Mark Gillespie
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Posts posted by Mark Gillespie
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I will add one thing. If 1st Texas had released this machine 3 years ago it would have been more of a success, to little to late.
Now I'm sure the reason White's made a waterproof version of the TDI stemmed from the Manta video and realizing that someone would snatch onto this machine. Now that being said, if they, or someone can develop a PI machine that can do the nail trick with a silver coin, it will have a better chance of cornering the market. By what I've been told by engineers over the years, making a true PI machine with iron discrimination and I mean a PI that can discriminate iron and still respond to silver coins would be close to impossible.
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Me too, I hate to see them go under. Their machines have a superior audio function to say the least. When I had the Vaquero I could actually tell when the detector had found a pencil eraser metal tip. Amazing the clarity of the audio reports on the Tesoro machines.
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Not to be to critical but nothing new, my White's TDI SL does the same thing. In fact, I found the heaviest gold ring ever using the same technic while hunting carpet of nails.
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That is a valid point and yes it is very likely most of the machines detected the same targets. The ground in this area is littered with burnt coal waste and tends to skews the received signal. But one thing I can say about the Equinox, it has the most accurate ID of any machine I've ever had. It is amazing how good this machine actually is.
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Nothing new that I can see. My White's SL can perform the same audio responses. Like I said, nothing new that I can see. I can detect a gold ring and ignore nails too.
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The wiggle is defined by:
I find the target and kind of hover the coil over the center of where I think it is. You don't have to move the coil much, maybe 3-4" left and right, not real slow but fairly quick. I use the front of the coil many times on targets that are not super deep. Real neat how that works. I had never really given the wiggle technic much a chance until yesterday.
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Extreme enjoyment.
This might not seem like much but this small school (built in the late 30’s) has been hunted for over 10 years. With machines like the:
Tesoro Tejon
Garrett AT Pro
White’s DFX, V3i
Fisher F75 and LTD
Minelab Etrac, and CTX 3030
And now the Equinox 800
Countless hours hunting from three guys including myself. Now I will say we’ve found some nice stuff from this site over the past 10 years and we all thought it was cleaned out but surprise, it’s not, yea I know they never are. But I was not expecting this many nickels and some over 6” deep. Then the silver nickel at maybe 5” and tilted to maybe a 45 degree angle.
I will say this machine has a very good audio response but one has to listen and learn. I did the usual noise cancel and started off with park 1. I wasn’t really happy so I tried each of the park/field programs and ended back with park 1 with one change, I set the iron bias to 0. It didn’t take long and I knew this was the settings for the day. Numerous times I tried park 2 and the two field programs but it seemed like park 1 was the very best at both a good audio and stable ID on located buried targets. After a while I started wondering why these targets had been missed. Taking my time, I stared rotating around each target and I was quite amazed at how stable the audio/ID was. These were absolutely dig, dig signals, no doubts about it, with the exception of the silver nickel. If the silver had not given a double beep I might have walked away but I’m glad I didn’t. Well, toward the end of the hunt I purposely moved to the trashy area of the school and wow this machine, even with the 11” coil separates very well. I might add, the old Minelab wiggle I used with the Etac and explorer works with the Equinox too. Found a somewhat nice signal that I thought might be a nickel. Did the wiggle and marked the spot. Called my buddy over to check the spot. He gave no indication it could be a good target but at 5” comes another nickel (gave a solid ID of 13) and surrounded by heavy trash. Well, we had to leave and to be honest I felt sorry for him because he had not dug anything but trash. Now I’m beginning to wonder if I should buy the 6” coil and hit the trash again.
Extremely satisfied
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I so was needing additional information on the 6" coil. Thanks
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Wow, that's what like to see. I will find Canadian in change but I've dug one but I live in Virginia and that's a long way from your town.
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Awesome gold finds.
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I wonder if that would apply to huge pieces of quartz's too?
Most of the hills in area have outcrops of quartz.
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Wow, that being the case a person should check any huge pieces of bed rock when every they are hunting.
Wonderful story.
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Mankind's attitude to gold is bizarre. Chemically, it is uninteresting - it barely reacts with any other element. Yet, of all the 118 elements in the periodic table, gold is the one we humans have always tended to choose to use as currency. Why?
Why not osmium or chromium, or helium, say - or maybe seaborgium?
That's where I meet Andrea Sella, a professor of chemistry at University College London, beside an exquisite breastplate of pure beaten gold.
He pulls out a copy of the periodic table.
"Some elements are pretty easy to dismiss," he tells me, gesturing to the right-hand side of the table.
"Here you've got the noble gases and the halogens. A gas is never going to be much good as a currency. It isn't really going to be practical to carry around little phials of gas is it?
"And then there's the fact that they are colorless. How on earth would you know what it is?"
The two liquid elements (at everyday temperature and pressure) - mercury and bromine - would be impractical too. Both are also poisonous - not a good quality in something you plan to use as money. Similarly, we can cross out arsenic and several others.
Sella now turns his attention to the left-hand side of the table.
"We can rule out most of the elements here as well," he says confidently.
"The alkaline metals and earths are just too reactive. Many people will remember from school dropping sodium or potassium into a dish of water. It fizzes around and goes pop - an explosive currency just isn't a good idea."
A similar argument applies to another whole class of elements, the radioactive ones: you don't want your cash to give you cancer.
Out go thorium, uranium and plutonium, along with a whole bestiary of synthetically-created elements - rutherfordium, seaborgium, ununpentium, and einsteinium - which only ever exist momentarily as part of a lab experiment, before radioactively decomposing.
Then there's the group called "rare earths", most of which are actually less rare than gold.
Unfortunately, they are chemically hard to distinguish from each other, so you would never know what you had in your pocket.
This leaves us with the middle area of the periodic table, the "transition" and "post-transition" metals.
This group of 49 elements includes some familiar names - iron, aluminum, copper, lead, silver.
But examine them in detail and you realize almost all have serious drawbacks.
We've got some very tough and durable elements on the left-hand side - titanium and zirconium, for example.
The problem is they are very hard to smelt. You need to get your furnace up into the region of 1,000C before you can begin to extract these metals from their ores. That kind of specialist equipment wasn't available to ancient man.
Aluminum is also hard to extract, and it's just too flimsy for coinage. Most of the others in the group aren't stable - they corrode if exposed to water or oxidize in the air.
Take iron. In theory it looks quite a good prospect for currency. It is attractive and polishes up to a lovely sheen. The problem is rust: unless you keep it completely dry it is liable to corrode away.
"A self-debasing currency is clearly not a good idea," says Sella.
We can rule out lead and copper on the same basis. Both are liable to corrosion. Societies have made both into money but the currencies did not last, literally.
So, what's left?
Of the 118 elements we are now down to just eight contenders: platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, osmium and ruthenium, along with the old familiars, gold and silver.
These are known as the noble metals, "noble" because they stand apart, barely reacting with the other elements.
They are also all pretty rare, another important criterion for a currency.
Even if iron didn't rust, it wouldn't make a good basis for money because there's just too much of it around. You would end up having to carry some very big coins about.
With all the noble metals except silver and gold, you have the opposite problem. They are so rare that you would have to cast some very tiny coins, which you might easily lose.
They are also very hard to extract. The melting point of platinum is 1,768C.
That leaves just two elements - silver and gold.
Both are scarce but not impossibly rare. Both also have a relatively low melting point, and are therefore easy to turn into coins, ingots or jewelry.
Silver tarnishes - it reacts with minute amounts of Sulphur in the air. That's why we place particular value on gold.
It turns out then, that the reason gold is precious is precisely that it is so chemically uninteresting.
Gold's relative inertness means you can create an elaborate golden jaguar and be confident that 1,000 years later it can be found in a museum display case in central London, still in pristine condition.
So what does this process of elemental elimination tell us about what makes a good currency?
First off, it doesn't have to have any intrinsic value. A currency only has value because we, as a society, decide that it does.
As we've seen, it also needs to be stable, portable and non-toxic. And it needs to be fairly rare - you might be surprised just how little gold there is in the world.
If you were to collect together every earring, every gold sovereign, the tiny traces gold in every computer chip, every pre-Columbian statuette, and every wedding ring and melt it down, it's guesstimated that you'd be left with just one 20-metre cube, or thereabouts.
But scarcity and stability aren't the whole story. Gold has one other quality that makes it the stand-out contender for currency in the periodic table. Gold is... golden.
All the other metals in the periodic table are silvery-colored except for copper - and as we've already seen, copper corrodes, turning green when exposed to moist air. That makes gold very distinctive.
"That's the other secret of gold's success as a currency," says Sella. "Gold is unbelievably beautiful."
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Rings are so nice?
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They have taken the original youtube video of the Aqua Manta down. I've had the youtube site ear marked since they first made the beach video and it is now gone.
It was very interesting to see the machine work on the beach but no more.
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1 hour ago, Steve Herschbach said:
I of course buy all my gear from Alaska Mining & Diving Supply
They are super, did just what they said.
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Awesome silvers, never, never dug a half dime.
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1 hour ago, phrunt said:
I can say for a fact the 6" coil on the Equinox is deeper than the T2 with 5" coil which is almost your F75 ? . I do quite a lot of side by side testing of my detectors when playing around learning them and comparing them. I have a target in the Park across the road from my house, I'm 100% certain it's a NZ $1 or $2 coin and it seems to be at pretty good depth, the depth meter on my Euroace says 20+ CM's, and it maxes out the depth meter on the T2 and Equinox also. The T2 won't see it at all with the 5" coil even in all metal with max sensitivity, only with the Mars Tiger which is 10x13" and even the the Target ID is all over the place only showing the 78/79 it should be very randomly. The Equinox gets the target with the 6" but the ID's not outstanding but enough to assume it's probably a coin, with the 11" the ID is a perfect solid 21/22 only straying sometimes at certain angles which is what it should be for a $1 or $2 coin. Interestingly if I change out of MultiIQ onto any of the other frequencies the Target ID is no longer so stable.
I will eventually dig up this coin one day to make sure I'm right about it being a coin but the Equinox, GBP and Ace have made me very confident it's the coin I think it is, even the GBP only sees it with the 13" ultimate coil, no smaller coil sees it but it gets a more accurate ID on it with that coil than the T2 does with the Tiger coil, it's ID on the Bug is pretty good on max sensitivity as you lower the sensitivity it goes from getting a ID favoring the 78/79 it should be down to as low as an ID of 60 before the signal fades away as the sensitivity lowers.
In case you can't decipher my rambling, the 6" is deeper than the 5" for the T2 by far, but still not a match for the 11" stock coil in depth/ID accuracy in my mild soils around here.
Thanks for your input. I'll consider. Actually the only reason I'm keeping the F75 is for the small coil.
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1 hour ago, Steve Herschbach said:
It sounds like the test coin must not be available for you to test. Or do you not have a 6" coil yet Mark and are looking to find out if it possibly exceeds what that F75 and 5" combo could do?
I can't really say personally as I have not used the 6" much in parks and when I have I have not been comparing to any other detector. I like mine well enough I picked up a second one on my last trip to Alaska. Mainly to test 6" against 6" on tiny gold with the two firmware versions we have so far but that has been low on the priority list.
You are correct I have not got the 6" coil as of yet.
I hate to sink money in a coil that will be no better than the F75, 5" coil
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Has there been any updates on using this small coil in a trashy park area?
My main concern is a combination of depth and speed. I'm sure the speed is there with the Equinox but depth on this small coil is a question.
Being a fact that a 6 1/2" dime is a common occurrence in my area, depth is a must and I'll give an example.
Years ago I bought and still have the 5" DD coil for my Fisher F75 LTD. I can easily max out the machine and can only get a slightest peep on my 6 1/2" dime that has been undisturbed for over 10 years and that is in fairly clean ground.
I would guess the 6" coil could obtain more depth than a 5" just out of reason.
Any experiences with this would be appreciated.
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Been thinking a lot about this new machine. Reading the description and comparing it to my TDI SL it seems the machine only has three present advantages, well it was three, now two. The Manta can sample to 7 micro seconds and the White’s TDI can sample at 10. Now that might not sound like much but 7 allows the smaller stuff to be heard before going silent if running at 10 micro seconds. The other market advantage was to be the water proof feature, but since White’s released a water proof version of the Sl that advantage is gone. Now we’re back to only two market advantages for the Manta, well unless 1st Texas is holding a trump card of a feature. Or when White’s released the water proof version they, 1st Texas decided to add another feature to excel the competition which might explain the official delay of this new machine. The other advantage will be in the weight/balance advantage and everyone knows 1st Texas makes some very ergonomic machines. The manta coming in from 1.6 – 1.8 kg which amounts to somewhere between 3.5 and 4 lbs. Verses the SL at 5.2 lbs which now offers an option to detach the control box and hip mount the unit which greatly reduces the weight issue. Now in comparison of price, the TDI at $1300 and the Manta at $2100 I wonder, just how many will spend the additional $800 for the Manta. And I might add, after watching the Manta video on You Tube, where the machine could silence iron yet still see the gold, my SL can do the very same thing.
I think the release of this machine has taken way to long and their procrastination will cost them on this machine. But, that’s just my thoughts, time will tell.
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I might add one thing Dan. I've had the Equinox for 14 months and have attempted to justify using the single frequency over the multi option. I've purposely hunted the hard, masked and deeper targets just to compare the single frequency to the multi option. Wanting to see if the audio or ID was better and can say the multi-frequency has never been trumped by any of the single frequency options. I've never had a machine that has satisfied me for long periods of time, until the Equinox. Several years ago I had the Etrac and Explorer and they did very well where I live but dang it, they were just to heavy. To finalize, I presently prefer the Equinox on every outing, it's light, extremely fast in recovering between targets and has the most accurate ID of any machine I've had in the past 20+ years.☺️
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On 3/17/2019 at 8:25 PM, Dan(NM) said:
I've been playing around with running 5Khz just to see if maybe I'd get a hit on some deep copper or silver in an old zoo that's finally playing out. The first time I did this I got 5-6 nice repeatable hits in a spot that I have beat to death with the CTX. All targets were deep and hitting in the mid 20's, every one was a ring tab. I had my disc set from -9 to +18, which made didn't make sense that I was getting a hit on the tab. Every one of them that I checked out of the hole would not register a positive signal. The second time I tried the same setup, 5 Khz, same disc settings, I decided to test the hits in multi IQ, nothing, not a peep. When I went back to 5Khz, there they were, loud and clear, same targets, ring tabs.
I was thinking to myself, that, possibly, I might get a hit on some deep nickles running 5Khz without having to listen to all the mid tones. Well, today, I do the same thing, only this time, I had just made a pass with the CTX over this spot and didn't get a good repeatable signal. Low and behold, I get a solid 28-32 both ways and dig a 6" plug and out pops a nickle ? At first I'm thinking its a war nickle due to the high numbers, but, nope, just a plain Jefferson. I pass the coil over it, nothing, not a peep, notta.
Any idea's as to what's going on here, I don't think it's a bad thing, just a bit weird I thought.
Dan, my machine will do the same thing. I tried park 1 and field 1 and I get the same results. Discriminated out -9 to 18, no audio in multi-frequency but good repeatable audio in 5 Khz . with ID's anywhere from 22 to 28 and that is on a 6 1/2" nickel. Not bad but strange to say the least. I might reset the detector to the original firmware and see what happens.
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What firmware version is on the machine?
Fisher Impulse AQ Video - Zts® Zero Target Separation
in First Texas - Bounty Hunter, Fisher & Teknetics
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Very valid points you have there. The quicker pulse delay will be a game changer if...... like you say it delivers the quieter/deeper detection of beaches for lost gold.