Steve Herschbach

http://www.prospectorshovel.com/

It happens more than you think. Fishing poles and golf clubs. My business partner it was boats! What person passionate about anything would not like a chance to better improve the products they themselves use?

The rucksack pulls to the side a little as can kind of be seen in the photo, but not much. The interconnection between the two straps alleviates most of that as does a good fit. My arm is bearing some of the load in uneven ground. I sometimes hook the thumb of my right hand in the right strap and pull a bit in the other direction. But all in all that little hydro pack has served me very well the last three years. I bought a second one just to make sure I have another when the first gives out. I am getting older with the aches and pains that come with age. Pulled a leg muscle last year overextending on a climb into a canyon. So I am looking for lighter detectors. I fully agree that people should look after themselves as best they can. I do that by roaming the hills with my detector instead of sitting on a couch with a beer in my hand. I may wear my body out detecting but better that than letting it go to hell doing nothing. My Nugget Detecting Kit

Wow. I don’t use the harness. It’s new in the bag also. I bungee to my rucksack strap. I set my bungee so my detector floats. I push the it back and forth and what little weight there is left rides on the ground. I hunt full days and at most my shoulder gets a little sore. Probably get between 400 - 500 hours per year detecting. I do think when using the GPZ 19 for a week last summer it was a bit much, and the hip stick would have been a good idea to have taken the load off my shoulder. I just turned 60 and appear to be doing just fine. But thanks for your concern.

0 is just the default ground balance setting for Equinox like 90 is for Deus. In lower mineral ground it’s fine - the ground balance is pretty forgiving in low to moderate ground. In higher mineral ground you need to ground balance it. It does not hurt to ground balance if you wish UNLESS there is almost no ground mineralization. Then the ground balance has nothing to grab or track to, in which case the default is best. Ground balancing in salt environments can cause a loss of sensitivity to smaller gold and again, if there is no real mineral content to the sand, like in Florida, the ground balance may be unreliable. I almost always hunt in high mineral ground therefore I almost always ground balance via the auto or ground grab pumping method. I rarely use tracking unless ground is extremely variable. You can use your detector to experiment with test targets in your own ground to determine what works best for you.

You did great!

I like the Extreme Scoop... may have to get one.

Mine is new in the bag.

That might be a fair price with the extras but considering a new full warranty GPX 4500 is $2699 anything over $2K might be a stretch. People price out the detector and extras rarely add very much. I am currently selling a huge package deal Garrett ATX with three extra coils and lots more, and I espect to get next to nothing for the extras. I basically am too lazy to try and part it out trying to eke a couple hundred more out of it considering the extra legwork and fees in multiple sales. My best advice is start high and bring it down until it sells. I do that a lot on the Classifieds here since listing is free.

I have tried a couple but so far the main problem is not power but depth of field. They work great for flat items but something like a gold nugget is very hard to get all in focus. My digital camera actually does a better job most of the time. For most stuff you don’t want too much magnification. 10x - 30x is usually fine.

That’s cheating, F-Pulse and Tek-Point are the same pinpointer!

Typical trade. The holes have to be smaller than the smallest object you want to retain, but too small impedes quick sifting. I lean towards heavy mesh over drilled holes for smaller hole sizes as the greater number of openings helps offset the smaller hole size. And then durability raises its ugly head. For sand lighter duty sieves are ok but in the rocky stuff it has to be extra stout. No real answer really, just the compromise that works best for you. My favorite scoop is heavy stainless steel with 3/8” square holes. Old model sold by Keene years ago, very hard to find.

Actually I hated all the delicate little charging do-dads with Deus and most definitely do not want a rechargeable coil when I can have a wired one for half the price. I agree however that one should only mention why a machine is good without dragging other detectors into the discussion. It invites defensive blowback. I think you missed the point on CTX. You have to remove the battery at least every couple days to charge, which vastly increases the risk of a bit of dirt or misaligned gasket causing a problem. It is not that both units use gaskets. That’s a given. It’s the need to constantly break the gasket seal versus one that is left alone that makes the difference. Equinox also employs a double oring seal versus the single gasket on CTX. And at the end of the day if I have to kill a detector in saltwater, far better to kill a $900 detector than a $2500 one!

Absolutely - ground balance settings affect bump sensitivity.

Don't worry about it - you can't overcharge Equinox by leaving it plugged in.

Some people have more money than sense. And right when we will probably see a bunch of 800s appear in the next two weeks.

Yeah, talk about hidden in plain sight!

Bump sensitivity has already been discussed at length on this forum which is why I asked about it. Main culprit - reducing recovery speed too much. Thanks for the link!

Yeah, I am done with shovels into sluice boxes etc. Metal detecting is the only way I find gold from here on out. I spent decades doing all the dredging and other stuff. Great memories but been there, done that. Time to clear it all out.

Good gosh, there are many people who are better detectorists than I am! Seriously, I am no wizard. I basically cheat by putting in huge hours, talking about the good days, and forgetting to mention the bad! Good photographers don’t take perfect pictures every time. They take a zillion pictures and toss all but the best ten. That’s my secret to successful detecting. Hours, lots of them. I like to think of myself as a student of metal detecting. The day I can’t learn from others is the day I die. A person simply asking a question I don’t know the answer to triggers my learning process. I don’t have all the answers - I just chase them down when people ask, and then we both learn something. My favorite line at work... “I don’t know, but I will find out and get back to you.” Pretty grand when you think about it. So thank you all - you help me in more ways than you know.

You have probably already seen it Scott. Find a deep target and test, and increasing recovery speed causes almost no discernible loss of depth. The target sound gets shorter, but that is about it until you get to 8, where it can shorten out of existence. In my ground anyway lowering recovery speed adds no depth worth noting but significantly increases the risk of masking. In my opinion any extra targets gained by any minimal depth increase at lower recovery speeds is vastly outweighed by the risk of targets lost due to masking. In bad ground a lower recovery speed increases ground noise, again making any real useable depth gain debatable. In my worst ground (and it’s Really bad) I am just not seeing it. More to the point, aren’t people trying to pull targets out of ground already pounded with BBS/FBS detectors? If so, then where is the reason in trying to turn Equinox into BBS/FBS if those machines have already been used and can find no more? Remaining targets, if any exist, will be there due to masking. Even ground with low trash still has trash and that trash can mask stuff. And there really is more to Multi-IQ than just speed and masking. I can’t put my finger on it but I know it’s there. It sees stuff other machines don’t see, plain and simple as that. People really need to let Equinox be Equinox. Trust that the defaults are close to what you really want, no matter what, for at least the first week or two. Immediately dropping to recovery speed 1 or 2 when the default is 6 and the user has no prior experience with the machine is really just kind of nuts. I think most poor results people are having is trying to outthink the engineers. Trust me, they are way, way smarter than any of us when it comes to what makes Multi-IQ tick and what settings are best.

I would like to thank Minelab for showing me the trust they did in allowing me wide latitude in creating this forum and running with the ball. It has been a genuine honor to have been involved in my own tiny way in this project. Thanks gents - you know who you are.

That is not how things work. There are different types of “testers”. Most so-called testers are people given units that are basically completed. They are kind of a last minute check on things looking for bugs, and are commonly the people you see yakking it up about new detectors when they first come out since they are the first people to have detectors in hand. I have done this sort of thing myself. Then there are the people that are working with engineering early on during the true product development phase. These people often never reveal themselves. If they do, they are usually bound by non-disclosure agreements that in general prevent them from revealing anything learned during that phase forever more. Every bit of what went on and how is proprietary information. No company publicizes this phase with only one exception I can think of ever - Nokta and the Impact via Tom Dankowskis released notes. That was a one off exception and even then may have been a detector mostly finished in all the important aspects. Anything else you ever thought you saw at any point was most assuredly of the first type described above. Lest anyone think I am making all this up here is an excellent essay on the subject by Dave Johnson at First Texas - About Field Testing. Long story short if that is what you are waiting for you will be waiting a very, very long time.

Nice!