Chase Goldman

Glad it worked out he responded as soon as I contacted him regarding your situation. Been working with him for several years now on the bootcamp circuit teaching metal detecting skills in addition to the nuts and bolts of how to properly set up your machine. A lot of knowledge, experience there that he doesn't mind sharing with the MD community.

That lead looks like a minie ball of some sort, perhaps a carbine, but not a 3-ringer. Nice saves.

Yeah, I can see that new table. Mobile Chrome issue I guess. Thanks for reposting it.

Is that supposed to be a link or image above, DD? It is showing up as nothing but a random character string on my browser, for some reason. Having relic detected PA a lot, I know where you are coming from with coal and coke hits.

Just a point for clarification. Unlike the Equinox, the Vanquish detector contol box is NOT waterproof and needs a cover (included with the 540) for rainy conditions. The coils ARE waterproof and submersible. Great detector for the price though it does have specific shortcomings like lack of adjustable ground balance settings. Suitable for most detectorists needs under a variety of (but not all) conditions and situations. Great coin and jewelry shooter in mild ground and great dry and wet sand beach detector.

Sandi - you are actually providing very little context as to why Dilek provided the machine to you (free) in the first place and what the objective of your "test" was. Were you testing it to write a public review or was it a private tryout. You never actually relayed Dilek's reply after you informed her of the failure other than the lack of providing a replacement unit (which as others have correctly stated, she is under no obligation to do since you did not pay for the machine). Did she just tell you to scrap it (so you "took it apart")? Makes sense if that was the case, she is out shipping and the cost of the failed (likely non-repairable) unit already , I see no reason why she should sink any more cost into shipping another machine, so you can "finish your review", unless she had some concern about how that review would be received. Shedding some additional light on the circumstances would be helpful to understand what you were actually trying to accomplish both in your test/review and in posting about the incident in the first place.

I think it can run plenty hot, not sure why you would really want to increase the noise floor any further (diminishing returns), but I guess it's cool you figured out a way to hack your Equinox to do so.

Do what Jeff recommends to minimize coil bump sensitivity. If you are within 5 points or so of the actual ground phase reading you will lose minimal depth. I don't know why it happens, but you can work around it.

If I push GB high, it increases coil bump sensitivity, I can even get falsing by simply shaking the coil in the air (i.e., nowhere near the ground). I can't explain why that happens, but I recall Steve H. not being surprised when I described this issue. You can see his response here and a longer discussion of causes for bump sensitvity here.

Agree with Jeff, It's just a latch of the TID on the screen at the instant when you press the PP button Basically meaningless once you engage PP because as Jeff says, it doesn't change once latched even if you move on to another target while PP is engaged. Especially true if the TID is jumping around which it usually does because I engage PP only when the coil is off to the side of the target and if it's changed due to an adjacent target or falsing off the end of a ferrous target, so be it. It still apparently pinpoints the intended target with the same sensitivity regardless of what number latches on the screen. Just another one of Equinox's quirks AFAIAC.

Hard to answer, the way it is asked because it is totally situational. 90% of the time if at the beach (the other 10% being tracking if in surf), 0% of the time when land hunting (mostly auto or tracking). So the total depends on my split of beach detecting vs. Land detectig which varies considerably. I guess I would say 25% overall I guess based on my ratio of beach to land hunting so that was the basis of my vote.

”The recovery speed would not go lower than 5 if there was no reason to ever go lower than 5. I did personally heavily fight the knee jerk concept of lower recovery speed automatically means more depth, and I just as much fight the idea that high recovery speeds are always the answer.“ Heed this quote above by Steve H. from the thread he linked to in the post above. Although it is talking about recovery speed settings specific to Equinox, there is a lesson learned here that basically also applies to Vanquish and it’s modes supposedly divvied up into various depth vs. separation trade offs. Basically, it resurrects the truism that there are very few absolutes when it comes to detecting and how detectors behave. ML may have had general intended performance objectives in mind for the designated Vanquish modes, but the realities of the specific site conditions and the depth, condition, orientation, and junk density will ultimately determine which mode is optimal for the site and targets of interest and it may look nothing like what ML had intended and may be counterintuitive to what you might think would have been the optimal mode setting for that situation, So the bottom line is not to rely on what the book says or even what the so called ”experts “ say. Those may be good starting points. However, if possible, you should do a little experimentation at your sites on known targets to validate to yourself whether the detector is behaving as you expect for the given settings and conditions and adjust as necessary. Takes some patience and a little time when you are anxious to get out there swinging away, but worth it.

Steve - I fully get what you are saying but instead of providing an optimized relic mode a la Equinox Park 2 or Field 2, I think they simply set out to focus relic mode on depth vice separation which probably means they backed off on the fixed, preset recovery speed vs. coins mode which they purposefully designed for separation based on the user manual mode descriptions (so coins mode is what should be used in trashy ferrous sites). Jewelry mode splits the difference on separation and depth between Coins and Relic modes. I really don’t think there is significant, if any, difference in the Multi IQ profile between the three modes so they are not really preferential to any specific set of targets based on conductivity and size - they probably picked an all purpose target Multi IQ frequency and signal processing profile that could run stable in wet sand and varied preset, fixed recovery speed settings for each mode to get the desired trade off between depth and separation. Relic seems to be the most sensitive to ground noise and sweep speed which would make sense if it also had the lowest recovery speed. So, forgetting what the modes are actually called I would say ML intended detectorists to use “Coin” mode for situations were you need improved target separation (regardless of coins, jewelry, or relics), “Relic” mode for max target depth (except at mineralized sites), and Jewelry as a good all around “Goldilocks” mode for stable, general purpose land or beach detecting. That was the intent anyway. That is, if you are going strictly by what the manual says. The rub is, as pointed out above, did the mode properties REALLY turn out the way ML INTENDED and described and I think the jury is still out. I have not yet had the opportunity to do extensive testing to compare and verify the mode properties against one another, but I am not surprised that it may not exactly line up with the user manual descriptions, especially if you take into account ground condition variability which is a definite Achilles heel for Vanquish because it has preset ground balance points and perhaps tries to compensate for that by using Multi IQ signal processing magic, but that really doesn’t work under very extreme soil mineralization conditions.

If it pairs up at all, then it's not your detector, the lack of a plus sign definitively means the D9 is not flashed with APTX LL, as I feared (just plain Vanilla APTX or some other non LL APTX variant, like APTX HD). That's why I specifically asked the + sign question of drive-by poster FoundingFather1776, who never re-visited the site after posting. See if MPOW has a firmware update to get the D9 to APTX LL. If not, you are out of luck and you should return them unless you want to use them for other purposes than detecting. I too have run into ambiguously worded specs by MPOW and received a non APTX LL set of headphones purported to be low latency.

Since you can only swing one detector at a time and you have two V540's why not put one of the small coils on one of the two 540 rods you already have?