Chase Goldman

100% agree that use of 50 tones is situational. It is what I use most of the time, but I have no problem just switching Park 1 on and going with 5 tones and the other settings defaults for a casual coin shoot on a ball field or going with Field 1 on a dry beach and trying to cherry pick deep high conductors in 2-tones. For the same reasons Mitchel points out above, the limitations of the site (manicured lawn - meaning more precise/selective digging) or time available at a site will determine your approach (e.g., grid it vs. cherry picking vs. canvassing it with more than one mode or detector).

Doubt anyone did try this Dennis. They were really tongue in cheek responses to a tgread that was last alive 10 months ago. Anyhoo, welcome to the forum!

Lol. I'm back on my meds now. Much better. Anyway, sorry to lose focus on the main point of the thread, your great finds. The old coins you constently find on your beach runs always amaze me.

That's why I said do your own research (i.e., google it) to see if something obvious came up. I guess as a relic hunter, that is all part of the fun. You get a unique clue here or there on part of an ID tag or other personal object and see what pops up. The runner's medal posted last week had a great story, of course there was a boatload of identifying info on the medal. Keep it to yourself to keep the losers away. It was more about curiosity and detective work than a ring finders thing (i.e., more about tracking down the back story from the personal identifying nature of the item than about tracking down and returning a gold bracelet, could have been stainless as far as I'm concerned). Since it was gold/personalized, if you just happen to find a 100% certain match so you can actually re-unite it with the owner perhaps some good feelings as an unlikely side benefit. But that wasn't my main point, so no need posting boos or educating me on why that is typically not a practical exercise 99.9% of the time. I hunt beaches and parks too , so I know the drill. I also get why many folks would have no interest in doing such research, just putting it out there. For example, the find below turned out to be a relatively modern era brass Army unit insignia badge (originally thought it was a hunt club pin found in a field giving up colonial buttons and spanish silver) and that context made complete sense after the fact based on where it was found and the history of the property (a previous tenant of the property nearby). Not possible, nor worth it, to return, but at least I had a back story and some fun tracking it down.

You're right, highlighted the quote in the wrong post. See revised post below. My apologies.

Nice finds. That bracelet includes an unusual name spelling, wonder if you could track down the owner with a little research on the name combination.

Primarily understanding how the varous metals you will encounter fall across the spectrum of target IDs and how that is primarily (but not soley) related to the conductivity of the metal, the target shape (irregular or symmetric like a coin), the target size (footprint), the target mass, and whether the target is ferromagnetic. Corrosion, depth, nearby metals, soil condition will also have an effect. All of these things play a role into developing a target ID. Having a fundamental understanding of that aspect is important to helping you make dig decisions because the metal detector can be easily fooled into giving you, for example, high numbers for iron targets that SHOULD be ringing up low and other anomalies. Understanding how that can happen can make you a more skilled detectorist down the road. So I recommend, setting up a test garden so you can train your ear and get used to the typical target IDs common targets such as various types of coins and jewelry and nails and aluminum trash will ring up as. In a nutshell, iron will typically fall in the -9 to 2 range; brass, nickel, aluminum, and gold can ring up anywhere from 1 to the 20's but will typically fall in the teens; nickels will typically show up around 13; pull tabs will surround the nickels, zinc pennies around 19-20, copper pennies slightly higher, dimes in the mid 20's, larger high conductive (silver and clad) coins will ring up in the high 20's and low 30's and so on. Speaking of ears, it will be natural for you to heavily rely on just the screen numbers to decide to dig, make sure you pay attention to the audio tones too because ultimately you will realize there is a lot more information and clues about the nature of the target in the audio nuances than in some digits flashing on the screen. Know this also, there are no "givens" in metal detecting save for you won't detect the target unless you get your coil over it. Also, no free lunches. The reason is because the variables that affect detectability are too numerous for any machine or human, for that matter, to fully account and compensate for. That is also why you should be wary of test videos that purport to conclude the absolute truth about the best detector or best settings. Likely, there is no one answer and the best answer usually is, "it depends". The key to detecting is patience, getting swing hours in so you can gain the experience you need to know your machine, balance all the tradeoffs and improvise as necessary, and most of all, enjoying the unpredictable nature of the hobby. Finally... Have fun!

I think the physical makeup of a DD coil may contribute to one way signal response.

Congrats on the 50th here is a DP page with a number of resources that explain the basics, theory, physics and technology behind metal detectors. HTH Here is the Equinox Essential Information Thread: Here is a link that explains Multi IQ https://www.detectorprospector.com/magazine/best-of-forums/minelab-multi-iq-technology-details-explained/ Chew on that awhile and if you have more questions than check back. TBH - As an engineer myself and tech geek, I think you may getting yourself into the weeds too soon on the theory of operation stuff and it appears you might have the wrong mental model of receive and transmit as far as a metal detector is concerned that may be a source of confusion for you. You are looking at it more like RADAR and it is more closely coupled like a transformer (see discussion below) because we are talking about detecting small changes in magnetic fields not reflected radio waves where there is little influence between the transmitted and received signals. I would separate your intellectual curiosity about how the detector works from understanding how to operate the detector save for a few basic concepts. But to delve a little bit into this, the detector is basically acting like a big transformer with a transmit coil (which one "D" the left side of the coil loop) as the primary and a receive coil (the other "D" on the right side of the coil loop) as the secondary and the target acting as the "core" of the transformer and the most "sensitive" region of the coil loop being the center "spine" of the coil loop where the two "D"s overlap in a back-to-back fashion . Different metallic makeup of the "core" (target) will cause the electric signal passing through the transformer system to be altered in ways that can be measured such that the target shape and electromagnetic properties such as conductivity and inductance can be inferred and passed on to the user as visual and audible target information. The transformer analogy as I described is incomplete and imperfect but it gets the idea across, hopefully. Multifrequency helps better cancel/account for ground effects and enable the different transmission and excitation properties associated with different frequencies to be simultaneously applied to the target. Higher frequencies excite lower conductors like like gold, aluminum, brass, and lead and small targets better but cannot penetrate as deeply into the ground. Lower frequencies penetrate deeper and excite high conductors like silver and copper and high mass objects better than high frequencies. Ferromagnetic targets like iron have different, known. response properties than non-ferromagnetic targets and can therefore be readily identified and discriminated. There are drawbacks to multifrequency operation, two of the biggest being, minimizing transmission power loss to extent practical (the transmit energy has to be divided between individual frequencies if you are actually transmitting them separately and simultaneously, rather than using more elegent methods such as square waves, pulse width modulation, or other methods to take advantage of harmonics that are produced when two or more signals of different frequencies are combined) and the processing power required to extract the information from the received signal. Equinox also brings adjustable, fast response to the table (known as recovery speed) which helps with being able to detect multiple targets in close proximity to each other. But as is true with all aspects of detecting, there is no free lunch. Run recovery speed too high and deeper target signals will begin to become clipped such that you may not be able to hear them with the practical effect that you are actually reducing detecting depth. Run recovery too low in an attempt to increase depth, and you risk increasing ground noise because of the need to swing slower to get a good signal whichnis also counter optimal performance. For the 800, the sweet spot for recovery speed is around 4 to 6 leaning a little on the high side. There are more in depth discussions of recovery speed on the Equinox Essentials thread page I linked to above. One of the mantras I use to optimize Equinox setup is to stay as close to the defaults as I possibly can and to maximize the signal to noise ratio. Avoid doing things that raise the noise floor along with signal sensitivity (like cranking sensitivity too high or lowering recovery speed too low as mentioned previously). Let me know if you want to go into the different properties of the various modes (Park 1/2, Field 1/2,. Beach 1/2, etc.) and what conditions and targets they are optimized for. HTH to get you started. Chase

Everyone also needs to realize that while the TID is related to metallic composition it is not necessarily directly measuring metallic composition of the target, there are other effects that influence the phase angle (delay in the received induced mangetic return signal) that is measured by the detector. So, especially, with mixed metal alloys, corrosion, and other influences it is hard to really say what is causing the variation. I think GB is right, that a sampling of non-corroded war nickels is what is needed to at least see if metal composition variances are the main cause. I think it also makes sense to do that check in single frequency to rule out multi-frequency processing artifacts and get a simple return off a single frequency transmit signal. Interesting topic.

Ok, I guess I misunderstood what you thought was confusing, but I was also familiar with the two other long-time threads that had been contnuously discussing this issue so there was no doubt in my mind about what Tom was saying. Funny, I can now see that depending on your frame of refrence you could find the original post perfectly clear or totally confusing, especially when it comes to the nuances of foriegn or US coinage. Nevertheless, war nickel or not it was a high VDI for a nickel (denomination) coin. The use of the term "nickel" is a misnomer in this case because it is related more to the denomination of the coin than it's metallic makeup.

Thanks. I have used the WM08 only occasionally in raining situations when I don't want the get the stock headphones wet so you have more experience than I do which indicates dropouts are not that big a problem for the long haul. I noticed dropouts when I first used it until I put it in my right side pocket of my rain jacket (swing right handed). Never had a dropout with the BT headphones and I know I have walked a good 20 to 30 yards away from the detector (40 to 60 feet) before I've lost connection, so my personal experience is the BT connection is more robust also probably helped because the receiver is in the headphones propped upon my head. The manual even says: Attach the WM 08 to the same side of your body as the detector to ensure the most reliable wireless signal and Avoid having the WM 08 in close proximity to other wireless electronic devices e.g. a smartphone. With no such warnings with BT (in fact you can pair the BT headset with your phone and with the detector simultaneously). This user also reported dropouts... But as always with these techy things, YMMV. To be clear, I am not saying one shouldn't use the WM08, but just putting the dropout information out there for general awareness. I think your experience with it shows that it is a reliable alternative and preferred if you have a favorite set of wired headphones that can give you the best audio experience because that is key. Do not fear the WM08. Thanks for the adapter link.

WTG GB!

Correct. FWIW, I have found that although the WM08 has less latency, it also seems to be more susceptible to dropouts unless it has a fairly direct line of site to the control head. So you need to keep it positioned on the same side of your body as your defector swing arm. No volume control on the WM08 but the Headphones do have a volume control. Here are some links to the pertinent manual sections from previous Steve H posts: A link to Download the manual if you don't already have it: And finally a link to the useful/essential info thread that has numerous links to relevant information and posts about the Equinox: HTH (shorthand for "Hope This Helps")

Neat find. Looks like young Master Davies had to trudge an extra mile as the medal is engraved with 28 MLS while the article mentioned a 27 mile trudge. Are any descendants still around the area?

Did you find the targets with beach? Beach is so compromised on normal and especially mineralized ground because of salt compensation and Beach 2 transmit power rollback. I would never think of using beach modes other than on the beach, especially with their high iron bias settings. You really need to tweak field 2 to your liking as it will hit mid-conductive targets like the button and lead seal harder. But hey you did well nevertheless. Just goes to show you that experience and familiarity trump tools and settings. In other words, an experienced detectorist familiar with a less capable machine will always have the advantage over an inexperienced detectorist with the best machine money can buy. Once you get used to Field 2 you will have more success than beach mode.

You bet, NE - here are some links to the transcievers. I have used the "Trond" which works well. https://www.amazon.com/TROND-Bluetooth-Transmitter-Simultaneously-CD-Player/dp/B01B4W40VC/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?keywords=bt+aptx+low+latency+transmitter&qid=1551617045&s=gateway&sr=8-3 https://www.amazon.com/gp/slredirect/picassoRedirect.html/ref=pa_sp_phone_search_atf_aps_sr_pg1_1?ie=UTF8&adId=A02757341Q0PYOTBXG77O&url=%2FTaoTronics-Bluetooth-Transmitter-Receiver-Simultaneously%2Fdp%2FB01EHSX28M%2Fref%3Dmp_s_a_1_1_sspa%3Fkeywords%3Dbt%2Baptx%2Blow%2Blatency%2Btransmitter%26qid%3D1551617045%26s%3Dgateway%26sr%3D8-1-spons%26psc%3D1&qualifier=1551617044&id=100749298542224&widgetName=sp_phone_search_atf Also need a right angle or straight on mini 1/8" jack to 1/4" phono plug adapter for the patch cord between the detector headphone jack and the bt transciever box. HTH

Congrats on the gold, but from a detector standpoint, I would like to "sink my teeth" into getting more information from you on the coin spill. Specifically, some folks have "mouthed off" on the Equinox as not being sensitive to shallow bulk high conductors and have shown that before the firmware update, that the Equinox had trouble giving a high tone/TID on edge-stacked quarters simply pressed into the ground. I replicated this for myself and confirmed a marked difference in how Equinox responds pre and post update with this particular target situation (post update you get solid high TIDs and tones). Since I was unlikely to encounter such a contrived target situation, I chalked it up as a curiosity more so than legitimate performance concern and filed it away in the memory banks. Bottom line, would like to "grill" you on what the signal sounded like (and TIDs) over the quarters, mode settings uses, depth, and whether the quarters were all co-located in the hole or scattered about at different depths and anything else of note when you recovered the spill. Thanks and I hope I didn't bite off more than I can chew on this one.

To be clear, the WM08 uses "Wi Stream" not WiFi, which is a proprietary wireless protocol vs. Wifi or Bluetooth which are universal wireless standards to allow interchangeability between brands and devices. The delay with the WM 08 module is about 17 ms vs. 30 to 40 ms with the included BT APTX LL (Low Latency) headphones. BT APTX LL protocol has the least lag of all BT protocols which can lag as much as 150 to 200 ms. Even APTX (non LL) iz around 60 to 70 ms which becomes noticeable when detecting. I find the included APTX LL headset to work well with the Equinox, with no noticeable lag for me. A small minority of folkss have noticed lag even with the APTX LL phones, though. As Northeast said above, ML included the WM08 module mainly as a option to allow the user to use a favorite set of wired headphones with the Equinox while remaining wirelessly untethered to the detector. Regarding use of a universal "Pro Sonic - like" setup across detectors, I am quite pleased with APTX LL and purchased a small BT APTX LL transciever (about $30 US) about the size of a thumb drive which I can plug into all my detectors (e.g., my GPX) such that I can use the Equinox wireless headphones (or BT APTX LL earbuds) across the board. Oh and it's a fraction of the cost of ML's accessories.

Update on this based on the XP ORX FAQ page linked in Steve H.'s post here: For Coin Fast - Silencer tracks reactivity setting For Coin Deep - The silencer is turned off

FWIW - I quit golf for detecting. Decided golf was doing the complete opposite of relaxing me. Detecting on the other hand. I can just as much enjoy taking in the scenery at a great historic site as digging a gold ring out of wet beach sand. Plus, I feel I'm better at it than golf. It is my stress therapy and love it but agree with the elements of the golf/detecting analogy, nevertheless.

Good point. Several independent MD dealers will offer Vet discounts too

No, I run iron volume at default. I have just noticed the odd blanking of threshold in AM mode but have not investigated it in detail to determine what is going on. Didn't really impact what I was doing so I moved on, it was just something that made me wonder because it was not something I expected to hear (or not hear, lol) based on the ML description of reference threshold as outlined in Steve's post above. It seems that Equinox may suppress the threshold a split second before a valid target signal sounds off, so it could be a very weak signal attempting to break the threshold, but again I have not attempted to characterize it in testing. It is just a trivial curiosity for me at this point.

I am mainly listening for tone duration, intensity/purity, clipping, distortion, and stability. I would be lying if I told you I could discern the TID by tone alone but, to me, 50 tones helps the characteristics/attributes I describe above stand out better than 5 tones. TBH it is really something that defies words and comes more of experience. When I am interrogating a target, I am integrating the tones, display, and coil motion all at once, perhaps shifting between two different modes, all metal, and pinpointer depending on what I am hearing.

That's why ML recomnends Beach 2 and GB tracking in that situation per p. 41 of the user manual.