schoolofhardNox

3 hours ago, dewcon4414 said:

At this point we really don’t have anything to confirm how deep this detector might be.   It’s not out yet... things change.   Comparisons will be better made once more people get their hand on it and see how it does in their conditions

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.

8 minutes ago, ALEXANDRE TARTAR said:

6 best points for improve metal detectors :

1° Best sensitivity on Gold targets
2° Highly reactive system
3° Rock-solid stability
4° Ground effect compensation (magnetic soil)
5° High recovery Speed
6° Iron discrimination

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

On 12/17/2019 at 1:10 PM, LE.JAG said:

Hi,

hot rocks / / light
no particular problem
most of them are from basalt magma

heavy stones with high density
from granitic magma / can cause problems

of all of my  beach tests / last two years
only one still poses noise problems
it is crossed by a strong vein of granite magma ...

we tested dozens of hot rock
from all over the world
and several volcanic beaches
more than 95% are eliminated / without losing gold
with impulse AQ


sent some samples to Carl Morland
First Texas Products 1120 Alza Dr / El Paso / TX 79907
specifying to test on impulse AQ
he will do it without problem

I want to test them / but the shipping costs will be expensive.. 🙂

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

21 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

Do they seem unusually light? Some of them look odd, more like water worn coke or cinder perhaps than natural rocks. Any rocks with high graphite content can be an issue as GB noted as they read non-ferrous.

Since they read so low the Impulse will likely ignore them in disc mode since that is focused more on ring range targets. In non-disc mode advancing the pulse delay should eliminate them.

I know Dave Johnson has an extensive hot rock collection but not sure if he is adding to it anymore.

Advanced Nugget Hunting with the Fisher Gold Bug Metal Detector by Pieter Heydelaar and David Johnson. This out-of-print book is a good basic text on nugget detecting. Although it uses the original Fisher Gold Bug as an example the information applies to most nugget detectors. Part 2 by David Johnson is an excellent primer on hot rocks.

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

19 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

Did you test to see if they are magnetic?  If not, graphite content is a candidate.  My White's TDI (locked at 10 microsecond delay) does not detect a very large graphite rock that my sister found in California, but both the Garrett Carrot and Fisher Gold Bug do.  The Gold Bug gives a TID of 40, which is right at the nominal ferrous/non-ferrous boundary.  That seems consistent with what you are getting with the Equinox.

 

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???

9 hours ago, Mark Gillespie said:

Years ago I sent a box of coal waste dirt to Dave at 1st Texas for analysis.  Yes, they did test and sent a length reply as with what I could do when adjusting my F75 to hunt the areas.  

What exactly are they and where are they native.

Wonder how the TDI would react.

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.

19 hours ago, phrunt said:

A very successful hunt, thanks for the post.  I hope to one day be able to put a post up in the "metal detecting for jewellery" section 🙂

 

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.

Me too.  😕 I'm hoping when it does come out that it does not pick up these rocks. They read #1 on the Equinox - right where the small gold and chains read. I would be willing to pay postage and send some of them to Fisher to make sure they are invisible to the Impulse AQ

It would be my first Fisher detector in 50 years of detecting if I can find one when they are released. If there is not enough supply, then I may have to get whatever Minelab's response will be. Maybe a waterproof, beefed up version of the GPX 5000 😄

10 hours ago, Rick Kempf said:

A good user manual is a joy to use - a bad one is hell on earth. It’s tough to walk the line between what is necessary and useful and what just adds bulk and confusion. Tech writers get paid good money to do this well.

A supplementary book - full of background on where the detector came from and how PI’s differ from VLF - going on to info developed from usage in the field - those are also valuable, but very different than the user manual.

I'd be happy without either of those, if I could just get the machine soon. My beach season is in full swing now. Sometimes it's more fun without a manual 😄

I'm hoping it can at least match the depth I am getting with my GPX 5000 at the beach. Real Iron discrimination?....... that would be super, If it handles EMI extremely well.......really super super 😄 And water proof ....hmmmm, OK I'll buy one. 😍

Beauty of a Seated Quarter. That coin eluded me for almost 40 years.... and then I found 2 of them  lol

Well it's come full circle at the beach. I was not able to get out any sooner than yesterday, but was hoping the beach hadn't changed a lot. Well nature waits for no one 😄 All the sand that was removed (around 12-15" worth) was now neatly back in place. There would be no easy silver picking. I also wanted to try out a new DD coil for the GPX I had just recently received. I did not get that chance since I left it home, so I decided to try going over the areas that I figured I would have a shot at getting some silver. I did notice that there were NO other detectorists out that day. Unusual for this beach. I soon found out that the targets were out of range for the most part. A lot of ground covered and a lot of silence. In this situation, the targets found are different than the targets found when the beach is stripped of a decent amount of sand. You tend to dig a lot of big, deep iron, mainly because it is so deep that it sounds softer and sizes smaller that usual. You also find a lot of thin wire, and smaller nails that were washed back on shore, and were at a depth that they would sound sweet too. Absent are all the good coins I was used to digging. Although I did not realize that I was stuck at 99 silvers from this beach, I was begging for at least one silver. that way I was not skunked for the trip. One really crusty silver dime was the only silver of the hunt. When I got home I realized that was #100 silver. 🤘 I've included the trash targets I found and if you look closely you can see an American dime for scale. I did that for my tiny new coil picture too 😉 Great to get out, and hopefully I can sneak into a new beach and try that coil out. I think I'll need a bungee cord for that one though.

That ring sure looks good. You sure that stone is not real???

25 minutes ago, Rick Kempf said:

Here’s a little something LE.JAG posted on another forum recently - along the same lines...

a scoop for the forum 
the latest changes now allow 
detect a 24 carat ring 
weighing less than 5 gr (no ring 24k heavier to test ...) 

under a big nail / or several small nails 
if you have a ring 24k try with your detectors 

it's impossible / even tdi (modif Reg Sniff) can not do it (22K is its limit ) 

it will be a very specific setting 
that I would explain in video 

this extraordinary feat? 
detect the 24k under the iron 
gives you an idea of the level of separation, gold / iron”
 

I think we are all eager to see this machine come out. My hope is someone buys it and hates it and will sell it to me for a discount price 😄

Thanks. I do save all my junk targets from each beach in separate boxes until the season is over, just to see how much I dig. Then I recycle them. Here are some of the usual targets I dig from that beach. I will dig around 4x what is in that picture per 1 visit. Some people may say that you can tell the size of an object and just pass on it. It's true, I can tell the general size, but with a PI you can never be 100% sure if it's a deep big target at 20", or a large coin (our silver half dollars) at around 8". A big coin at 8" comes in very loud and wide. The added benefit of digging iron is that I remove some very nasty pointy objects. I have also found coins near or with that iron many times. If I get out soon, I will save the junk targets for a picture.

Well had to see if the area  I did last time out would continue producing silver. I was planning on slowing down a bit and going past where I left off. The depth of the first couple of copper pennies let me know that time is running out. The beach is sanding in again and more areas are beyond my machine's capabilities. I know it's all still down there, since I was hitting it before.. Now the signals were far and few between. Also the deep and big iron now sounds coin sized. I still managed to squeak out some good targets, but not many. One of the nickels was a 1901 Liberty Head V nickel. 6 Silver dimes and a tiny silver ring rounds up the silver tally. Copper penny to zinc ratio was excellent again. That one zinc was along side, just under a huge rock. Took me a while to remove it and when I did BAM a zinc penny😆.....😡 The GPX, like probably any other PI, can keep you digging quality targets, although you will be digging a lot of iron. I watch a couple of other detectorists come and go quickly due to lack of targets. They are always shocked to see the quantity of coins I get. Then I showed them my iron and everything was better 🙂 Hopefully I can sneak out thus week for another hunt. 

22 hours ago, kac said:

Good point, I have recovered dimes and pennies that were paper thin from the salt yet their diameter was fairly close to original.

I think you could be right, here are some what looks like collectable knock offs on amazon that are very similar to yours:

https://www.amazon.com/YEARS-Ancient-GLADIATOR-CHRISTIANITY-Velvet/dp/B07RR3V787?SubscriptionId=AKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q&tag=duckduckgo-ffab-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B07RR3V787

That one does look like it. Thanks. Those may be real ones on Amazon too. There are so many of those coins found that a bit of electrolysis and they probably look like the ones in the picture. I'm just surprised I got one at the beach.

Here's a couple of better picture.

7 hours ago, kac said:

Check some of the early Irish coins. That could be what is left of a Hibernia. Diameter might be blown away from the erosion but what should help is there are not of early coins with a head facing right. One's I know of are Hibernia and early King Georges. Hibernia date in early 1720's, think the KG's are 1780's. 

I'm thinking it is a small Roman coin lost by a service man that was stationed over sees. If you look at the size of the head next to the dime, it is proportional to the size of the coin. If it were even a farthing size copper, the head would not shrink with the corrosion. It has to be minted close to that size disc. It may have even been from a planted hunt or some kid that brought it from home to show it off.

1 hour ago, phrunt said:

It pays to never give up, if you went home all disappointed at the 5 or so hour mark you'd miss all that good stuff... If that is a Roman coin you'd think it'd be an extremely rare find in your area.  A great ring too, does it fit

I've never been one to give up ....don't know if that is smart or stupid😄 I guess in this instance it was smart. Yep, them Roman coins are not natural here, unless we want to re-write history a bit. I didn't try the ring on just in case there is some voodoo attached to it. My luck, it will never come off😧

So there was a decent storm with high winds that ripped the coast a bit. I was expecting a washed out beach, so I headed down as early as I could. This is the silver beach that has been so good to me. When I got there I found that the beach was actually sanded in where I was hunting last time. But some areas remained the same, so I hunted those areas. 6 1/2 hours later I had less than a dollar in clad. What a waste of a day. But I continued, as I usually stay for around 8 hours. The last 1 1/2 hours what a blur 😄 It all started with a small copper disk I found about 2 inches deep. I thought it was a washer, but it turns out it may be a Roman coin. This beach, as almost all beaches, was hopping after WW2, so I think a soldier brought this back with him. Then the copper pennies started to show up, then an early 18th century bronze ship spike (my 3rd) surfaced, with a sliver of wood still attached. Then the silver starts to pop up. Finally a gold ring completely surprises me. It may have some German script in it partially says weit lo**. Marked 969 14K. You can't tell from the picture but the band is gold and the middle is some kind of white (white gold, Platinum, nickel???) I'm assuming the 969 designation refers to that metal. That day was 80% hard work and then 20% pure bliss🤪 I'm hoping I can get out there next week but I might have an short archaeology project starting soon taking away my beach day!!!!