Daniel Tn

Tony Eisenhowers are pretty good for volume for me. I do have 2 complaints about them though. 1. The cord is too short for my liking. 2. They do not fit my head well at all and as far as I can tell, there is no way to adjust them. If they are, I'd like to know. I cannot wear them with the headband across the top of my head. I have to put the band behind my head and then the ear cups do not fit my ears well.

For what it's worth, out of the different models of the TDI, I found several the older ones to be better for my intended purposes of relic and jewelry hunting. The big box TDIs had at least 4 different models to it. There of course, was the Pro and Regular...but there were 3 versions of the regular big box. The first one was the tan colored box...those were actually more the less prototypes and what most refer to as the "through hole" design. The next one is what I refer to as the small knob big box....all of the knobs are small and all black colored. This is my favorite of the whole series...will explain a bit in a minute. The later ones had bigger/fatter knobs with silver on top of them. Then later on came the SL, then the SL special edition with the new paint job...then the Beach Hunter. Okay...so my opinion on them is, the newest versions of the TDI have had some tweaks with the threshold to make them smoother. The older ones were indeed a bit unstable...erratic if you will. They were hard to get smooth, unless you turned them up really high and then you had trouble hearing those small subtle sounds. Not so important for relic hunters but nugget hunters...that's a big deal. So they smoothed the threshold out and now it purrs like a kitten. But whatever they did...they took away the nuances for being able to tell a nail from a high conductor target. My best guess is, they sped up the SAT. With the older models, on a coin or say Civil War bullet, the machine would almost "bog down" over them. It was a long drawn out audio signal. The nails would be much shorter...almost abrupt sounding. It was very simple to tell them apart. With the newer versions...starting with the big box, big knob version and progressing thru the TDI SL...this is gone. The bogging down sound is gone that is. Now everything sounds the same to my ears. The sound is chopped off and then it goes back to the threshold.

Jim, The short answer is no. The main point of the video was to demo the sounds of the pulse machines with a short example of why I prefer one to the other. The sound of the TDI on a bobby pin is the same on the TDI longways or however you want to pass it across the coil. With a nail, if you hold it a certain way, you can get it to respond on the edges of the coil and not in the center, and if you whip it rapidly by the coil, you can get it to give a double beep. That's what I would do in the field with the TDI before I got a GPX...circle all around the target and speed the coil up really fast. If I ever got it to give a double beep, then I reasoned it was a nail and moved on. If the nail was bent or rusted more on the head...you wouldn't get the double blip. I've owned all generations of the TDI...from the Pro, to the regular big box (even the tan colored box through hole design), to the SL and the one in the video was the new Beach Hunter. IMO, a mono coil seems to help this somewhat but the stock dual field coil makes it tough to ID a nail. Not sure how the mono coils handle bobby pins...the Beach Hunter version is the only one I have tried on the beach, and you are stuck with the 12" DF coil for now. On the GPX side of it, on the bobby pin I can get it to entirely null on it or to give that slight high warble sound with the way it is held. On the nail, if its within a few inches of the coil it nulls on it no matter how its held or oriented. The distance from the coil seems to matter most...and how aggressive the iron disc is set. If its set too low then it is more easily fooled by deep iron. At the same time, if it is set too high, then you can pass over deep non ferrous targets...it will blank those out. I tend to balance it. I try to run it as low as I can and try to find the breaking point of it at each site. If I'm getting fooled by too much deeper iron, then I will bump it up a number or two.

I use to shoot competition 3D Archery and have several carbon fiber target stabilizers and probably a pound in weights I've gathered over the years. The part of interest would just be the end cap with thread bolt that the weights screw onto as that is all that it is. You can even go buy longer bolts to add more weight to. You've got me wondering now how I could make this work with the stock Equinox rod and add some of my weights to the back and make it perfect balance. Target archery stabilizers are just hollow carbon rods with end caps on them. The weights they make specifically for them are very expensive for some reason. I've never figured that out. Most come in 1 ounce stacks...some companies offer them in half ounce stacks though. I like that idea...and having the ability to add or subtract weights by just screwing them on or off a bolt is a plus. You could balance it for the stock coil or 15 inch coil very easily.

"What's the most valuable thing you have found with that thing?". That one seems to come up the most on beaches. Or...you'll run into the one upper that has found all sorts of far fetched stuff. I had one guy tell me he found a whole jar of Confederate gold coins one time. I asked him what he was doing vacationing in the poor man's side of the gulf of Mexico and not on his own private island. ? Drayton does come across as a bit arrogant in his books. He is always going on about how much smarter he is vs "the competition". He does have a YouTube channel in which he finds some gold jewelry. He does live and hunt in the part of Florida in which I consider to be where the wealthier people vacation. The poor people like me save and scrape up enough money to go to PCB, Destin, or Gulf Shores. The higher rollers go to Ft. Lauderdale and that area that Drayton hunts. They may very well lose a $3,000 ring there...while people on the Destin side can barely afford Tungsten rings. Haha.

I like mine more for using with my phone than with the detector. They work great for that. Despite them being low latency, there is a delay in the audio and coil timing. You will really notice it if you use a pair of wired headphones with the Nox over say a target laying on top of the ground or a marked in ground target. It's not much, and pending on your plug size you may not even notice it at all. But its there for sure. I do like some of the features of the wireless phones. They aren't bad at all. But after getting Tony Eisenhowers waterproof phones...I am going to use them full time with the Nox. On land and in water. I really like 'em that much.

My pair came today. FINALLY, a pair of waterproof headphones with volume loud enough I could hear. I had to turn the detector volume down a few digits and I was happy as a lark. Do NOT waste your money on those yellow Minelabs or the Gray Ghosts. Email Tony and get you a pair. I like the sound of them so well I will probably use them all the time on land as well.

Very well articulated story Steve, as always!! Congrats on your finds. I like reading about people's trips over there but for some reason I've never had an interest in going myself. I guess most of it is due to not knowing what the heck most of the stuff is that I see pictures or videos of. Haha.

I'm still more excited about this coil than I was the 6 inch. I wasn't even really wanting a 6 inch but kind of just bought one due to the reports on how deep the thing goes. I admit I was shocked at that myself...deepest small coil I have ever seen. But I swear I tried hunting a Civil War camp the other day that was loaded in iron...and it took me 4 hours just to cover a 50 yard long by 20 yard wide area worth of overlapping swings.

There is a lot of info coming through via audio in the Equinox, if a person chooses to utilize it. I personally believe using anything other than 50 tones takes away the nuances of the audio. You'll get a cleaner hit in the 2 or 5 tone options but you can't hear those nuances. Somehow I think Minelab has this machine being able to determine that an object is an alloy, and can report the differences in the metal alloys. I could be wrong, as I'm just guessing based on the signal I have gotten and what the object actually turned out being. I have no idea how many hours of use I have on the unit. I don't keep track of all that as it really doesn't matter. If I'm in a site where I'm going to dig everything non ferrous, I will go to 2 tone and have clearer sounds on targets. If I'm in trash and cherry picking, I'll be in 50 tone. I have found something though that has came in with the Nox update. My machine did not do this before with the old version. I had some items laid out on a rubber stall mat doing a video between the Nox and Kruzer. I happened to have the small coils on them and some pieces of flat iron, bottle caps, and a coin or two. The target this happened on was a US silver quarter laying flat. When I ran the coil over the quarter to show the difference in sounds....I didn't get a sound but maybe once out of 3 swings over the top of the quarter. Very odd...I had to look and make sure I hadn't somehow discriminated out the quarter range, and I hadn't.

My experience is that by raising iron bias, you lose quite a bit of the "tells" that the steel and alloy metals give. Especially the newer beer bottle caps. I don't ever dig them unless I swap to the Multi Kruzer and then I have a tough time with them. I know they are obviously already there but when I've got the Nox in my hands, I just don't dig them. To my ear they are easy to figure out. I've not figured out any "tells" with the Kruzer as of yet. Same with the flat iron. I'm just not digging any with the Nox.

I think there is a lot of misunderstanding of what the Iron Bias filter setting does vs what people think it does. I think that is culprit in some people's problem with the iron, bottle caps, etc. Without getting too deep into it, I will say that you gotta understand that not all FERROUS objects are iron. Steel is not iron and iron is not steel. A lot of the ferrous objects we call "iron" and lump into the iron category can actually be an alloy made up with non ferrous materials. The modern crown cap "bottle cap" found on most beer bottles today are basically a steel alloy version of their older counter parts and contain copper, zinc, and I think nickel too. What does this have to do with Iron Bias? Well the higher you set the iron bias, the stronger it tends to filter out the ferrous part of the equation...which is great if an item is pure iron. Bottlecaps and many other objects are not pure iron, so raising the iron bias on those simply removes the ferrous part of the compound but makes the non ferrous alloy part stand out better....right the opposite of what you want to do.

I'm running the new version but I haven't really ran into any issues with it as of yet. The only time I run into deep iron with the Nox is if I have hit a spell where I've not dug anything in a while, and then I start trying to force signals; digging those that I'm pretty sure are bad, but there is just enough of a high tone coming thru every now and again that makes me curious. It was that way with the first version and the newer one. What I have noticed though is something pretty eye opening when comparing to the Multi Kruzer. Here lately I've just been using both machines with their respective small coils...6 inch for the Nox and 7 inch for the Kruzer. In my soil, the Nox still goes deeper, despite the Kruzer having a slightly larger coil. But that's not what I am getting at. It has to do with iron. This Multi Kruzer loves flat iron. I'm talking it will sing out on it, repeatable and consistent 50 to 80 IDs on flat iron....it depends on the size/thickness of it too in what it will read. I started noticing this when I would be comparing both machines....as in hunting with one, marking good signals with it, then getting the other machine and comparing those same signals. I noticed when I would hunt with the Kruzer, I was getting several signals each time that it was giving an unmistakable good signal on...ID higher than the nickel range, and into the coin range....that when checked with the Nox, it would only give single digit numbers or at most, an ID of 10. Well that's quite a difference....when you have one machine reading into its higher conductive coin range and the other not even registering as a nickel. I thought to myself "uh oh...". That was until I started digging these things. 100% OF THE TIME....not just once...or twice...the target is iron. I have a whole pile of iron now that this is verified on....the Kruzer will read as a mid to high conductive target when it is flat iron. The Nox will single digit read it AS LONG AS it is in multi freq mode. If you go to the single freq on the Nox...you will get the same exact thing that the Multi Kruzer is doing over the iron. It causes it to instantly shoot up into the 20-30 ID range.

This is going to be an odd freshwater season here. Typically around here, the "start of summer" usually kicks off with Memorial Day in May. That's when people really start hitting the water to swim and such, and then unoffically ends Labor Day weekend in September. This year is different; May and June were unusually rainy months this year...seemed like every weekend it rained, well into July. The popular peak times for the beaches are the weekends, so the beach traffic was just not like it normally is. But from August thru now, it has rained very little and has been perfect days for swimming. Today finds us in the 2nd half of September and it's 90 degrees outside today here. So...this has people still flocking to the beaches, even though in years past they have pretty much quit going by this time...either due to schools being in session or whatever else. If it keeps doing like this, I may get an extra month or so of "depositors" hitting the water. The bad in all of it is...I've found 16 rings this year so far, and only one of them has been gold. The rest have been junk (tungsten, stainless, or GP), with the exception of a few were .925 silver. The Nox has been FUN to hunt with in the water for sure.

If they do I hope Minelab makes it. The CoilTek models for the CTXs were horrible and I don't see them doing any better with the Nox line. Just my opinion.

Over time, the elliptical wording has been dropped. Same with the CTX large coil, people refer to it as the 17" coil, although it too is elliptical at 13x17. Andy -- Between the Nox and Multi Kruzer it has been a fun test. The Kruzer is built much better overall than the Nox. For depth...In my test garden, the Nox with 6 inch coil is overall deeper and more accurate in ID vs the Kruzer with the 7 inch coil. But most people aren't going for depth with small coils attached. The game there is in how much it seperates. Over the past two weeks I have hunted some nasty trash areas...iron trash. I've hunted areas with one machine and marked signals. Then checked them with the other machine...then dug those and rehunted with the other machine to see if I had missed anything. I have yet to locate a target with one that the other couldn't also detect. The difference has came in ID. The Kruzer has an expanded ID range so it tends to shotgun the ID and tones on a target....a scattering blend if you will. It is never locking or sure of itself...it can just basically say there is SOMETHING non ferrous in the ground. The Nox has a more compressed ID and therefore doesn't jump as much in tone or ID numbers. I feel you might NOT be able to differentiate between a copper penny or dime...but you know it's probably a coin and that is fine with me, cause its getting dug anyway. The Kruzer may give a range from aluminum to coin range and all in between. I also seem to get more noisy operation from the Kruzer and more falses...especially off iron in the 19khz mode. I don't ever dig mis IDing iron with the Nox (iron that reads as non ferrous...like iron buckles and such) but this is common with the Multi Kruzer. Some like that though.

That's how I've always described an elliptical coil; via the larger number. A 6x10 DD coil has always been a "10 inch elliptical" to me. The 12x15 should be roughly the equiv to a 13 inch round coil, and if it offers up to 2 inches more depth, that is huge to a lot of us. The way it stands now, in my soil, the Nox is probably the most accurate IDing VLF machine I have ever ran. BUT...the catch there is that in my soil, it is almost unheard of for a VLF to be able to ID anything accurately beyond 5 to 6 inches or so. In my case, the Nox can give consistent coin numbers and tone on a dime buried at 10 inches. Most all other VLFs will read that dime as iron. 10 inches is about as far as it can do that...you might squeeze another half inch out of it if your coil control is perfect and the coin centered of the coil, and even at 10 inches, it requires good coil control. I have been blown away at the multitude of stuff that has been coming out of the ground with this machine as it is now....adding just 2 more inches to that might open up a whole new world for me. The past couple weeks, I have been playing with the 6 inch coil and comparing it to the 7 inch concentric coil on the Multi Kruzer. That 6 inch coil packs quite a punch too.

The 15 inch is high on my wanted list. I don't think it will be as in demand as the 6 inch coil was/is. But I could be wrong. I didn't have to look for a 6" too hard...it sort of found me.

That's what I was getting at in my post. People all over the forums are popping up with Db readings and then that leads to comparing their figures with other people's readings. I think it is giving the impression that there is quite a variance within the yellow Minelab phones themselves...maybe even suggesting that there are good batches of them and less than good batches. That's why I brought up the points about different apps and such, giving different readings even on the same phone. I didn't mean it to be offensive to anyone here doing the Db testings but from the responses, I guess that's how it was taken.

There has been a huge surge in people using their smart phones as Db readers for headphone volume. I may be to blame for that since I was one of the first to start it for volume comparisons and now it seems as if everyone is doing it and getting different numbers. I think two of the big probles are the downloadable Apps are different and the phones are diff too. I can download two or three Db apps and get quite a spread between each program. One might peak a target at 50 and another app peak the same target at 75. Then there's also differences in phone microphones, etc. Some have calibration offsets and some do not. One App I downloaded was already reading steady 15-20 Db readings by doing nothing and was giving the loudest/highest readings of all the apps. I assume it was adding the 15-20 to whatever reading I was actually getting.

The 6" on the Nox is pretty decent. It exceeded my expectations and actually sings out well on the 7 to 8 inch coins and relics in my test garden. The only catch is, I had to reduce recovery speed to make the targets not sound clipped in audio. I'm not going to hold my breath but I would love to see an 8 or 9 inch round coil for the Nox. Word on the street is Makro will probably produce one first...if they do, the Multi Kruzer will probably knock the Nox out of my hands for a freshwater beach water machine. I like the Nox performance and audio better but 6" is too small and 11" too large in water.

You have the ability to notch ID ranges in and out. You could make disc patterns similar to what you are running on the CTX and not have to disc out the entire range. It would look different on the screen but if you test your rings again with all IDs accepted, you could get an idea where MOST of them fall within (you will never get them ALL if you are using discrimination) and leave those areas open on the disc range and then disc out the rest up to coins and then open that range up too. Discing out -9 to +22 is a bad idea unless you are solely chasing recent dropped stuff IMO.

Here is a quick video I threw together showing the Makro underwater headphones vs the LS Pelso underwater headphones. You can hear the difference in volume between them on this video too.

Kellyco called me a couple days ago about my LS Pelsos and the connector. Yes they are bad and they are offering to do some modification to them to make them work. I DO NOT have the Equinox version of them though. I have the ones for the Multi Kruzer...but they did call me about them. The problem, at least for the Multi Kruzer...was that the headphones do not work if you are using the external waterproof battery power pack. If you do not use the battery pack accessory, the headphones work fine when plugged into the detector's headphone jack. It is possible that this problem may have been reported on the forums for the Kruzer and that people are intrepreting it to be for the Nox as well. Or it could be a similar problem with the Nox....I'm not sure.

The 11" round coil is different.