Chase Goldman

At the beach...Searching >All Metal - yes. Pinpoint - no.

Trying to cover a beach with the 6 inch coil would drive me nuts. Maybe I would hit a specific cut with it visible from my entry point but I wouldn't carry it with me hoping I had the opportunity. The small stuff the 11" coil sounded off on my last beach outing was ridiculous. As Steve said, no need to go micro micro with the 6". Recovery of such targets in the sand is hard enough since they sift right through the scoop like sand.

Still worth it to remind folks its an elliptical IMO. I know plenty of folks who mistakenly believe the depth performance on an elliptical is driven by the long dimension and who will argue about it until the cows come home. Also, I guess I'm used to GPX's where you spell it out because there are 15" round coils and 15x12 SEF ellipticals (and even larger coils) and a variety of similarly sized coils with wildly different performance characteristics (DDs and Monos) and folks pretty much spell it out in conversation to make it clear what they are talking about. Agree there is not a need to be as specific on the Equinox since there is only one coil available with a 15" dimension . My bad for being too OCD about it, I'll go back to my cave now. Lol.

Gold Mode in fresh water perhaps but it is unusable in salt water, FWIW.

Actually, if they intended to make a 5x10, I would have thought they would have announced it by now considering they announced the 12x15 9 months ago and it's still not out. Hope I'm wrong, though, because I would like to see that form factor. I think the best we can say is, "Who knows".

Pure Platinum has a specific conductivity less than iron, but metal mass not just conductivity and of course total target alloy composition and orientation of ring targets will affect VDI and the latter especially can cause VDI variations during recovery.

Any detecting day is a good day.

My point was it's not a 15 inch round coil. Folks were not adding "elliptical" so 15 inch coil (implying round) and 15 inch elliptical coil are two very different coils from a depth perspective. Just wanted to clarify that. I think the 15x12 is a great compromise between depth, coverage, and weight. Would like to see a similar elliptical at the low end too, like 8x12 or 6x10.

ML yellows are Piezos so are much quieter and do not have great sound isolation (compared to the Pelso's). The Pelsos require me to turn down the volume as the Dan said. Not so with the other WP headphones I tested. To be fair though, the others being Piezos will work better if you are detecting with your head submerged or diving, which is not what I do. I am looking for heaphones that will survive a dunking but I am generally keeping my head above water. Pelso fit the bill. I did a side by side volume comparison test linked below:

I like how everyone is calling it a 15-incher - It's a 12x15 elliptical, so don't get too excited if you are hoping for it to be much deeper than the stock . Great 15" coverage but at 12" wide, it is only going to be marginally deeper than the 11" round perhaps by an inch or two max.(i.e., slightly deeper than a 12" round) and it will be heavy for that marginal depth increase. If its swing coverage you want without the weight of a full on 15" round coil, then you will be happy. Just call me Debbie Downer. Lol.

And as Alluminati alluded to, try lowering sensitivity. It may just be the site has a lot of nails. But it this IS the case, lowering sensitivity a tad may help. The good news is that if you don't like and can live with the previous version, it's a snap to roll back.

Great find, Andy!

Already updated! I like it!

What Steve said. 600 or 800 for pure backup. Best value bar none versus the alternatives discussed below. I am into value. Don't be fooled that just because the Equinox is is a jack of all trades, that it is not a coin and relic master. In my opinion it is a master at detecting those targets. That being said, there is something to be said for employing detector tech diversity in your arsenal. Therefore, I recommend Deus (HF or X35 Coil) or Multi Kruzer for tech diversity/backup. Multi Kruzer has the edge if water hunting or wet salt beach hunting is on the agenda but I think EQX 600/800 still beats out the Multi Kruzer in this regard. Though more costly, Deus has the edge if primarily terrestrial hunting. Look for a value, used buy from someone bailing on Deus to go to EQX or is just ftustrated with it. You can probably get a deep discount on the legacy Deus LF coils but I would prefer to pay the premium for the investment in the far superior X35 or HF coils. 11" x35 for max depth and coverage or 9" round HF for great all around and kight weight performance or the 9.5" elliptical for pinpoint-like separation and restricted swing situations. HTH.

Agreed. Go with Sinclair's advice on lowering sensitivity. Increasing iron bias only increases your chance of completely missing a partially masked non-ferrous target amongst the iron. I don't really like filters of any sort in thick trash. Lowering sensitivity in thick iron (also called sifting) will lesson the tendency of Iron to overwhelm the detector and may make shallow, partially masked non-ferrous keepers to pop out of the muck. One thing threw me in your description, you are running all metal but you must have iron volume turned all the way down if you are "see[ing iron] silently appearing on the display as -9, -7, -3 etc." Sometimes the iron audio grunts clue you into a mixed ferrous, non-ferrous signal which can help you make a dig/no dig decision on a target with a questionable audio signal. If you can't hear the iron then you lose that vital piece of information. If I am bothering to run all metal, I may lower iron volume but I still want to be able to hear it. Seeing the iron TIDs flash across the screen without the corresponding iron audio does nothing for me FWIW. Happy hunting at what appears to be a great permission. Enjoy.

Bottlecaps are easy to recognize especially at the beach after you get dome swing hours in. The only "trick" I use is searching in AM. The bottlecaps are then pretty obvious with their weak, flutey tone and the accompanying iron grunt as I swing the coil edge off the target. Pull tabs are hard, but at the beach it just takes a few seconds to scoop 'em and move on. Otherwise, if the CTX is so much better in wet sand (I actually doubt that statement when it comes to gold jewelry), that's great, no one is forcing you to use the Equinox. The fewer Equinoxes I see on the beach the better as far as I'm concerned. HH.

Unless you are really using complicated notch settings or customizing tone breaks which I don't bother with as I use 50 tones, primarily, the only other settings that you might fool with are recovery speed and iron bias and even then you are maybe adjusting them a few clicks off the defaults at most. The default settings are pretty good, in general, so there really is not much need to change and document settings in my opinion. Plus it's easy to get individual programs back to their default settings since each mode can be individually reset back to its factory default without disturbing your other mode settings.

I wasn't offended, just reinforcing the fact that people shouldn't be comparing absolute dB numbers between posts,as you stated. People appear to be doing it anyway even though I tried to be clear that was not the point of the post. We are in violent agreement. Lol.

I made it pretty clear in my post the readings were not calibrated for the actual dB numbers but merely for side-by-side comparison purposes using an identical setup for each pair of phones I tested. User to user comparisons of actual dB readings should be avoided for this very reason (variability in test setup, hardware, and software used).

Thanks. You cleared that up for me. I have had no problems with my Equinox version Pelsos. Great all purpose/all weather/all terrain phones. Not for detecting while diving though.

Remember thst since it is a 15x12" elliptical you are not going to get extensive depth over the 11" coil because the depth performance will be primarily driven by the 12" dimension (though as an elliptical it will get slightly more depth than a 12" round). The 15" dimension determines coil swing coverage more than depth. HTH.

They are still available for sale on their website and they have not contacted buyers that there is a problem. So...?

Yes it ye True as long as ML cooperates and gives Mars the tech info they need to make a compatible coil.

I think there are some technical challenges associated with such a wideband coil (one that can operate from 5 khz up to 40 khz) that they may not have capability to produce them independently without understanding what ML does to enable this.

True. That works best on dry sand though. If there is any kind of mineralization, lowering recovery speed and associated swing speed increase ground feedback noise and limit the degree to which you can increase depth in this manner.