schoolofhardNox

That would be cool. I always wanted to try a D-Tex, Gardiner, Compass, Arado, etc... but was stuck on early Bounty Hunters and Whites. Always wondered if anyone actually used them in the parks around my area in the 70's

The heck with gold!!! Give me a detector that finds me Rhodium!

I think it is 2 Amps. Also, I recall that a lower amperage (1A?) may make the machine think it's fully charged, when it really isn't. Lower than that and it will take a long, long time to charge

I usually hit the CT and RI beaches. I'm in western MA, so a beach trip is usually 1.5 to 2 hrs away. Lately the beaches provide very little but clad and the occasional silver. Last hunt was my first non silver hunt.

Have you tried another search coil?? Also try another battery cable? If you know someone that has another battery,try it too. I always like to eliminate the easy stuff first.

Yep, and also may take even longer for some tricks to surface to see how well it really can perform. I'm not the best detectorist out there by any means, so it usually takes me a year to find some of the better settings. For those who detect regularly, they may find some settings that even the designers didn't imagine. It's been a long time since, for me, a machine may come out and be as good or better than my GPX in certain conditions.

This discussion has been great, but just like the Equinox original threads, when you run out of new information, it gets a little repetitive. I'm hoping it will not be the same long wait that Minelab had. After reading everything about the machine, I am torn on, if it can do better than my GPX? If there are not enough deep rings available, than I would probably run it so it can pick up the widest range of targets (hopefully as high as silver too). I understand that I will be digging large and small iron, and also I understand that I will never get that small thin gold, (like chains and stamped charms) because of the locked salt setting. But I'm starting to worry that I will be digging a ton of deep pull tabs and very little gold. The deepest decent sized gold ring (14K) I have found with the GPX was around 12-14". A small woman's 10K ring was a wobbly reading at around 12" Can it do better than that, is what I am wondering now.

#7. Mitigation of all EMI. That would be my dream !!!!

Thank you. After the holidays, I will ship Carl some for testing.

Steve, All the rocks pictured are the normal weight and not light . They look like the basalt we have in this region. Reading up on basalt it can have pyroxene minerals which can have iron and magnesium as components. Maybe all the black rocks are basically the same here except for the higher contents of metals present?? Just my guess on it. They may have graphite in them too, as some have that shiny silver look mixed in them. I'm hoping you are correct on the impulse ignoring them. That would be a huge plus for me. I'm pretty sure the GPX ignores them, just not the Equinox. I'll look up that book. Thanks

I tried it with a regular magnet and they do not respond. I will get a hard drive magnet and see if I get a slight response or not. Hitting on the same numbers that the small gold hits on, makes it hard to decide to dig or not. I dug about a dozen of them and gave up for a while. When I decided to start digging them again I eventually pulled up that 14K small earring. I wonder how many I may have missed???

I always wondered if they actually care when you send them something like that. I may e mail them first instead of just sending them a box. Anyone have a contact person there? Mark, those rocks are at Rhode Island beaches as well as some Connecticut beaches. Probably MA and NH as well, I'm thinking. I'm not sure exactly what they are, but I'm thinking they are have a higher concentration of minerals and probably are magnetite. Just a guess. There are a lot of other black rocks that look identical, but do not read on the Equinox., so it makes it tough to detect in the rocks. The Garrett carrot also pick them up.

It's a lot easier on a beach to get jewelry then at a field. Someone probably will lose some playing there, but it will be a lot rarer to find. Even though we all want you to start digging those different signals, in your situation, with almost NO competition, you are better off hitting new areas and getting the silvers first. You can always go back and look for jewelry later. If we do that here in the states, when we go back we will see a million holes in the area we wanted to hit "later" 😓

After 2 weeks of lots of work, I was finally able to get to the beach for a hunt. I was hoping that I could try the 18” DD coil I just bought for the GPX. The area I did well at with the 14” coil, was even more sanded in and that defeated the purpose of comparing it to the 14” coil to see if it could find something else there. But I did use it for a while, and it was heavy. I put a side arm on, to offset the weight and that worked, but trying to carry a bigger shovel and holding the arm did not work well at all. It seems I will have to get a bungee harness set up for any coil larger than a 14”. So, I brought the Equinox out and hit a patch of rocks that I later found out was being pounded days before. I heard it was a good section. I did ok, considering the amount of sand and other detectorists that hit this beach regularly. Junk, clad, possibly some silver rings, 2 Mercury dimes, a nice 14K earring and some good observations. First observation was that some iron was encrusting the small stud earrings. That’s not new news, but it only happens sometimes, and you need to pay attention to those times. That leads to the second observation, which just seemed like some junk jewelry trapped in the salt/sand mixture. But at home I noticed it looked gold and did not show any signs of being plated. It may be a low karat jewelry that was not mixed with copper, or the usual green copper encrustation was already gone. The other problem on this beach are the black rocks. Not all the black rocks respond to the Equinox, but the ones that do read a solid #1. That is the exact number that a lot of fine gold rings and chains ID at. But it was nice to get out and hunt for about 6 hours. 2 silvers and possibly 2 gold for me is a good hunt and worth the long drive.

The CTX for me has been a great beach machine as long as it stays out of the water 😄 Overpriced? I think yes - compared to the E trac. The E trac for me was a better deep silver machine. The CTX a better beach machine, especially with the big coil and long tones enabled. I still have mine and want to sell it. I even had mine rebuilt so it does not leak, but still fear selling it to someone just to have it leak on them. So overpriced? If it was reliable, then maybe still a little bit overpriced, but acceptable. Leaking like they do? - Not only overpriced but the car "lemon law" should apply 😆 Steve say it best....Shareholder are what any publicly traded company has to look after. If Minelab was a private venture, then I think they could have eliminated all their competition in 5 years time. The CTX would have been $899.00 and no one else would have given us a comparable detector without upsetting their shareholders.