Randy Dee

12 minutes ago, Cal_Cobra said:

Why would you want to make an Equinox sound like a CTX when it's not?

Gordon is only giving this information as an option for use not as a must use, it is just a case of like what Mitchel wrote to me the tone setting is just like one does when setting up the "Base & Treble" tones on a stereo to ones own preferences.

The CTX-3030 has the ability to utilize the tones to ones own likes and so does the Equinox, both machines great tones.

2 hours ago, Relics&Bones said:

"why would you take someone's settings that are being used on a different continent" Because there are quite a few on this continent using it with success. I posted to see if there were folks here w/experience that could advise me on what I might be doing wrong. Isn't that part of the reason for the forum?

Welcome aboard,

As Steve has said other peoples settings which they have setup on their own soil type and location is of very little use on other soil types (Land or Sea Shore), from what I can make out from your first post you are in the States ie. on an iron infested colonial site  as we don't have colonial sites here in the UK and Neil who I have met does not encounter iron infested fields like your location so for a start his "Iron Bias" setting would not be of any help for your detecting situation and Neil runs all of his detectors on full throttle (Sky High Sensitivity) and no "Discrimination" and he doesn't do much beach detecting if any.

To find your best settings for your Equinox, first of all read the manual to learn what influence each of the settings can make to gain the best settings for your present location / land type, you may find that the main controls the Noise Cancel, the Ground Balance, the Sensitivity, the Discrimination, the Response and the Iron Bias settings when tuned correctly will make the detecting in your location more pleasurable and quiet.

Good Hunting      Randy Dee

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49 minutes ago, Dick Stout said:

I have never met Steve but have heard nothing but great things. The responses to my Q&A and the comments here only reinforce that. You have a lot of friends Steve and they have a lot of respect for you. Thanks for all you do.....

Hello Dick

Great words about a great man.

Good to see you in here and welcome aboard.

Well done Richard plenty of finds there.

Another good session with the Nox, stick with it.

Here in the UK the internet broad band providers are using wireless microwave mini dish transmitters to provide broad band connection to remote farms, the dishes are mounted close to the main telephone lines on the main highway and I have been detecting on the fields close to the relay dish for many years but this spring time my Equinox and my mates Deus was going berserk and it was then that I noticed the newly installed microwave relay dish, we had to vacate the fields as the noise was unbearable, I later tried my CTX-3030 on the same fields and the noise was the same.

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Welcome aboard me old pal it is always great to see some of the old timers posting with their masses of experience in this great hobby.

As I have stated earlier in this thread I bought one of the first of this Nox telescopic rods and I can honestly say that mine has not given me the slightest problem in use, no wobbling no twisting absolutely nothing to give me concern and I use it twice a week for eight hour detecting sessions in corn stubble so I speak as I find, an excellent and good value bit of kit.

I bought the very first one released to customers direct from my good friend Tony Hunt here in the UK, and in all honesty his Tele-Nox fully collapsible carbon shaft is a top notch bit of kit and worth every penny, when collapsed down will fit direct in a back pack.

1 hour ago, Nuke em said:

But Minelab isn't looking to cater for people wanting a Nox or that price range. They are looking to cater for people wanting a better than starter machine and rip into the Ace 300/ 400 market I think.

The Terra is old and needs replacement so I still feel that's the Vanquish is that and will be in the £300 to £550 price range . 

If it can mix what the Terra can do and what the Nox can do in the surf well enough , it will eat Garretts for breakfast .

We'll see.

Richard you are 100% correct in what you say about the Vanquish being brought to the market to compete with and supersede the low end Garrett detectors with two models priced just as you say.

The Vanquish to compete with the lower end detectors is much the same as what Minelab did when bringing out the Equinox to compete against the XP Deus.

There was a recent Europian Minelab distributor meeting in the Netherlands where the Minelab Vanquish was the purpose of the meeting and general discussion and although all attendees were sworn to secrecy it looks like a few are singing like canaries.

The idea of having longer battery life for the Equinox or for that matter any other metal detector for use here in the UK is because unlike the USA we have 3 & 4 day metal detecting rallies and at it for 8 -9 hours each day and most of the participants do not have any means of charging their batteries.  Steve has been over here detecting in these events and will most likely appreciate the battery charging nightmare.

For the guys looking for extra battery life for the Equinox, I have copied a post from the MLO forum where my good friend Tony Hunt here in the UK is financing the production of a new RNB double life lithium battery for the Equinox, see his comments below.

He intends to ship this battery worldwide.

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Extra battery life for the Equinox.

Well done Mitchel very nice indeed.

Very nice finds there Mitchel.

3 hours ago, Cal_Cobra said:

Great history save!  The condition is incredible for a 1st century BC find.

Almost all Celtic and Bronze-age bronze artifacts found in the UK are found in excellent condition especially the Bronze-age axe and spearhead hoards.

A few months back I posted an artifact of mine from the Celtic / Romano British period which is a Celtic Horse Harness Attachment.

 Here below is another of my Bronze-age finds it is a Socketed Spearhead which has not been finished or sharpened I found this along with the bronze ingot which had been previously attached to the spearhead, both found together.

52 minutes ago, Maximus said:

What metal do you suspect it is made of?

Bronze as in the     " it is a 1st Century B.C. Celtic bronze "Eye type" toggle cloak fastener".

3 hours ago, Natew1214 said:

Steve Have you ever heard of this problem and tell me if you think you know what it is... I have a Equinox 600 and I got vdi issues where I will be swinging the Detector hit a signal and then not want to dig that and keep swinging and it will show another vdi and then freezes up while I'm still swinging and then -- will show and then after six seconds or so 00 and then go again and same thing and I have turned sensitivity to 20, recovery speed 3 iron bias 2 and ground balance on auto tracking.... I also will swing over a vdi and it will jump and lower and jump and lower. And on pinpointer mode it sometimes won't have audio but I back out and try again it does. This is for sure a bug. Right?

Please don't panic as what you are describing may be caused by your own settings and very dependent to what Mode you are using and one of your settings which I believe may not help is you are using "Tracking Ground Balance" this has caused me to be concerned in the past when I was tempted to use it and one thing which I had noticed was my Equinox 800 would give off a slight spitting signal and the VDI numbers would move all over the show and then I would lose all audio but when I moved away  then returned of the previous signal zone I would go through the same annoyance again and it was only after I had started to dig in the area of the dubious signal and using my pinpointer probe I actually found a hammered silver cut quarter penny and this was identical when trying to gain a repeat signal from very small hammered silver coins, it was my own perseverance to eliminate this audio problem that I realised all of the misbehaving cured when I reverted to "Manual Ground Balance" with the head away from the signal source and remaining in "Manual GB" and all of the problems were coming about through my detector being in the "Tracking GB" setting as the more i moved the coil over the weak signal the more the Equinox was Ground Balancing out the signal and eventually no audio.

Hope you get the Equinox sorted soon and it is worth trying Manual GB.

Thanks All for your kind replies.

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I have had my Equinox 800 1 year this week and yesterday Sunday 10th February I celebrated with an extremely rare Celtic find from the period 100 BC (Over 2,000 years old) it is a 1st Century B.C. Celtic bronze "Eye type" toggle cloak fastener. Main body shaped like a human eye with a large bulbous pupil, the loop on the back would have once been stitched to the garment, It would function much in the same way that toggle fasteners on duffle jackets do.

To all of the Happy Equinox users I wish you all A Merry Christmas & A Happy New Year from the UK.

I hope you all get the Christmas Presents which you all are hoping for.

Good Hunting

Randy Dee

10 hours ago, amergin said:

My current settings

I am running Field 2, 5 tones , recovery speed 6/7, no iron bias and all metal on sens 20

I drop sensitivity to 15 and go over again

When referring Iron, I am talking about primally Nails at colonial cellar holes

With your current settings your Equinox will for ever give falsing on iron as first of all you don't have any BIAS against iron set your "Iron Bias" to 3 or 4 and back off a bit on your "Recovery Speed" to 3 or 4 and work your coil sweeps slightly slower you should then be able to have a higher "Sensitivity" setting of 18 - 20.

And unless you want to hunt for small iron relics and nails whilst using 5 tones, in "Tone Break 1" which is -9 to 2   turn down the " Tone Volume" to 1 and the "Tone Pitch" to 1.

Hope this solves your 6" coil problem.

Myself and my Equinox user friend David Hopper and his son Kevin went onto one of my Roman field permissions on Sunday 4th November with both David and myself using the new 15" coils, we were both very impressed with the performance of this coil and the results were very much like what Gordon Heritage had stated in this months Searcher magazine we were impressed with both the depth and signal quality from deep extremely small finds and we had Roman Minims around the 6" - 8" depth mark, I had 22 and David had 8 and these coins were as thin as paper and the size of your little finger nail.

The highlight of the day was when Kevin and myself watched David digging a pit to recover his signal from his very rare Roman Vesparsian silver Denarius 69 - 79AD,   I said to him are you digging for a grave we had tried both machines over the signal and David recovered his find at around a foot deep (His Pinpointer + 4").

One thing which we both noticed was that we had to turn down the "Sensitivity" 2 or 3 notches to quieten down the ground chatter even though we were carrying out manual "Ground Balancing" it could have been caused by the sheer volume of ground coverage and feedback with a large coil very similar to the CTX-3030 17" coil and the wet soil conditions wouldn't have helped.

The weight is very light for a big coil that I didn’t give it much thought all day and that is from an almost 76 year old. It pinpoints with the greatest of ease. To  my experience, the 15” Coil is a great addition to the Equinox coil armoury. It is a a great coil to turn to if you have large open fields especially pasture to hunt with moderate trash and just like we proved it is very capable to find the small items at a great depth, on my Roman fields there is next to nothing other than Roman coins and artifacts to be found but on my other permissions where I find the abundance of Medieval hammered silvers I can see this 15" coil hitting the small hammered silver farthings, half pennies, whole hammered silvers and cut quarters & cut halves.

Myself and David were detecting close together and using Kevins coil photographs I believe there is a lesson to be learnt why I am hitting more signals and resulting finds than David and I have mentioned the cause to David in the past and for the uninitiated take a look at Davids coil it is dry and clean whereas mine is muddy and wet and following advice from Neil Jones ( Slow & Low ) always keep your coil flat on the ground like ironing the soil because detectors don't like air between the coil and the soil, David always swings his coil 2" - 3" inches above ground level, on the previous visit to this field with David we both worked the same area and again I had 22 Roman coins and David had 10, like Neil has said before if you are not going through 2 - 3 coil covers a year it shows you are not utilizing the coil sweep correctly to achieve maximum detection depth, which makes sense.

That will have to do for my observations of the 15" coil.

Good Hunting

Randy

Today I got a delivery of mine and friend David H 15" X 12" Equinox coils, I will be out detecting tomorrow and giving mine a bash.

Steve

What a great article which is a complete account of your detecting enjoyment armed with the Equinox 800.

Thanks for sharing your wonderful detecting holiday experience in our Gods country England, what you encountered is the type of detecting I do twice a week here in the UK and have done for the past 42 years.

Don't get over disappointed with not finding a Gold Stater because it is one coin which I have not found myself, I have found the Celtic Silver units and the Celtic bronze core type but the gold ones have eluded me.

Good Hunting

Randy Dee

Durham, UK.

21 hours ago, Andy2640 said:

LOL - What the heck was that in the video??  A brooch, a gold mirror?

Andy

You must go on youtube and watch the 3 separate series of "The Detectorists" the programmes portray the metal detecting  on the humorous side here in the UK at first it seems a bit on the "Train Spotting" type of show but it grows on you .

I have attached a photograph of the gold Ecleasticle Staff Jewel which the lads had found and is identical to an original find now on display in the Ashmolean Museum.

Here below is a link to the full story about the Alfred Jewel found in Somerset 1693.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Jewel

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42 minutes ago, kiwijw said:

Would that make a forgery coin worth more than an original as there would be less of those than original ones? Outside of the silver content value. Interesting. Thanks Randy Dee. ?

Good luck out there

JW 

Yes JW some of the forgeries are worth more than the real thing but all depends on the coin condition as the copper content tends to rot away much quicker than silver or gold.   Henry 8th debased his coinage so as to gain the silver and finance his armies, Henry VIII silver coins would wear away on the coin legend high spots such as Henry's nose and as a result his nose would show through red from the copper and resulted in Henry being nick named "Old Copper Nose".

Here below is a small article from my dear friend John Winter blog.

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