Cal_Cobra

As you said, not the first (the first was almost ten years earlier in Southern California), but it was the catalyst that began the great expansion to the western frontier.

Going after the ice in micro mode, hope they're real 👍 BTW I suspect serious work has been done to better mitigate EMI on both the D2 and the L. I wonder if they haven't leveraged some sort of DST technology.

A few years ago at a San Francisco park scrape, I got a seriously wonky signal on my Racer2. It was big, not a can big but spread out, trying to size it was difficult, it sounded good'ish but it was seriously funky. I dug the target to uncover a piece of larger gauge copper wire probably deposited from the 1906 Earthquake refugee camp times. Imagine a wire coat hanger unraveled and twisted into a distorted quasi figure eight shape. As I pulled it out, I was like, no wonder the signal was so funky. Imagine my surprise when I re-scanned where I'd just pulled the wire from and got a banging 90's signal that turned out to be a Barber quarter. That was a great park scrape.

Interesting you suggest EMI. The "L" was VERY quite when I spent an entire day with it detecting various sites and parks in San Francisco. One spot was specifically selected due to it's high concentration of EMI which forces one to drop the sensitivity on the EQX to the mid teens for any kind of stability, but you loose the depth required to get to silver coins. The day I tested the EQX, I had to reduce its sensitivity to 17 to be usable, whereas the L could run at 28-30 and remain stable, quite even, sometimes to the point of "tap tap is this thing on?" moments and I'd run it over the eyelets in my boots to make sure it was running, and it always was 🙂

Thanks, it's really interesting that White's certainly had the engineering power and resources to innovate, even up until the very end. Glad you pushed them to drive the 24K to completion, and thank god they didn't eek out another MX regurgitation 🙂 @Nokta DetectorsXGB is well worth investigating 👍

Did you try a factory reset on it (see the manual for instructions)?

PI detectors are way outside of my wheelhouse. Does iron reject actually work? I never hear of people taking a PI machine with iron reject to a ghost town or stage stop?

I'm not a prospector, but I pop into the prospecting forum from time to time to admire the finds and such. Reading this thread is quite interesting. I'm primarily a relic hunter and some of my sites have really tough ground, I have one desert stage stop in a sea of alkali soils that cause machines fits to GB at. I've found I have to use beach mode at some of these sites on the EQX to handle the alkali soils. Wouldn't the XGB ground balance technology work wonders at relic sites with difficult soil conditions as well (alkali soils, red volcanic grounds like Culpepper, etc)? Could this be incorporated into a SMF detector?

I've had the Red Racer, Racer 2, Impact, and MMK and they all had a rich selection of both factory, as well as after market coils. I don't see why the Legend will be any different, Dilek said they're happy to work with 3rd part coil vendors, as long as it made sense for both parties. She also ran a poll on their Facebook page to sequester polling on the most requested coils for the Legend. I see a 6x10 closed loop elliptical DD coming 🙂

I've used a variety of Nokta Makro machines over the years (I put a LOT of time on the Racers, Impact and MMK), they all had a degree of "hold my beer" wow factor to them, they just worked despite how I set them up. They minimize the in the weeds user adjustments for under the hood options we didn't have to twiddle, and they did a darn good job of bringing home the goods. It's natural to try to compare the Legend to the EQX, but lets suppose for a moment that it's the same, yet different 🤔

Steve you bring up some interesting points with the size vs conductivity discussion. Although I started park hunting, I mainly relic hunt these days. I run my EQX in F2 not because it's supposed to be hotter on a certain type of metal, but because it's more sensitive to smaller targets. This opens up a lot of types of targets as well as targets on the fringe/edge/etc. But if it's more about target size vs conductivity, in theory using the Gold modes on the EQX vs Park or Relic modes for relic sites should work better eh 🤔 The college of hard knocks taught me that the only test that really matters on a detector is that detector in your hands at your sites. There's no such thing as inert soil in California or Nevada where I enjoy detecting. Inert Florida soil doesn't tell us much out here about how a detector will operate in the field. It's a bit akin to the nail board test, it's one metric we like to see our detectors pass, but it's only one of an endless variety of variables we're up against.

Perhaps they're fueling up their plane for their big splash at Detectival 🤔

They were entertaining, I used to call them "Ringy & Dingy". I think their finds were genuine (not salted), I didn't care as much for the one that did the stupid crazy dances when he found something (which half the time was junk), he climbed trees and jumped off rocks and other goofy things when he made [in his mind] a good find haha There are areas of wagon trails I'd like to check out for a variety of reasons. Historical citations of high traffic wagon trails during major events (gold rush for example), talk about tens of thousands of travelers, with wagons stacked up at bottlenecks (river crossings for example). Also many times in historical citations when wagons would arrive at hospitable environments (water and grass for live stalk) especially after traversing difficult environments, they tended to camp to recuperate, make repairs, and revive their animals. Generally not all together, but for sure they reused camp sites from previous travelers. Detecting wagon trails in high traffic areas has proven to pork out finds, but it can also aid in revealing undocumented camp sites or seasonal trading posts, which can be rewarding.

It's funny how many water bottles I have collected from trade shows and other events. Everyone want's to give you one, aluminum, plastic, even glass, I can't give them away fast enough, even family members are like "no thanks, we're good" haha The only [new] ones I keep now are things like Yeti's or something cool/clever. If I found a Yeti in good shape, I'd probably autoclave it and call it a day 🙂

I know of a couple of other 1916D Mercury dimes that've been dug around here, 1909-S VDB wheat cents show up. People who embrace the history, and appreciate the historical context their finds represent, they understand it. I never sell my finds, so it's not about the $ but it sure feels great to dig a high value target 👍

There's areas at at this site that have almost zero modern influence/targets/trash, but if you wonder towards civilization more modern junk shows up, but mixed in with the oldies. Yes that's the one! That barber dime was spent at Golden Gate Park and could've just as easily been lost there. Local legend says it was, I don't know. I saw that Pawn Stars with the unreadable date barber, what a joker haha Our history doesn't go back as far, but as coins go we're lucky to find a high number of San Francisco and Carson City minted coins, a lot of the 1800's ones were good ones. I've been blessed to dig some rare dates, 1916D Mercury dime, dozens of semi-key date seateds and barbers, two rare date/mint gold coins, a "less then 100 known" per PCGS seated quarter. Then there's the relics 🙂 I love this hobby, every conductor is a lottery ticket!

Thanks Cal 👍

I came to the same conclusion after I compared a bunch of targets. I think it will be a good coil, it'll come out the next time I'm hunting a busy site.

Nice powder flasks!! With all those finds, there has to be coins and/or tokens there.

Wanted to watch Dig Fellas, but it's not available anywhere. The detecting program from the UK was great, although it was fictional.

Any Medieval gold coin would be any detectorists home run, but this guy won the lottery!! It's interesting that penny and cent are not the same thing. Even though they are commonly incorrectly called pennies in the United States, we have never used pennies here since instituting our currency standard, as our currency system is based on the Spanish dollar aka pieces of eight.

I think that flask may have slipped out of my pocket haha 🥃 So what's the ruie for repurposing these in a Covid world? If it wasn't sketchy before, is it now? 🤔 Just asking for a friend...

Love the watch fob!! If you only have to walk to the sites to get that, imagine what must be in short driving distance?

You could certainly be right. They sure screamed like silver, but they're not marked. We've had good success doing this at a mid-1800's stage stop, we're actually to the point that you have to clear brush if you want new dirt to detect. If I were wealthy I'd hire a landscaping crew to remove all the sagebrush under the guise of "fire protection" haha Thanks El. BTW according to my notes the tracker you ordered is the basic model, if you want to track Tom, you'll need to upgrade to the Deluxe model 🙂 Thank you, every high conductor there could be "the one" haha Love digging the earliest history we can reach. Thanks, it's nice to get a out a little. I've never found a button hook, maybe Tom has. Kind of surprising as I'm sure they were in high use, but maybe not in these early frontier sites. Given they mostly came in by ship, no stores or trading posts existed yet, they probably brought a minimal amount of necessities. I would envision those as a later western era industrial revolution era type of item (1880's+), but I've never found one hunting ghost towns before where it seems like something like this could be found. Neat find really. If you're going to dream, dream big! A coin like that would be awesome. It's funny, I forget the year, but the director or some other such employee at the San Francisco mint gave his daughter a barber dime at the Children's Playground at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and she spent it on an ice cream. It was one of something like 15 known to exist type barber dimes, basically the holy grail of barber dimes. So who knows what's waiting to be dug up. I've been fortunate to dig two gold coins, and both were rare dates/mints, one's an example of less then 100 known to exist (according to PCGS). You gotta love that, that's what keeps us going in this hobby 🙂 The button is in pretty good shape. I cleaned it with Naval Jelly to remove the crud and then hit it w/lemon juice to clean up any remaining gold gilt. It came out pretty good, still a lot of gold gilt left on the front. Some sites out here have nice sandy loamy arid soil, and as long as there's not farming or animal pasturing going on, a lot of targets come out of the ground looking like they were just lost. We have an area like that where the targets mostly come out in beautiful condition, but down the road is a stage stop in a cattle pasture, been cattle there for over 100 years, silver coins tend to come out in poor condition.