bklein

I am not liking my EQ600 with 15” coil and am wondering if it’s just my brain is too attached to my CTX, or if something is wrong with the coil or detector. I am noticing that the coil cable is being sensed if moved when I’m detecting so I did this little video test that uses my car as a ferrous background/target. If I move the cable with it in the background it senses the movement. But if I do it in air, no detection of the cable. I’ve never seen this discussed or tried before so don’t know what to think about it.

We have underground transformers here in our housing tract and although the nearest transformer is 2 houses away EMI is serious with most all my detectors. I had a Compadre i sent back to Tesoro twice thinking it was bad - pissed them off, got a nasty letter saying nothing is wrong with it. So I called SCE to do an EMI scan and they said everything is fine. So nothing I can do. I’d like to get a tri-field or similar meter to try and pin down source location and frequency. Anyone have luck with one of these?

Yes I agree with you Chase- the higher settings will help you out in your hunting environment. Our hunting environments and even wanted targets differ greatly. Most of the videos I’ve seen are of your type environment and targets. But guys hunting beaches are watching those videos with confusion. If there is a major benefit to higher settings at the beach I’d like to hear more about it. I think for most there is a risk of target loss. Two things got me interested in the Equinox: 1) great target separation 2) it finds targets much closer to concrete steps and walls that contains iron rebar. Much better than my CTX can do. And there are often rings in these areas. So I am suggesting that if bias settings are advanced, the performance amongst iron will suffer - perhaps to the point it’s then worse than the CTX. I haven’t proven it but it would be good to test this out.

My real world beach is not nearly as clean an area as that in my videos and I would walk right over the targets you say you’d stop on because they are all over the place. My CTX doesn’t have the issue but doesn’t have FE or FE2 either. And if you can’t hear the target like I show, you don’t know if you are missing it. The videos show that you likely are if you set the bias up. Why do you care about bias if your targets are coins, silver, and gold? Just some falsing issues? Digging too many bottlecaps? Ok do as you wish.

My issues could have been due to the poor earbuds. I have to try them again at Laguna vs the Miccus BT headset.

Did you see my videos?

Thanks! I missed that! ”Adventures with Jim” YouTube tutorial Tuesday just suggested FE 0 not same as FE2 0. With the brief testing I’ve done, I’m thinking a lot of guys are missing targets using higher settings. Not due to the response of the target itself - due to nature of sand/soil and or nearby iron targets.

Thanks, I surely will spend more time debugging this. Right now I’m overwhelmed with some family matters - little time to mess with it. I’m hoping my friend will volunteer to give it a try on one of his future outings.

I tried it at a different beach yesterday with miccus aptxII headphones but its inconclusive whether it fixed the stutter. No targets but did have black sand. I spent about 40 minutes trying to get the phones to pair. Eventually bluetooth did not even come up as an option on the screen - just wifi would cycle on and off with the activate button. Had to do a hard reset, then it worked. The loudness of a good target was close to the loudness of bogus sounds when sensitivity is set too high. Even with sensitivity set at 20 some of those come through. Some cellphones were causing trouble even though they were at least 50 feet away. My friend was there with his EQ800 and found a couple rings in the first half hour he was there. I spent so much time on setup that we didn’t get much time to compare. He had an 11” coil. There was a zinc penny he could hear well but I just would get a null in the threshold. We’ll have to give a comparison another try or I may just let him borrow mine for an outing and see what he thinks of it. I also need to test for an open in the coil. I did not get the issue when flexing the connection to the housing but did at the coil itself - but on this second outing I really didn’t get the chance to look at this again.

Just looked up the earbuds, Soundpeats Force, atpx, not aptx ll. So that's one thing explained.

I have an EQ600 with a full set of coils. I was at Laguna yesterday with the large coil. I am using bluetooth earbuds that have been recommended by others. There was a lot of black sand where I was hunting. I was having the detect audio stutter like it was overloading bluetooth or the headset although I played with the detector audio and couldn’t reduce the stutter. There also seemed to be indications of a bad coil connection at the coil. Wiggle it a bit and you hear a crackle. Never got a full disconnect though. I later ran all metal and maybe the stutter was less not sure. In disc I was stock settings masking zero and below. But that should be a nice audio cancel - should hear good targets without them being chopped up. I found stuff but it was a miserable detecting experience. I played with recovery speed and went between beach 1 and 2 modes. Tried messing with ground balance types too. I found that if I was in black sand areas pinpoint would help me locate possible targets and I’d just dig them without much clue from Lcd ID or tone (running 50 tones). I didn’t have the other coils with me to test. I tried sensitivity 17 on up. Normally was 22/23. I was experiencing bad latency with the earbuds that I don’t remember being an issue with the 11” coil. Just a real test of my brain the whole day.

Is setting FE at zero result in the same behavior as setting FE2 at zero? Also, if you set FE for instance, and get out of special settings mode, the FE setting takes precedence over FE2? It’s not like you have to worry how both are set, just the last set one?

Any links to these companies trying to bypass the chip?

What if you had a gadget you wore on your wrist that vibrated in maybe 3 speeds according to the audio input?

Could always rip out the board if you didn’t like it and make it a pi...

If I wanted to duplicate your test setup how would I go about it? Where do I get the magnetite and what are typical black sand beach concentration numbers?

Cool. There are also EBL AA cells now, but the 18650’s have more Ah.

Does someone make a lipoly pack?

I would think someone with a 3D printer could make some money here.

On my “channel” I have several test videos posted for that day, both 11” and 15” coils, ctx3030/EQ600, iron - or just coins in different arrangements. I may have missed posting a few. One video though is the ring, nail, and quarter - and I take the nail away to make the point. I did vary the sweep speed and change to different recovery speeds. I did raise and lower the coil in some videos. Just gets worse the higher you go obviously- but single coin had better depth than groups. I don’t get professional on the videos as I don’t really care to spend a lot of time on it. These are all tests you can do yourself your lawn... Road noise was absolutely terrible - a guy just spent hundreds making his huge ass truck the noisiest in the neighborhood and had to drive all over with his family, showing it off.

El Nino77 - I’ve seen some videos of going over the target for a length of time to see it resolve it. My thought is you’ll miss a ring and falseing sounds just like normal background trash noise as you are walking around swinging - I’m talking beach hunting though. Midalake - it probably was 3 but not sure. These are just quick and dirty videos of things I’m trying, obviously not rehearsed... I just added a couple more showing how coin grouping has depth suffer vs coins separated. I didn’t associated this to FE/F2 - I need to go back and test to see if it is.

Say two years from now I come across a deal on one of these and the volume pot or something like that goes bad, would I be able to open it up and access the electronics or is it a welded together enclosure like the Nox?

Hi all. Ok I uploaded the video along with several others I made in the same day. Some EQ600 with 15”, some 11”, and some my CTX-3030. A fair example of what I’m concerned about is this one: Sorry for the wrong camera (phone) orientation, road noise, and low audio. The other videos show it seems coin groups reduce depth vs single coins with the Nox but not CTX, some masking with CTX depending on coil and coins orientations. I hunt beaches and don’t see many nails usually. I avoid fire pit areas. My main worry is just how targets detect in blacker sands. I don’t have any at home but wonder if the same issues exist with it. For you guys that hunt inland I can see you getting tired of digging falling iron - if a ring or coin is by itself out of the influence of something ferrous, the FE/F2 modes can help. Oh, the older EQ800 videos are some of my aggravations with the EQ800 I first had and eventually sold. Some of these issues may have been resolved with firmware upgrades or were due to my clueless use of the detector. One main thing you can see by these later videos is I need to set sensitivity down to almost quiet. That, noise cancelling several times, and making sure ground balance is good (and FE/F2 are set to zero). After this, bare coin depth detection seems maybe an inch or so better than the CTX sometimes. The CTX though has the Smooth mode that gives you a much better chance of recognizing you’re over a target. There actually is some bad EMI in this area, but both detectors seem to adjust for it over time.

I guess we can’t add videos to our posts? Anyway, the default setting FE and F2 is 2. I set out a gold ring, old square I ron nail, and quarter. With FE or F2 set at defaults of 2, it seems to mask these targets. Set to zero all is good. (This is an EQ600). This seems to contradict the original videos that came out when the detector did. Beach2 program.

So Q4 is hot? Looks to be the TX coil FET.