schoolofhardNox

Nice variety of years as usual. Not sure what that big brass piece is but it peaks my interest - maybe gun related or military? 🤔 The two headed nail is cool for sure. Maybe that is how they were made and then just cut in half and pointed? Silver is never out of style by the way 😄

That makes the whole day worth it. Something about seeing gold send a victory pulse to the brain 😄

I'm late to this, but was wondering if you could attach a counter to a new member that let's just you know someone is new and is sending a lot of PM's. Anyone new doesn't know enough people to send multiple PM's. If a new member sends more than one PM, then maybe that could report to you that information. As a lot of people here, I have never had an issue that I can remember.

Very Nice!! That's one way to make you like a new machine 😄

NOoooooo.............. That's exactly the kind of pre-hunt thinking that got me into trouble in the first place. 😄 Next hunt will be worse than this hunt. It will rain molten aluminum and iron will jump from the sea. There 😊 Set the bar low and you won't fail. 😉 Huh ...... 😞. I've done that too. 😄 But in my defense, the guy at the store swore to me that they use hard plastic inside the boots for their durability. 🤔 Never did buy anything from that store again. Next time the pinpointer comes with me. I scrap electronics for fun 😄 I can smash that puppy and extract the board in less than a minute. Seriously, I recycle metals and electronics for their components. There are buyers for boards and I just collect them until I get a lot. I was a bit shocked that the modes differed enough to cause the land version to be noticeably different from the beach version. It's not that it was unusable by any means, but more that it did change it enough for me to notice the difference it was giving me towards iron. I just found it to make the iron iffy enough for me to dig it. I was way more confident in beach mode with the iron. Who knows, maybe just a fluke. I won't be able to test it again for a couple of weeks. I want to hit the grass and try for some more silver from the fields, next trip out.

Beach hunt # 19 was at the same beach that gave me gold and silver last time out. This was going to be a full Manticore hunt. Got up very early to be there just before sunup since it was going to rain/snow in the afternoon. I prepped everything and was psyched to get going, dreaming of more silver and gold. What I forgot to plan for was that I would be an idiot that day. 🙄 Yep, seems that last time out I tried the high sensitivity people were wondering about and also switched from Beach Mode to All Terrain Mode. A seemingly unimportant technicality. So, I hit the beach running and drop the sensitivity down to 25 and start hunting, but notice the machine is really sparky this time around. Then I notice that the method I use for identifying iron isn’t working well today. I was very disappointed that my system was not working. ☹️ I detected for most of the day with very little to show, except that I had a lot more iron than I wanted. I was a bit bummed and lost a little faith in the Manticore. I decided to try another program but them I noticed that I was not in beach mode. What a rookie move. 😬 Switched over and all was well except that my time has nearly run out. Oh well, it’s just like the old days when you pack everything for a great relic hunt but…. you forgot to charge them Nicad batteries. I will not make that mistake of rushing to hunt before verifying my detector is set correctly again. So, no gold or silver, but I did find some weird stuff. A Garmin GPS which I will scrap out for its PC board, a cool, old pad lock, and an unusual amount of big lead, including a nice, unmarked ingot. So, the second trial of identifying iron on the Manticore will have to wait a while. I may try a grass area next hunt to see how the iron responds to my system of IDing it. Still nice to get out hunting and always better than working. 🙂

I find that all the time 🙄, except mine is made of iron 😄 I'm surprised your still alive and didn't have a heart attack. Saying, "Great Find" is an understatement.

That is some great beach hunting!!! 😍 Awesome finds. Hurts to hunt like that, but well worth it. More storms coming in, maybe time to change beaches.

I do the picture route. It has the finds (good and bad), the detector used, and the amount of time spent. That is the reason I put that information on the pictures I post here. They then go into a folder with the date of the hunt. If my hard drive dies, I'm toast 😄 But long term for my beach hunts, I put all the total coins and jewelry into plastic bins with the beach labeled on each. My relics I just put in boxes or display cases. Important hunts, I have bagged them and labeled the place where found. When I die, no one will care and the kids will Coinstar everything 😲...😆

Not enough time on it to notice the negatives yet. It's pretty lightweight and I didn't notice any issues swinging it but I haven't had a full hunt with it yet. Hopefully I will get out Thursday and spend the full day using it at a beach. Haven't done a relic hunt yet, but on the beach the iron is manageable. Any iron I dug last time out was by choice or with the pinpointer in with other targets. Only got really fooled twice, but I'm still learning. I think that the issues will come later after some wear and tear on the units. Hopefully it doesn't leak. We need some southern guys to take it in the water. But for me, no complaints so far.

Thanks. I'm hoping my luck continues. I'm hoping more people can get there machines and see if they feel the same way as I do about it.

Yeah nails suck 😄 unless they are rose head nails, then they are ok. So far so good, but I'm really liking the target response a lot better than the Equinox. It's a decent improvement over the 800 for sure. It's more precision like over the older Nox. I wonder how everyone likes the 900 over the 800?

Thanks man. I'm really liking this machine for the short time I have used it. I may brave the next hunt at a colonial cellar hole nearby. Those nails are tough to get around, so I'm not expecting an easy day of it. We'll see if any of the normal tricks work on those cut or wrought nails 😬

Thanks. The beaches are building my confidence up so they can drop me hard one day 😄

Here is a video that shows what I was talking about in the last post. Go to time stamp 5:42 and you will notice the numbers hit into the low 90's one way but turning 90 degrees the signal breaks up and the numbers drop to the low 60's. I think it starts to build in the upper iron range on the 2dD graph when the numbers are in the 60's. He digs a nail that pinpointed in the center but was really off to the side. This is the best way to ignore tricky iron that I have seen.

Beach hunt # 18 was at the beach suggested by a member here. I was certain the GPX would be my primary machine there, since there are a lot of big rocks exposed and I knew a pulse would not suffer much by detecting above the rocks. But I also wanted to give the Manticore a good workout as well. So, I started with the Manticore, and it wasn’t too long before I had my very first hit. High numbers and out pops a Walking Liberty half dollar. So, this is how the day is going to start? I dug nonferrous for a while but soon the lobster cage pieces started to show up. There are a lot of them there, and after a while by reading the 2D screen, pinpointing and re-scanning the target, turning 90 degrees, etc.… I was fairly confident I could tell them apart from real targets in that number range. Doing the wet sand, I was not getting a lot of targets, so I started to dig iffy targets. Nothing good came from it, so I went back to digging “quality” sounding targets. The Manticore performed very well and netted me that half and 3 silver quarters and what I think is a nice art nouveau sash buckle. The obverse of the half dollar is completely encrusted in iron. Copper cents do not fare well here, as the get destroyed in the tumbling sand and rocks. Not bad for about 3 hours work. So decided to switch to the GPX to see if it will work there as I hoped it would. Since the Manticore ran smooth at 25 sensitivity, I assumed there was not much EMI. Well, the GPX said otherwise, so I toned it down and settled for hearing the EMI. I must say, I wasn’t getting things deep like I thought I would. Lobster trap pieces were hard to ignore, and I started to wonder if I should go back and get the Manticore. But I wanted to work some more rocks and finally found a section where my I got my first decent find…. A glob of iron. It read nice so I was curious what was inside, so I smacked it into the big rock, and it cracked open to reveal? An iron ball. 80 caliber. Wow, it is old and might be case or canister shot. Very unexpected from a lump of crusty iron. Some coins came out but nothing special. Finally, a common looking religious metal surfaced. It was yellow and looked like tumbled brass. We had these as kids in school and they were nickel plated brass. But when I looked at it at home it was different, so out come the magnifying glasses to reveal the 14K stamp. 4.1 grams of gold. Even the jump ring is gold. Where is that chain?????? Not how I envisioned the way the hunt was going to play out, but glad it turned out that way.

I think once more units arrive, people that were fluent with their Equinox will really like this machine. I've played around with the other modes, but their general mode is well done. I will have to at one point force myself to go through all the modes in beach and compare on a deeper signal. Right now I'm just having fun with learning the responses to certain targets. Not yet, This beach has some pretty harsh waves to it but if I get a more inland beach, I will give it a try. When I up the sensitivity to that red zone, I did not see any added bonus to it. I'm worried that the more sensitivity you give it in an EMI environment, the worse it will be. If there is a place that has little EMI, then it would probably have a much more positive effect. Time will tell, but for the beaches I do, I'll probably keep it stable at 25 and maybe push it up a number or two if possible.

I stole that from someone 🤭

Upper section that is always wet during high tide. Beach General. One tone all metal

So I did another beach hunt with the Manticore. Some things about it I noticed. It loves saturated sand after the high tide recedes. It responded well to a deep silver half dollar and a deep silver quarter in that saturated sand. Hit them both at around 10-12" I know everyone is worried about the iron reading good. Yes it does and it reads right around the TID of 40-50 and again pegged at 98-99. But if you use all the things you have learned about iron you can dig very little of it on the beach. I dug iron just to make sure I was calling it correctly and was about 80% accurate. Those of you who are worried about lobster cage pieces, here's what I found out. They hit well in the 40's-50's range (or 98-99) depending on which way you hit them, and will read on the non ferrous line. But at 90 degrees, the should read opposite of what the first angle was.. They will also not pinpoint where the best tone is achieved. They will also start to build into the upper iron range once you pinpoint them. A real target will be quicker to respond and not as drawn out as the lobster pieces. Non ferrous just sounds tighter and more consistent in TID. Turn 90 degrees and if the target is not sharp, I would suspect iron. Very deep targets may stray a bit from this but generally sound quiet but solid and pinpoint correctly. Give it a try and let me know if you get the same results. Off to clean today's stuff and post what I found later in my beach thread.

I tried 30 -35. Numbers bounced like crazy at 35. 30 was tamer but still too noisy to hunt, without checking every false signal. Ran it all day at 25 and it purred like a kitten 😄

Air tests are not the best, and I don't have the coin in question, but I tried a steel core Canadian quarter with a smaller brass coin on top. In ground scenario with the coin in question, would be the best though. I'm gonna say that strict coil height and sweep control is pretty important. In these pictures you can see what happens when you run the coin over the coil without strict control. The numbers fluctuate by 3 or 4 in the iron range, but that still may work for one particular coin. The brass coin alone reads 52, but on top of (and in front of) the nickel/iron quarter, the readings drop a bit. Again this is just to show you the reaction of the screen.

It probably will vary, hopefully not too much, but you could extend the iron section that you want to include by 2 or 3 numbers, so that the ferrous signal is accepted. The non ferrous signal from the coin would probably already be accepted if you were set up to include all non ferrous. I think MInelab had a video on notching in iron coins. If it were me, I would only focus on adjusting the iron response from the mixed metal coin. Tighten the iron response only enough to include a couple of numbers, and the rest of the mixed signal should come through. Just my thinking on it.

If it was just iron it would probably be easier to accept that narrow spot. I'm guessing the way to do it is to read the target with no discrimination and see where the pattern lands. I would think it would travel from a certain number in the non ferrous line and continue up into the ferrous line. It would probably look like how a nail responds sometimes. But it sounds like it could work unless a nail displays in the same exact spot as the coin would.

Exactly!! When the wind exposes the first black layer and that is what your detector sees first, depth is cut a lot. Target ID is also messed up. Happy new year to you too.