maxxkatt

wishful thinking. I looking for a Equinox 3090.

Yes, Doc is great to deal with and very dependable.

great finds. I wonder what kind ok kick a rifle had shooting a .69 cal like the one you fired. Would probably stop a bear.

Now that is one sweet bottle. Amazing they can last that long and not broken. I guess it is hard to break them buried in a creek or river. As a kid we use to throw rocks at every single bottle to watch it break and see who had the best arm.

cannot find that video. Sorry. but easy to test. take pop tops and pull tabs. put on ground and poptop on top silver dime. in multi swing over target and see if poptop masks the dime. next do the same in 4 khz and you should see a tid for the time, not the poptop or a down averaged number for both.

Clive Clynick's books on the Equinox are much better than Andy's. Andy's book on the CTX3030 was very good, his Equinox book not so good and in my opinion full of filler fluff. Do not under any circumstances use anyone elses settings. Stay in the standard modes until you learn how to set up your 800 for your type of hunting and hunt sites. It does not take much to get a setting wrong on the 800 and totally ruin a hunt by using a badly tuned detector. That has been my personal experience with 3 years on the 800. Hunting coins in a park that is trashy with modern trash (aluminum) use park1 or par2 and switch to 4kHz. 80% of your aluminum trash is will be invisible to your 800. Some times pull tabs with out their tail and screw caps will still trigger the 800's roundness routine and report those as good targets.

I am curious. are you detecting different areas of that park and it keeps producing, or hunting the same areas. If you are hunting the same areas are you wandering or gridding and are you using the same settings. What I am getting at if you are hunting the same area what do you think is the reason you missed these items the first time? I am not criticizing, but just trying to understand what is making that area still produce if it is the same area you hunted before?

Just use park1 or park2 and switch to 4 kHz. Even if it is noisy use a higher sensitivity than normal, as much as you can stand. Then listen for your coin audio. If you are comfortable using bins and tones, make sure your high tone will be silver coins, which it will be in a park1 or park2 probably so likely no need to adjust bins and tones. I have done just what I described in a very popular park with tons of modern trash. Turn on your threshold and listen. If it going off like a automatic weapon, that is what I call tons of modern trash. Doing this I started finding coins rather easily. No silver coins, because this park is along the Chattahoochee river and every ten years or so it floods and I rather think the old coins are too deep for most detectors.

The tip off was some day hunting and not finding much. If you really don't understand all of the settings use the standard settings and just noise cancel and ground balance. From the early days of having the 800 I messed with some of the advanced settings and not knowing really what they were all about. I would put a standard setting that you think is best in your user setting. Then play around. One thing that gets adjusted a lot on the Nox is the sensitivity in an effort to get rid of all the seemingly good good signals from lots of small fragments of metallic trash especially modern metallic fragments. So you drop the sensitivity to quiet the machine and you really lose depth. mess with the recovery rate and the iron balance and you can also detune the detector if you don't really know how to use those two settings and correctly apply them to your local site. Big hint. run your threshold and listen to the number of targets under your coil. Out in a field with few targets you can lower your recovery rate and get a little more depth. But the reverse is true, in a trashy park your threshold might be going off like a machine gun. you need to use a high recovery rate and if you do that and drop back the sensitivity to quiet the 800 you then are back down to if you are lucky a 4-5" recovery depth. So you will only conclude there is no deep silver in that park where you are hunting. So you are hunting now with a dectector "tuned" or set up to not be able to find deep silver. A better alternative for deep coins especially silver is to use a small 6" coil and use the standard park 1 or 2 mode and swing slowly with the most sensitivity you can stand. And hunt in the 4kHz mode. That will eliminate the pull tabs, pop tops and some can slaw. No joke, it really will. Test it out. I found out the hard way the most successful Nox hunters are doing: 1) not hunting in modern trashy areas. or: 2) really know how to set up their Nox or both of these. The nox is a really hot machine, great for gold hunting in the desert, small ear studs on the beach and volleyball courts, but that fine hot sensitivity to small metallic fragments should be able to be switched off. As far as I know, the only way to switch it off is to really turn down the overall sensitivity and detune hunting in for items where you don't wish to hear all those small pieces of modern trash. That is a feature of multi-frequency, so maybe hunt in 15 or 20 khz so as to disable the "hotness" of the Nox. Probably 4, 10, 15 if you are hunting for silver coins. Just a suggestion. I don't own my 800 any more. I know this is a bit of rambling, so I hope you could get something out of it that is useful. So your own test on 4khz. put a silver dime next to a square tab on some clean ground. swing in 4 kHz and then in multi and see how the TID and audio reports on the square tab and the silver dime. In a very trashy modern park, this will eliminate 80% of your problem targets. I saw a member's video on this and could not believe it and tried it and now believe it.

I think the CTX3030 was named after the famous Winchester lever action rifle using 30.30 bullets that won the west. Just a guess on my part. Have no inside knowledge.

I will tell you this. The combinatons and permutations are quite gigantic on the 800 resulting from the many ways you can set an 800. Stay as absolute close to standard modes. Why, because the engineers have done an excellent job of setting those defaults. And if you get one or two settings wrong, you in effect detune your 800 and make it much less efficient. I had to learn that lesson the hard, hard way. Wasted a lot of my hunting time with a detuned detector.

When hunting coins in a real trashy area switch to 4kHz. It totally hides pop tops and pull tabs and keeps them from masking a silver coin and keeps from down averaging the coin value. A guy did a video of that fact and it was hard for me to believe. So I tested it out and he was 100% correct. Then I went to my trashy park and I mean trashy, trashy with pop tops and pull tabs and same great results. Was quite easy to put out coins in areas I would not hunt before with my 800.

Looking at that picture I figure Gary is a genius. That is what I need. A younger person doing all the digging for me. Gary is smarter than I thought he was. Never really thought he was dumb. You don't get to be on a popular show like that being dumb.

I have been in and out of this hobby for many years. Jumped back in 6 years ago with AT Pro, fine machine. Got caught up in the Equinox hype and just had to have an 800 so bought one after selling my AT Pro. Recently sold my 800 and bought CTX3030. (for some loss of hearing, not any reasons the 800 was not a good detector). I hunt parks and civil war relics in urban Atlanta. For me the hobby gets me out of the house and the dreaded unlimited honey do list. My wife still works and I am semi-retired. Run a small online business. The part of being retired she feel quite content with filling up with her honey do list. Or as she starts out every sentence is "honey, I need you to do this...". My detecting is physical exercise since some hunts I hike in a mile or two and back out. The thrill of not knowing what is under your coil and digging is fun. But with my CTX3030 on coins it pretty much spoils the suspense since it is so accurate at ID's coins vs trash. Civil War relic hunting is a different story and even the CTX will keep you in suspense often. There is a technical and historical intellectual challenge to this hobby that helps keep the mind sharp. Learning a new modern metal detector, especially one from a different vendor is like learning a Mac when you have 30 years experience on the PC or vice versa. Learning to use new research tools is also fun and often results in some better places to hunt. I have thought about giving up metal detecting, especially in the 1st year with my Nox 800. But what else would I do? I really cannot think of another hobby that offers both physical benefits and intellectual challenges. Only thing close is panning for gold. But now in North Georgia where the gold is, it is all pretty much private property so you have to join a gold club and pay monthly dues. I guess I was spoiled for two years I had exclusive use of a 40 acre original lottery land lot with two gold mines and a gold bearing stream running through the property. I didn't back then realize how good I had it. But my boys and I had a great two years panning on the weekends. bike riding? no, bowling? no, walking or running? no, stamp collecting? no, coin collecting? no, art painting? no tried that, writing books? no best seller was produced but it was enjoyable and gave me a sense of accomplishment. reading? no and the list goes on. It is metal detecting for me as long as I can physically get out there and walk and swing. It is very hard to describe to others outside this great hobby. I also think it takes a special type of person. I think we detectorists are just plain curious and like to find things. Based on my years on the forum, we come from all walks of life. Some times we go a year or more between a really good find. But between those great finds we are having fun and that is what this hobby is all about having fun. Communicating on forums with like minded people is also fun, because in every day life, I rarely, if ever run into a detectorists other than some rare sightings while out detecting. Those are rare, maybe 4-5 in the past six years detecting in urban Atlanta. My dream location would be somewhere on the east coast of FL say lower half of the Treasure Coast down to South Beach. I know two detectorists who do live in that area and really clean up on the rings with nice chunks of ice on them. These two guys are not active on forums or do not make videos of their finds. But they make more than a decent living with their finds. The know where to hunt, know how to read beaches, they have the right detectors and years of beach hunting experiences. Each shared what the do with me because I was writing a small book on Metal Detecting the Treasure Coast. But they both ask me not to reveal their identity. But moving to FL is not in the cards. My wife has too many relatives near us and she would never consider leaving where we live. So like a lot of detectorists, we just have to make do with detecting sites that are within our comfort driving range. For me my limit is about 1 - 1.5 hours drive to a site. Fortunately I have quite a few sites within the 40 minute range.

I put more money in my 800, Carbon fiber rods, coiltek 10 x 5" coil, 6 inch coil. Of course this raised my investment and brought me closer to the CTX3030 and other detectors. I was very lucking in finding a CTX3030 four years old, new in box with full 3 year warranty. CTX3030, headphones, WM10, rechargeable battery and charger and akline battery holder, data cable. It was the latest with upgraded seals. All for $1,400 which was just at my budget level with enough left over to buy Minelabs Pro-Swing 45 harness, which is necessary for me. Only 3 weeks and about 20 hours on the CTX3030 but so far it is quite a coin hunter for me with that great display for FE-CO values. Xchange2 program makes programming it a piece of cake. It is a very well written program and my background is software development. Lots of good info on the CTX3030 in great detail on metal detecting forums and video because it was introduced in 2012. Never thought I would buy an older detector, but with my high frequency hearing loss the 800 was not doing it for me. With the greatly enhanced visual display of the CTX3030 it helps me overcome my hearing handicap. Don't read this post as a criticism of the 800, it just was not a good fit for me.