Jeff McClendon

The Orx gold modes are very close to threshold based all metal and depending on the HF coil used, the available selectable frequencies are amazing. The simultaneous multi frequency Equinox 800 and Legend (I only have the 11" coil for the Legend) using their Gold prospecting modes are very similar in the testing I have done so far. I haven't had a chance to compare them in single frequency 40 kHz yet. Until the Legend has a 10X5 elliptical coil available, I can't really give it a full test comparison to the Equinox 800.

Deus 2, target was basically touching the coil in those two videos. Legend was air tested. That’s all I had time for. 1.5”. Same distance for Bic pen test using default Gold field. ORX is an excellent gold prospecting detector for smaller gold. I really like it’s ergonomics, frequencies and coil choices. I like the discrimination choices, single digit notching, audio and the simultaneous multi frequency hot ground handling of the Equinox and so far the Legend more than the ORX.

I haven’t hunted with it on a saltwater beach yet and Nokta Makro haven’t released the saltwater beach software update yet. The same goes for the iron bias update. Nothing final yet. Otherwise I am very impressed with the Legend as an affordable alternative to the Equinox especially if someone is ready to upgrade from a beginner level detector to a more advanced and versatile unit. From what I have seen so far in testing and field use, I wouldn’t hesitate to use a Legend or Equinox for gold prospecting. As far as not being ready….that’s why most recently released intermediate level detectors are user software updateable.

Another newly released detector with its 11” coil was not doing very well on .07 gram shotgun pellets in one of Andy’s videos. That is one of the reasons I did a quick .05 gram test with the Legend’s 11” coil. It hit that test nugget easily just like it passed Steve’s medium tungsten point Bic pen test.

Mineralization bar on Deus 1 at that park is 3/4ths full. Unfortunately I won’t get any time to hunt here in Montana

I am back in Denver and had a chance to run the Legend through my test garden. I only tried the Legend in Park M1 since I didn't have much time. Headed to northern Montana tomorrow to meet my 1 month old first grandchild. The Equinox 600 and 800 can not only hit all of the targets in my test garden in Park 1, they can also correctly ID all of the targets which are a modern US nickel, zinc penny, copper penny, clad dime, clad quarter and lead bag seal all of which were buried at 6" depth 3 years ago. The Vanquish models do very well on these targets too. However, since they cannot ground balance on the high iron mineralized dirt in my area, all of the targets also have iron responses. The Legend also not only hit those targets but it also correctly identified them........so compared to the 35 or so other detectors that have been over those targets and failed, I am very impressed with the Legend. The Legend in GoldField has easily hit .05 gram gold nugget test targets also with the 11" coil. I was able to go for a very short hunt today in a park that has very bad EMI and noisy iron mineralized dirt. By bad EMI I mean, an F75, T2, F70 and Omega 8000 could not function at this park.....I tried them and EMI was overwhelming. The Legend ran quietly at sensitivity of 25 out of 30 and did very well during this 1 hour hunt giving more outstanding results on deeper low to mid conductor non-ferrous targets and even hitting an 8" silver Roosevelt dime with a faint but very repeatable proper high tone in 6 tone Park M1 along with correct target IDs. It was a dig me all day target. So, in less than 6 hours of hunting with the Legend in moderate and high iron mineralization, the Legend has detected a .2 gram 10K gold opened hoop earring, a bling ring, 4 other bling earrings, a 1942 wheat penny, a 1962 silver Rosie and over $10 in modern US clad coins........... I will happily take those results and I haven't even moved out of 6 tone Park M1 yet!!!

The actual head band minus the WS4/6 puck costs around $15 US. I agree, using that head band is my least favorite way to listen to the sounds of an XP detector. The WS6 puck however is a great way to listen as a slave or master. Now I just need a 9” FMF coil.

It works fine with Deus 1, ORX and WS6.

Thanks Chuck, I am trying to just report what I find in the limited hunting conditions and targets in the area I am in. I am headed back to Colorado this weekend and then on to Montana to meet my first grandson. I will take the Legend with me for sure. So far it has proven to be as advertised for coins and jewelry by my testing and hunts which means it is a direct and viable competitor of the Equinox in moderate mineralization. My mother is pretty fearless but at the same time she rarely gets too upset by any challenge. However, rolling a wheelchair on wet, uneven ground is already something that she has declined to do. Maybe in a few weeks she will be able to get outside more.

I did some modern USA coin medium depth testing today just to see how accurate the Legend target ID’s were by comparing surface IDs to 7” IDs in moderate mineralization. I also did some Steve’s Bic Pen tungsten tip testing for you micro jewelry and small gold prospectors. I was able to use a small hill in my mother’s back yard to plant targets horizontally with minimal ground disturbance by taping coins to 12” long thin wood shims and I measured the depth to the tip of the shim with a 12” skewer that touched the shim at 7”. This ground registers 3 to 4 bars of Fe3O4 iron mineralization on an F19 and half to 2/3rds full mineralization on a Deus 1. All of these targets were taped flat to be consistent. I tested the Legend with 11” coil in default Park M1, M2, Field M1, M2, and the Gold Mode M with preset “Ground” discrimination pattern, sensitivity at 25 of 30, reactivity 5 and ground balanced each time I changed modes and multi setting. Ground balance readings were 61 to 63. US nickel surface ID in each of the five different modes was 25. At 7” all five modes registered the nickel between 24 and 26. US zinc penny surface ID in each mode was 41. At 7” all five modes registered the zinc penny between 39 and 43. US 1957 wheat penny surface ID in each mode was 45. At 7” all five modes registered the wheat penny between 44 and 48. US clad dime surface ID in each mode was 45. At 7” all five modes registered the clad dime between 44 and 47. US memorial copper penny surface ID in each mode was 44. At 7” all five modes registered the memorial copper penny between 44 and 47. US clad quarter surface ID in each mode was 50. At 7” all five modes registered the clad quarter between 50 and 53. The results in the dirt at this site show that the Legend exhibits minimal up averaging down to 7” in its multi frequency modes. I have tested other single and multi frequency detectors in this dirt at the same depth with the same methods. The Equinox and Vanquish are also able to correctly ID coins at the 7” depth with minimal up averaging. I have tested other Nokta Makro detectors including the Simplex, Multi Kruzer and Racer 2 at this site along with the F19 and Deus 1. Those detectors lost target ID accuracy and severely up averaged targets at the 3 to 4” depth level. These detectors are mentioned here for reference purposes and are not meant to be a comparison or to reflect negatively on them. Obviously, Nokta Makro have developed some very capable SMF tech in the Legend. I also did a version of Steve’s Bic Pen test in the same dirt by burying a Bic Pen vertically with just the tip being exposed at the surface. Target IDs for the tiny 1mm Medium tungsten tip were 11 to 13 in all five modes. Detection distances with consistent 2 way hits and target IDs were: Park M1/Field M1 = .5 inches. Park M2, Field M2 = 1 inch. Gold M = 1.5” The Legend has already found micro gold jewelry for me. 10K opened hoop earring which I haven’t had a chance to weigh yet. Still in Georgia with my mother who is totally amazing. Her physical therapists cannot believe the things she can do on one foot at age 91. Neither can I. She is scooting around the house in her wheelchair. Standing on one foot, doing dishes, cooking, doing laundry (with the help of a sturdy walker and some support bars I installed) and is progressing very well towards a prosthesis in about 2 months. She makes at least 30 transfers a day from wheelchair to standing or sitting on something else with ease. Never a complaint even when she is experiencing phantom pain from her amputated foot.

If you can cut it with a pocket knife as in cut pieces off of it fairly easily it definitely isn’t obsidian. If you hammered a piece of obsidian with a pocket knife you might get a piece of the obsidian to fracture into a glass-like sliver. Hopefully you are wearing hand and at least eye protection. Obsidian can really be dangerous.

The two main areas I have and will use a Deus for are gold prospecting for smaller gold nuggets and for relic hunting. I usually do this type of hunting using a threshold tone. For relic hunting I sometimes use disc. IAR set on 3 to 5. For gold prospecting I leave disc. IAR on 0 or at most 1. Clearly hearing the threshold tone vary, hearing very faint target responses and hearing non-ferrous responses amid ferrous responses are all important for me. Even when I am using a discrimination mode, I always have at least part of the iron target IDs accepted so I can hear iron targets either as an iron tone or as a nulled threshold tone. The WS back phone system does not help me with that hearing process. They simply do not fit my head no matter how much I adjust them, put tape or foam padding on them or literally bend them to fit my big head. When I wear a baseball hat with the plastic tabs on the back that have several holes on one side and little round tabs on the other, mine are always on the last tab and hole and the hat is still usually too tight. Since the WS does not fit, the ear phone pieces don’t fit either and the plastic rubs on the side of my head and irritates the top of my ears whether I am wearing sunglasses or not in about 45 minutes. I won’t call the WS4/6 audio modules junk. They are fantastic. I will call the WS back phone system unusable for my head however so they might as well be junk. For those that think I am complaining……I am not. I have been fighting with those back phones for 6 years now. I actually like the original back phones better than the newer “improved” design. I seriously hope that XP get the threshold that is an option on Deus 2 working as at least a reference threshold soon.

I don’t yet have a Deus 2 so my information is not first hand….sorry. Can Gold Field and Relic be run with PWM audio? Does that change the threshold behavior? Deus 1 Gold Field’s threshold does null on some iron and deeper targets if some disc. IAR is used from my memory….. thanks

The threshold in Relic and Gold Field works correctly. Why it doesn’t do anything using “pitch” audio in the discrimination modes is bizarre.

Park multi 1, ground discrimination setting, adjusted the tone breaks for iron, small gold, US nickels, zincolns, clad dimes/copper pennies, and quarters so each coin has one tone and isn’t straddling a tone break and adjusted the pitches to my classical music liking.

Very short 45 min hunt in the mud between thunderstorms. Even though the iron mineralized ground here in west central Georgia is fairly hot, the Legend ran very quiet and stable again in Park M1 with sensitivity at 24 and recovery speed at 5. It had no problem hitting and correctly identifying all of these targets. One of the nickels and several of the dimes and quarters along with the pulltab were 6+” deep. The ring is just bling but it sounded great. After 2 hunts totaling less than 2 hours, the Legend’s SMF tech has proven to have very accurate target IDs and pleasant, easy to distinguish tones to the point where I already can predict what I am digging as far as USA modern clad

The Legend in Calabash’s video was falsing and reacting to the salt level on that beach. The constant 9/10 target ids clearly showed that. The only setup step that Calabash did not show in that video was ground balancing. Maybe he screwed that up….. I doubt it. With the Legend behaving that unstable it had no chance to show what it can do. Calabash did all he could to stabilize it but those steps also cut depth and length of signal response. So, in my opinion that video showed why the Legend sorely needs software work on salt ground balancing abilities. I am going to hold final judgment until after N/M has had a chance to make some changes.

I watched Calabash’s video posted above very carefully. I cannot fault anything that he showed in the video. His comments are his opinions but the setup he used as far as settings for the Legend was correct and as said earlier, his is not the only video that shows a Legend behaving this way on USA East Coast beaches. I don’t think it has anything to do with the Legend being a bad detector. I do think that there is a software issue that Nokta Makro has already said will be addressed very soon via a downloadable software update.

We are very fortunate that detectors from some companies like Nokta Makro can be easily updated when the problems pop up. Are you listening FTP?????

I have not had a chance to hunt with the Legend at an East coast USA saltwater beach. I did watch Calabash Digger’s Equinox 800/Legend beach video where he tested planted 10”, 12” US nickels and a 12” 14K ring. That video was disturbing. Calabash was not the problem. His testing was well done. The Legend he was using was constantly displaying target IDs of 9 and 10 when any of the iron range was accepted so it was constantly reacting to the salt levels and was also falsing in the upper 30s even with salt sensitivity at 5, reactivity 5, sensitivity in the low 20s, using Multi Wet in Beach mode. Another Florida beach user posted a similar video with similar falsing/salt sensitivity issues. Hunting with the iron range accepted would have required a big reduction in the iron tone volume level, notching 9 and 10 or just not hunting in all metals accepted. Very troubling in my opinion…….

The Equinox as most know, doesn’t have a mineralization meter. Maybe that was deliberate on Minelab’s part since they knew it could handle most types of mineralized ground very well and didn’t see a need for more display clutter. The Legend may not “need” one either for the same reason and it’s display is already full in my opinion. In the short time that I have hunted with the Legend, the Ferro-Check feature has done well on shallower borderline ferrous/non-ferrous targets. I can see this feature being helpful when gold prospecting, shallow relic hunting and beach hunting at low black sand content beaches. It seems to be a “possibility/probability” meter rather than an exact iron identification meter and could be a useful, easy to use tool. It seems that Nokta Makro is addressing a weakness in the onboard pinpoint function with a software update very soon. I was pleased to discover that the supplied Bluetooth headphones have fine tuning volume control onboard which can further adjust the overall volume level. This headphone feature might also help that sudden jump in threshold volume level between threshold volume settings 9 and 10.

Quick 1 hour hunt at a local school complex. Standard US clad along with a 1942 Wheat penny and a 10k gold opened hoop earring. I was using the 11” coil in Park Multi 1, sensitivity 25, 6 tones, recovery speed 5 and was using the ground discrimination setting which rejects target IDs 1 and 2 to take care of ground noise from the red iron rich clay that is the soil here which is made from decomposition of granite and gneiss. I definitely performed a ground grab before hunting! My mother told me to get out of the house for an hour since it was my 66th birthday and she was being looked after by my sister. I obeyed. My third target was the 10k opened hoop earring (bottom right earring on the plate) which gave a very solid audio response and a TID of 14. It was 3” deep and surrounded by 16 steel 🧷 safety pins from a high school cross country race event. I could clearly hear a good target amid those pins. The other coins were identified correctly both by tone and numbers so no up averaging even in mineralized dirt. The US nickel and pull tabs were 5”+ deep. I had adjusted the 6 tones, volume levels and tone breaks to match ferrous targets, small gold/aluminum targets and the 5 main modern US coins. The only possible negative was what seemed to be a bit of Bluetooth lag since I was having some issues locating targets using the onboard pinpoint function. However, the red dirt was extremely wet and my Tek Point went nuts anywhere near the dirt so could be ground conditions more than wireless lag. So far, the Legend has been very quiet and stable and is a pleasure to swing and use. For those with a Simplex, the Legend has much better weight balance. For Dean, the vibration feature works in all of the modes, it has 0 to 5 for intensity and can be shortened or lengthened in duration by adjusting the recovery speed. Yes, those chewed up coins are modern zinc pennies which are destroyed quickly by the soil here.

Thanks Simon, George, Chuck and Dean. I am in Georgia to help take care of my 91 year old mother who developed a really bad Covid toe infection and had her foot amputated. She is in great spirits since her foot has finally stopped hurting…. I may not have much time to detect. I will say that there are plenty of settings, icons and adjustments to learn and make on the Legend. I won’t come close to being able to report on most of them yet. Dean, the vibration feature works really well in my opinion and it has several levels of intensity. I haven’t tested it much but I will soon.

Received a Legend WHP with 11” stock coil today. First impressions are that this is an extremely nice detector as far as build quality, features, layout, and general feel. Weight is similar to the Equinox but the handle/grip is much more comfortable at least for my hands and the Legend is not very nose heavy with the 11” coil. The Legend’s weight is fairly evenly distributed. It actually reminds me of a T2, F70 or F75 in that regard. The audio tones are very nice compared to previous Nokta Makro detectors and have a more tone-like audio similar to the Equinox and Deus 2 using Square audio. The audio volume, pitches, and tone breaks are easy to adjust. It was about 35 F here in central Georgia today with a wind chill of half that temperature so detecting with the Legend didn’t happen. Hopefully I will be able to use it some tomorrow 3/13/22. Please feel free to comment or leave your impressions of the Legend if you have one and want to add to this discussion whether you agree or disagree with whatever I might report.

Top four are more intermediate to expert detectors that can challenge anyone both with their versatility and adjustability. The last two are buy far the best value for the money for the beginner or slightly experienced. CTX 3030 and XP Deus 1 at least for me are very site specific specialty detectors. XP Deus ll Equinox 800 Equinox 600 Nokta Makro Legend CTX 3030 XP Deus 1 Simplex Vanquish 440/540