground or high salt levels), then repeat the Auto Ground Balance process by sweeping the coil from side-to-side, rather than the standard up-and-down motion.” I would however always recommend you do a ground balance if running a single frequency. In more mineralized soils performing a ground balance should be normal operating procedure even for Multi-IQ. The Gold Modes are preset for ground tracking. From the Minelab Equinox Full Instruction Manual, page 63 (click to enlarge)... Portions marked with asterisk are Equinox 800 only.

Oh I have always enjoyed coin detecting, and it's even more fun when there is a chance at older coins. Still, I was already thinking that next week I should shift to jewelry detecting soon, which is what I normally do when not nugget hunting. For now though weather is mild and a little rain now and then, and I want to take advantage of that. Once the summer heat starts I do not like plugging the turf around here as the ground gets so hard and dry. So I think I will keep honing the Equinox coin hunting skills as long as conditions favor digging plugs, then shift to jewelry detecting and of course nugget detecting later on. I do go to Park 2 and Field 1 & 2 from time to time when I get a good deeper "iffy" target but so far have not been convinced to move off Park 1. The targets will sound different and target ids present differently but not in any way yet that seems clearly better or worse - just different. Park 2 and Field 2 are hotter on small objects, but that does not help me much for hunting silver. It just lights up the smallest foil and can slaw bits.

A couple notes. Even at Recovery Speed 7 Equinox gets the depth in bad ground. I also think fast Recovery Speeds plus 50 tones does accentuate the tonal difference between nickels and square tabs. And I have no proof of this, just a gut feeling, but Equinox seems to not lose any appreciable depth from aggressive notching. These last settings were super quiet and would make a good "silver program" for places unlikely to have the oldest coins. Like 1930 and newer. I sure like this detector! My ear just keeps getting better with it. Anyone giving up on Equinox with less than 100 hours is not really giving it enough of a chance. There is nuance and power here aplenty that reveals the more you use the machine.

Thanks folks! It got more interesting today. I have not found a silver now that I am detecting again this spring. I went to an area where I got a lot of the silvers from my Equinox silver report. I had hunted the area halfway well but I am getting a better hang of Equinox every time I use it, and so decided the area needed some gridding to see what I missed wandering around. Since I was looking for silver and the area is both really trashy and not all that old (my oldest coins in this spot have been 30's and mostly 40's) I got more aggressive than ever with notching. I even notched out 39 and 40 to reduce noise from ferrous falsing, figuring I can use the horseshoe button to check questionable targets. I stayed at Recovery Speed 7 due to trash density. The machine ran crazy quiet like this, even in this dense modern trash. Park 1 - Multi-IQ50 TonesIron Bias 0Detect Speed 7Auto (Pump) Ground BalanceSensitivity 22All items from 21 on down rejected plus 39 & 40 No zincs, no nickels, and almost no trash at all. I gridded away for three hours and got 8 dimes, seven copper memorial cents (no wheatbacks) and a couple quarters. No silver. I am ready to quit but take one last row on my grid and get a 25ish signal, a little weak but good. I dig a pretty deep plug but the lower portion was left in the hole, pinpointer signaling a coin in the middle of the bottom. I stuck my digging tool down in and pried the hard soil apart and the bottom kind of popped apart as the dirt levered to one side. I spotted a silver dime. A first it would not register however as I did not know what I was looking at, until my brain finally recognized a Seated Dime! Another first, and at 1887 the oldest coin I have ever found in the U.S. I figure it was right at about 6" deep. The dime has good sharp detail and I am thinking it will grade better than most. Then I turn it over AND SEE THE SCRATCH! I know I did not hit it with my Lesche digging tool, and its edges are too worn to make a scratch this sharp and fine. I think when I levered/popped that hard dirt apart a sharp little rock edge must have scraped along the coin. Don't know, but it does look like a fresh scratch so I am owning up to it. The good news I guess is an 1877S is not a super high value coin and so all I did was reduce the value of what might have been a $20-$25 coin. Still, I hate it when that happens! The only mystery to me is what a coin so old was doing in that location, but I am not complaining.

Hi Terry, Welcome to the forum! You made quite a splash with your new Equinox in more ways than one!!

Welcome to the forum! There are very few global settings - a setting that if adjusted is the same in all modes. Most settings are local, and so yes, they must be set for each Search Profile you employ. Only volume, sensitivity, and backlight are global with settings that transfer automatically to all modes. Important Tip - Global Vs Local Settings Minelab Equinox Essential Information

Here is how the red one cleaned up. I left the green one alone. Also, for Equinox owners, some details on settings here.

I did a thread recently where I was hunting local park areas and wanting to experiment with "cherry picking" settings that would net me the most coins the fastest without bogging down into overly serious detecting. I normally hunt 50 tones with no items rejected, which works well but which requires me to work slowly analyzing targets sounds. Time is limited so I wanted to get out and cover some area. The settings worked well enough to get a pile of coins out of some trashy modern park settings. Park 1 - Multi-IQ 50 Tones Iron Bias 0 Detect Speed 6 unless in dense trash, then 7 Auto (Pump) Ground Balance Sensitivity 21 or 22 depending on EMI All items from 21 on down rejected except for 13 For nickels I was being really picky, just digging good, solid 13 readings. I do know nickels can also read 12 but I did not want to recover too many pull tabs so kept this very narrow. And I have to note - I am experimenting!! There is nothing magic about these settings, just something I am trying in modern trash. Anyway, it worked halfway well and I was able to readily skim coins out of a modern trashy park area with minimal trash, and nearly all that being square tabs that read 13 like the nickels. Very little high end trash. I was getting quite a bit of ferrous high tone squeaking but only a couple that tempted me enough to dig them anyway, and got a couple nails. This weeked I wanted to try an area I had cherry picked before for copper/silver range targets, but my ear is better tuned now so wanted to give it another go with more open settings than above but still not wide open full tones. I employ different levels of intensity in my hunting that varies by location, time constraints, and my mood. Sometimes I want to recover all non-ferrous targets. Sometimes just copper/silver. And sometimes varying levels of in between. This next round I opened up the discrimination a little. Park 1 - Multi-IQ 50 Tones Iron Bias 0 Detect Speed 6 unless in dense trash, then 7 Auto (Pump) Ground Balance Sensitivity 21 or 22 depending on EMI All items from 16 on down rejected except for 12 & 13 This time however I rejected everything from 16 on down except 12 & 13. The goal here is zinc pennies read 21 and since I hate them it makes for my regular cutoff point in areas from around 1930 and newer. However, in older areas there are two things in particular to pay attention to, assuming you still want to reject some stuff. Indian Head pennies overlap the zinc penny range. New zincs come in at 21 but corroded ones will read lower. Indian Head pennies can read in that same "high teens / low twenties" range. Also, a $5 gold coin will normally read at 18. Ground and age can pull readings lower, and so I decided on 17 on up as being good, but 17 is debatable. I will decide on that later after digging enough 17 targets. But 18 on up has to be open because I am determined to find a $5 gold coin with Equinox. I also wanted to open up the nickel range as older nickels seem to hit around 12 and newer ones more in the 13 region. Again, just experimenting! I also need to note that I am using Park 1 - target id can vary depending on mode and frequency. I told myself I would skip shallow zinc signals but I have a real problem passing on clean sounding targets, and so dug most of these since they are shallow and easy to pop. I did finally make myself stop though as it is a time waster - zinc pennies were the most common "trash" target followed again by some square tabs. Like I noted, I detected this area before, so once I pulled the about 20 zincs aside I ended up with 10 copper pennies, 4 dimes, and 3 nickels, none all that old. However, I got three special signals. The first was as nice a 12 reading as I could hope for, just a nice clean, mellow tone. And down about 8" appears my first ever Liberty or "V" nickel, a 1909. Some time later and maybe 100 feet away another identical, mellow 12 reading - I just knew it had to be another nickel. This one was down under a tree root at about 8" and popped out of the ground dry and green - another V nickel, 1898 this time. My first Liberty nickels, and two in one day! Some time later, with time running out, I got a messy 19 reading. It was trashy sounding but just good enough to get me to dig, and my first Indian Head penny pops up next to some ferrous trash. So after 45 years of detecting, why am I only now finding my first old coins of these types? I was born in Anchorage, Alaska and lived there my entire life up until 5 years ago. Anchorage was founded in 1915 and most of that area is paved over core downtown. Most of the town is far newer. I considered 1930's coins to be the great old finds, with only a couple ever from the 20's, and never anything from the teens or earlier. The bottom line is these types of coins just did not exist where I lived. And then I got into nugget detecting...... So anyway, a couple firsts for me, and that alone made it quite fun. I used some cleaning tips mentioned on this other thread (steel wool) on the 1909 Liberty but left the other alone as cleaning it would probably make it worse. The IHP has a couple weird corrosion blobs on it so have not messed with it. Anyway, opening up the extra notches did not get me into too much trash except for the zincs I did not resist digging. The big lesson is that deep Liberty nickels, or at least these two, were the most wonderful mellow 12 signals one could imagine. So my current working theory is newer nickels will tend towards 13 and older ones 12 while in Park 1 mode.

Mine will occasionally start out quiet or muffled, but I have never been able to determine with any certainty if it is a bug or caused by having the detector sitting on a target when engaging the pinpoint. Even if the coil is pulled aside there may be rejected trash targets under the coil. I guess I need to do experiments on ground I know to be free of targets to get to the bottom of this one. At worst I hit the pinpoint button a second time and everything is fine. In general my pinpointing with Equinox is great - if the target is good I am going to be spot on. Ferrous trash, that may throw me off.

There is a known bug in the User Profile system. Be sure and exit the User Profile mode before powering down the detector. There may be other associated glitches. Minelab is aware of it.

?? Released over a year ago. I used mine last summer. My toy list has gotten a lot shorter this spring as I shed excess detecting gear.

The flats are caused either by cheap tires or speeding or both. I have a 4Runner with a good set of Michelin steel belted radial tires, and stay at lower speeds like about 35 mph max. I have had one trailer tire pop but no vehicle tire failures in five years of driving out in that country. And I get way back in on some barely visible tracks.

I second that Dilek - please let us know about any events in the U.S. that are open to the public where Nokta/Makro will have a booth set up. I would certainly go out of my way to attend such an event if feasible.

Yes, the manufacturers read this forum and the other good ones also. I and some others report issues when we think they are real. Minelab is aware of what’s going on, and Equinox was designed to be able to have bug fixes issued at some point. No few testers can find them all and so it was almost inevitable a few bugs would get found once enough units are in the field. I am sure Minelab would like to make sure any such bug update is comprehensive rather than issue numerous updates to single issues. Long story short, there is no need for people to make special lists or efforts. Minelab already has one. If you personally are having a problem or what you think is a genuine bug, by all means report the issue to Minelab. There is no need to do anything other than that. Do not report bugs or issues to Minelab you are not personally experiencing. The last time I saw such a bug list thread attempted on a detector it just turned into a pile on list of issues real and imagined stirred with glee by trolls.

A well outfitted prospector!

Interesting.... well, good to know. I never use backlights myself. The only time I turned mine on was to shoot this photo set...

Yeah the problem being a strong arm can force a twist so there is an amount that is acceptable or not. Twist locks are only meant to hold a rod in place against normal detecting forces. It really does need to be obvious and pronounced. Hopefully Minelab does not get a bunch of false alarms over this but the fact is there are some people that really are having an issue, and if so a fix is available for those people. Reports on turnaround time have also been fantastic so far, which is good.

If you have not noticed it then it is very unlikely you have a problem - it is apparently rather pronounced. My main fear posting this thread was people who have not had an issue before now deciding they do (power of suggestion) so people do need to be sure and contact Minelab before doing anything. If anyone ever gets a firm line on how to diagnose the problem as being sufficient to justify Minelab replacing something let us all know. There must be something that measure out of specification that can be checked to verify the problem.

Welcome to the forum! Here is a recent thread on the subject.... plus some videos that might help... https://youtu.be/_Mlu1zwsdpo

Please provide links. This is not a forum that makes people play the “Google This” game. eBay link Brookmays EU Link

Yours sounds normal Vez. The Equinox as far as rods compares to other detectors in the comparable price and weight range. The CTX at triple the price and almost double the weight is built like a tank by comparison.

You must mean the 600? The 800 is adjustable to a pretty low level. I am still using the Minelab supplied screen protector since it is working but it does give a nice mirror flash of the sun at just the right angle. Sure not complaining though - nice touch for Minelab to include them