Chase Goldman

There are still plenty of treasures out there but the most valuable ones are closer to home than you might think...

Lol. That's not something anyone can likely easily, if ever, prove in a court of law...as opposed to the opposite. Fenn's mistake was that he never insisted that the finder come forward and reveal the find and where it was found. That should have been the price of admission. But there would also be no way for Forrest to enforce that rule and would make it more likely that someone who found the treasure would not even inform Fenn (which is probably something Fenn couldn't stomach). As far as those who lost their lives - I have sympathy for them and their loved ones but they should also realize that greed and poor decision making (or destructive behavior patterns) are a detrimental combination that can't be blamed on anyone but the individual making those choices (and it was a choice not a forced decison). A little common sense, preparation, and self awareness make every single one of those situations preventable based on what I have read about those situations. If they simply asked themselves whether an 80 year old man carrying a 20 lb chest could do what I am about to do now?" and answered correctly "No, I suppise not", then 5 people may not have put themselves in the jeopardy that cost them their lives.

I've found small brass relics in the 40's, but yeah, its mostly going to be modern junk down there if hunting a modern site, maybe the occasional micro jewelry bit (earring stud). 49 to 69 I pay attention to for buttons, nickels, and gold jewelry. Deus makes it a lot easier to deal with modern trash in this range because full tones distortion really reveals the irregular aluminum junk in this range, if Orx had full tones well...you know. If you get your hands on a Deus target ID chart off the internet, pay attention to the 18 khz column because Orx normalizes all TIDs to 18 khz operating frequency for all coils (including the White HF coils - even Deus doesn't do this) regardless of what frequency you are operating the coil at. For relic hunting, minie balls fall into the high 70's range otherwise, not much there. Then its your IHPs and Zincolns in the high 70's, low 80's and purer copper in the high 80's silver and clad at 90 and above. Orx/Deus likes to up average deeper targets and down average non-ferrous adjacent to ferrous (use of Disc set at around 7 to 10 tends to alleviate the latter). HTH.

The Fisher Impulse AQ "Special Edition"uses NiMH not lithium cells. Nickel metal based batteries and Li Ion batteries are susceptible to damage from exposure to extreme hot or cold conditions during use or excessive charging and it usually manifests itself as swelling or rapid loss of capacity. If the battery was used and charged in accordance with AQ specs, it is likely that it had an underlying defect that hastened the failure. They should not be used or charged further once swelling occurs and should not be shipped . Fortunately, NiMH cells are not as unstable and susceptible to fire as Lithium cells once damaged, but the cell should be treated as if it is a potential fire and material hazard and disposed of at the proper battery recycling facility. Contact your Fisher AQ point of contact for warranty replacement and whatever documentation is needed (e.g., simple photogrphs) for them to honor the warranty. I can't see shipping it back as a prudent option, but that is all up to Fisher.

It is considered a tabloid news source.

Definitely go with what works. All the Equinox firmwares are acceptable, it really is just a matter of some minor tweaks and features. If any of the firmware versions was seriously flawed, I doubt ML would retain the ability to dial back to it. Confidence in your machine goes a long way towards success with it, so stick with what works and don't fix what isn't broken. Good luck and happy hunting.

Um, well OK then . No one seems to be able to take anything at face value anymore. Wonder why that is? It seems if people don't get they're way, they chalk it up to some conspiracy. Seems like that is what many of the Fenn Treasure Seekers have done now.

I will say this - the ML's were the second worst of the four WP headphones I tried from a sound quality standpoint. The worst were Gray Ghost generic Amphibians with no volume control. Tony E modified them to make them a tad better using his drivers but they were still not as good as his custom phones. Did not try the Patriots. I like the LS Pelsos which are hard to come by now. They are waterproof, but designed to handle a dunking but not submerged detecting because they don't use Piezo drivers, but definitely loud and good for non-submerged surf work with wave and wind noise being attenuated pretty good. I have only heard good things about Tony E's and the Patriot Phones - and they are both pricey.

Why not give the classifieds here a shot too. Saves you some ebay fees and I know some folks here are looking for remotes.

A little confused by your subsequent posts. You've got to remember that there is no way for us to know what your situation or journey is unless you spell it out for us - so try to put yourself into the shoes of the reader and as a reader what you would expect to know or not know about how a stranger operates their machine. We had no way of knowing this was the way you operate until you told us. So thanks for letting us know You need to noise cancel for each mode/frequency separately because Noise cancel is specific to each mode because each mode operates with a different frequency profile, it is not a global setting. You never said whether you did this for each mode you were using. Also, manual noise cancel is an option on the 800. Since you don't use noise cancel on a regular basis, you should probably reconsider doing it as a matter of routine because there is also such a thing as "silent" EMI that can affect sensitivity and it takes all of 5-10 seconds. Your previous description is how I would expect the machine to behave (Field 1 generally running less sparky than 2 because field one is weighted to lower frequencies vs. Field 2). The later situation is not expected and either means you need to do a reset because the machine has become overly noise sensitive due to some update or settings glitch or the EMI noise field is now stronger where you are detecting. You mention in a subsequent post that you upgraded directly from 1.7.5 - which doesn't have F2 so you may not be very familiar with running with it. We are learning more about F2 behavior with recent testing by some experienced Equinox users. The upshot is that F2 seems to be both more effective at making mixed-ferrous signals become ferrous signals than FE (with higher settings, less falsing) and is also a lot less likely to cause adjacent target masking than FE. This finding coming from Steve who likes to run with iron bias at 0. The thing that doesn't make sense in your description is that F2 was "way too sparky" - I take it this means it was falsing more than FE? You might want to consider running with higher F2 settings as there seems to be little downside o doing so, but that is your call. Based on your later statement that you upgraded directly from 1.7.5, I can't tell if you are saying F2 behavior changed with the update (meaning you must have had some memory of how it behaved if you briefly ran 2.0 software - again, have no way of knowing whether you ran 2.0 at all, a little or a lot - all we know that you did your latest upgrade from 1.7.5) or if you were just comparing it to Fe. Confused a little on this. Yes, I have seen that behavior too after a soaking rain on a field that usually runs mild. That is just a GB phase setting behavior thing due to moisture and probably doesn't have anything to do with the update. Yep, you pretty much covered both the upside and downside of running 4khz there. In general, since the 2.0 update, what I have experienced is that ML is simply adding features (F2 and 4 khz) and pretty much leaving the existing features alone. I did notice that going from the original software to 1.7.5 there was generally a lot more sparkiness vs. the original software (I think they tried to increase sensitivity for small high conductors in Multi) and falsing with the small coil. I found that 2.0 alleviated this sparkiness somewhat for me, again anecdotally and it could be my imagination (it certainly did not make it worse). Same goes for 3.0 vs. 2.0 - no noticeable increase in sparkiness or noise susceptibility in my experience. So your observation that 3.0 is generally sparkier/noisier than 1.7.5 is surprising to me. My suggestion is to do that factory reset after update just to set everything back to default and go from there. Or stay at 1.7.5 if that meets your needs, glad ML gives us the option to upgrade or not based on whatever works best for our individual situations. If you try it again with similar results after noise cancels and resets, then yeah, I definitely would roll back to a previous version. Detecting opportunities are too short to put up with the frustration of an unstable machine. Good luck.

Maybe it would help if you more thoroughly described the mode you were in and other relevant settings, specifically, whether or not you were running single frequency and what frequency, etc. Did you try different modes, different frequencies, and different manual noise settings (800 only) before cranking on sensitivity to see if it was mode or frequency specific? The only substantive change was adding 4.0 khz single frequency, nothing else was described other than the nebulous "various stability enhancements..." Otherwise, ML states: All other single and multi-frequency settings are unchanged in their performance. In addition to the 4 kHz upgrade feature, various stability enhancements have been included. Overall, other than the addition of 4 khz which appears to be more EMI immune than 5 khz or the other SFs, I hadn't personally really noticed any other performance or stability differences. When it comes to the "intangible" feel for how it generally runs post-update the reactions are all over the map, indicative of nothing really changed but but people are more aware of how their machine is behaving and any difference that appears out of the ordinary is amplified and attributed to the software update (placebo effect). Some people are reporting better behavior out of pinpoint mode - I personally am not seeing that, and again people have been all over the map on that wonky feature ever since ML started issuing updates. EMI is highly variable even at a specific site - time of day (electrical load changes during the day, intermittent loads that are only turned on part time), humidiity, and the possibility of new sources can change what was typically an "EMI Quiet" site to a noise nightmare. If anything, people have generally reported more stability vice less but that is still all subjective and anecdotal.

Note that Deus “Hot” is just Deus Fast in Full Tones and no disc (disc at -6.4), a fav of Gary Blackwell who hates to run with discrimination if he can avoid it. If you want to “hear it all” (ferrous and non-ferrous) in full tones, you basically have to run disc between -6.4 and 0 (note on Deus the ferrous region runs up to about +10 or so) because iron volume is non-functional in Full Tones. The downside in running this way is you likely have an unstable or at least unreliable horseshoe display and cannot take advantage of discrimination mitigated ferrous down averaging of non-ferrous target IDs. Don’t like to run Hot in iron, as a result, but it is a great coin shooting mode in the presence of modern, aluminum junk.

Actually, Joe. Not a bad move to move on from the 800 now from a warranty perspective and if it doesn’t leave a significant capability gap in your arsenal. You can afford to wait and see what XP or ML (or Nokta) come up with for 2021 or as you mentioned grab a 600/800 later (perhaps discounted depending on what hits the marketplace over the next several months).

Garrett didn't hold a naming contest for a new multi freaker years in advance of releasing one or even hint at providing one ...so its really a matter of expectations. Of course people are going to get grumpy when something is promised and not delivered as opposed to not promising anything and delivering not only a multi frequency machine but the most inexpensive selectable multifrequency (the Apex feature that really matters considering how vanilla the SMF is on that machine) on the market. Nokta makes a host of amphibious machines and really needs the additional performance and stability that multi brings to the table on the salt beach to basically have all the bases covered save for PI, so rooting for them to do so. Otherwise, I would be happy to simply see Nokta beat Garrett at the value selectable multifrequency machine game by providing a Multi Simplex (doesn't have to be Simultaneous Multi AFAIC). Of course Garrett doesn't have to worry about cutting the legs out from underneath its Kruzer and Anfibio product lines like Nokta does, so there's that. So as Dilek alluded to above, perhaps now that Garrett has shown their hand, Dilek and company now know what their next move should be. Perhaps more of a marketing/business conundrum than a technical hurdle at this point, knowing how technically innovative Nokta is. But the incontrovertible fact is, Garrett did get to simultaneous MF and value selectable MF before Nokta and Apex is no slouch for $450 US so its your move, Nokta. Don't disappoint us...or keep us waiting much longer. The window of opportunity is small and ML is lurking around the corner likely with their next iteration beyond Equinox AND Vanquish both released since Nokta hinted at working on MF. It is a cutthroat marketplace with a very small user base. Not much room for error or complacency as Whites and Tesoro have learned the hard way.

Neither am I, and ironically that's why I like the Equinox. I basically just choose the mode for the situation at hand (e.g., FIeld 2 for relic hunting, Park 1 for coin shooting, Beach 2 for wet salt sand) and basically run straight up with the defaults with either Gold Mode (for relic hunting) or a single frequency variant of Park 1 residing in the user profile slot for target interrogation. For me it is the ultimate turn it on a go machine - it's just that you have plenty of choices of modes to turn it on and go with. The Deus on the other hand sometimes takes a little more "tuning" in the field to get some of the parameters optimized (specifically reactivity, silencer, and frequency), especially in hot dirt. Moot point since Equinox was not your cup o' tea, but just my perspective so I thought I'd mention it. I do see a lot of folks fiddling with the user parameter settings on Equinox and they tend to get themselves tied up in knots when the defaults work for more than 95% of the situations once you get the machine noise cancelled and ground balanced. ML really hit the mark on getting the machine pretty optimized as far as the default setting are concerned based on my experience in the field. FWIW.

IMO ORX was just two or three missing features away from optimal. I like the display layout of the Orx vs. the Deus. I like that it normalizes the HF coil TIDs (Deus doesn't do that) but it would be nice to have the option to switch of ID Normalization as you do have with the Deus and the X35 coils. I also like the way Orx implements ground grab. Obviates the need for tracking GB. However, being stuck in 3 tones for the coin modes is just a little TOO bare bones. I don't need all the tone breaks and tone pitch customizations of Deus but give me at least pitch and full tones to go along with the ORX 3-tones and associated fixed tone breaks and I would be a happy camper. Ideally, adding a few more custom slots and the ability to navigate them using the +/- keys like on the Deus would be great too. I don't have a bunch of custom programs, I basically just use Deus Fast variants only, with a Deep program thrown in, but I like having clones of the same program with only the frequency and/or type of tones changed and go back and forth between them when interrogating and iffy target to see how the frequency affects the target signal to make a dig decision.

Large size of the stock coil? It’s a 6” wide DD. I would expect it to do well in a separation test despite its length. Fact is that other detectors do even better with 9” round coils as demonstrated here. But a decent showing for a detector in its price class. Thanks for sharing.

I could get away with one or two user profile slots if there was a way to navigate the modes forwards and backwards rather than having to cycle through all the modes in one direction only.

Apex - Have not seen plots to see what the Apex multfrequency profile looks like. As far as multifrequency is concerned, it really is not all that important to know what frequency components any manufacturer combines to comprise its multifrequency spectrum. It is sufficient to know that a multifrequency spectrum is being used. What is more significant is not the discrete frequencies used, but how those frequencies are being combined during transmission - sequential like the ML FBS machines (eTrac and CTX 3030) or simultaneous like the Equinox and Vanquish and probably the Apex and that the manufacturer is using sophisticated signal processing algorithms to derive the target data. How the multifrequency target signal is processed is the true secret sauce of multifrequency. There were some detectors that enabled you to choose which frequencies were combined (I think the Whites V3i). Most ML detectors and the Apex do not allow you to choose the specific frequency components that comprise the Multifrequency spectrum of the detector. And, like I said before, it isn't necessary for the end user to have this degree of control over the Multi spectrum. Equinox is the only late model MF detector that gives you choices on different MF spectrums to apply for specific detecting situations via the choice of the search profile setting (i.e., Park 1, Park 2, Field 1, etc.) The stability in salt beach hunting is the primary benefit of Multi and is derived from being able to use characterize the salt signal from the way it reacts to the different parts of the frequency spectrum. This enables the salt signal to be compensated for by the machine, enhancing stability in salt conditions. On the flip side, multi can be more susceptible to EMI noise perturbations and also the transmit signal power must be optimized to be able to simultaneously transmit multiple frequencies. Multi is not a miracle, do it all mode. There are some things better suited to a single frequency detector, especially where one of several different single frequencies can be selected. This enables the optimization for specific target types (large/small, high conductive/low conductive) and situations (deep targets or lots of junk targets). Some general truisms (as in anything metal detecting related, there are exceptions and your mileage may vary): use of lower frequencies (e.g., 4 khz) tend to favor larger and higher conductive targets (silver coins) and the signals penetrate deeper into the ground and are generally less sensitive to EMI ane more stable in salt conditions; use of higher frequencies (e.g., 20 khz) can generally resolve smaller targets and excite lower conductive targets better resulting in better separation in high junk conditions are more suited to gold jewelry and smaller items, like gold nuggets and small hammered silver coins, lead and brass targets like minie balls and buttons - but the signals are more highly attenuated by the ground limiting their depth vs. low frequencies. HTH. They probably could by manipulating the way they process the target signals but as far as relics and silver coins at salt beaches you are talking two competing target types. The beach modes are already suited to hit higher conductive targets like silver coins at the beach because they are weighted to lower frequencies. As far as relics - that is a pretty general term but as a relic hunter, I generally take that to mean lead and brass. On the surface the beach modes are less suited to those types of targets because of the frequency weighting but that being said, I have been able to hit deep nickels (greater than a foot in salt beach sand) with the beach modes, so I suspect that it can hit relic type targets pretty well. The fact is, that beach modes have to be weighted towards the lower frequencies in order to provide salt stability. HTH.

That's been the case since Day 1. We've all known the 600 is essentially a mildly crippled/dumbed down 800 with only minor hardware differences (different LCD screen layout and lack of a user profile membrane switch), with the differences manifested in software. But still a formidable detector nevertheless. And yes, if they can add 4 khz, they should be able to add 20 and 40 khz via software if they are so inclined. Regarding 20 and 40 khz, as has been noted numerous times in other threads, measurements of the multifrequency spectrums of the various Equinox modes on both the 600 and 800 appear to consist of few if any of the discrete single frequency components (4,5,10,15,20, 40khz). They consist typically of two (or at most 3) frequencies that are combined to create a low to high frequency spectrum of multi IQ unique to each of the modes. The best that can be said is that each of the multi IQ spectrums that appear on both the 600 and 800 and, more importantly, how they are processed appears identical. And yes, even if discrete 20 or 40 khz frequency components don't exist as part of Multi IQ, similar high frequency elements exist as part of the Multi IQ spectrum to provide similar capability. So Cuda is basically right because while you may not have exactly 20 and 40 khz, you have the close equivalent of those frequencies working for you in Multi IQ. This does not alleviate the fact that there are some circumstances where it is advantageous (high EMI, focus on micro targets) to run 20 or 40 khz single frequency vs. Multi. So yeah, if you want that capability, you are going to have to pay the premium and get the 800. That's just business and dealing with ML's tiered features approach to the Equinox product line (a common marketing practice not unique to ML). Does multi consist of 5, 10,15, 20, and 40 khz - probably not:

Me too.

Buh-ling! Nice find.

Cool. I like the new look and feel. I just have trouble finding the edit button now despite knowing where it is, since I am so used to it being on the bottom of the post. Causes a stutter step for me (I use it a lot). Ha!

That's possible, but I am not sure the Depar has fixed target IDs either. Cannot find that in the manual. The Depar appears to just be a port of the Deus gold modes with everything else disabled, but it has more refined user settings than even the ORX and shares the exact same wireless headphones. So I doubt there is a software impediment unless the Depar doesn't have fixed target IDs. They released Deus 5.X software and then the ORX with compatibility with both the HF and X35 coils AFTER Deus already had that, so that makes me think they were focused on Orx software SINCE release of Deus 5.X and may be holding that ID NORM option for HF coils "fix" for whatever they have up their sleeve next for Deus. Fun to speculate on all the possibilities. The fact is, XP hasn't released ANYTHING new in well over a year and a half now except for a backpack!

Hadn't heard that conspiracy theory before 🤔 The HF coils were introduced more than a year and a half before ORX (if you ignore the Orx immediate ancestor, the Depar DPR 600 - but that was more like a Deus with only Gold Field, was even compatible with the WS4/5 phones and came with an HF coil). XP can easily "fix" this with a SW update to Deus, but has chosen not to for whatever reason. I think it might be the other way around, actually. The Orx was probably designed around the HF coil even though the coil was initially developed for Deus/Depar. I think the fact that ID norm is fixed for all coils on Orx is simply a matter of simplification for the end user. Just another setting the end user doesn't have to fiddle with. That's my take anyway. That being said you just might be right, Jeff. You referred to Orx ID normalization of all coils as "more proof" that the HF coils were designed for Orx. What other evidence do you have that this might be the case. Cool little tangent I hadn't given much thought. Thx.