Daniel Tn

I saw a Manticore on the big auction site yesterday. Surprisingly, it only had 1 bid and was no higher than the original MAP but I imagine the "gotta have it now" folks will run it up once they find it.

You either got lucky or are in for a disappointment. I've checked Cabelas and BPS every day for the listing, including this morning...assuming this roll out goes like the Equinox in which BPS/Cabelas got many units vs dealers. I never saw a listing until just now...but...Cabelas and BPS (same store) are notorious for listing out of stock items...sending shipping & order confirmation emails, and then later, sending emails showing the item has been canceled due to no stock. I hope you guys got lucky but beware...they've done it to me many times on sale items, etc....let you think you got the items and then BOOM...canceled.

No matter how well done a video is, somebody won't like it or want it done differently. I'm personally not a fan of the test garden or above ground nail/separation tests. Simply because there's a lot of "slide of the hand" tricks a person can do to make one machine stand out and look better. Especially the buried test garden ones...in some instances you can tweak a machine to hit a specific target you have buried in there BUT in real world hunt conditions, you'd never be able to use the settings in which you achieved it. The ole manual ground balance knob machines could do this with balancing into the negative zone. You could impress people in videos via showing an obtained signal over specific test garden targets but in actual hunt conditions with those settings, you more the less made the machine very chatty and unstable. A lot of people are doing the same things with certain settings just to show the ability to pick up a specific target but in real world hunting, they wouldn't be able use those settings. Be very cautious as to who you watch and what you believe. I take em all with a grain of salt.

I don't think most dealers took money on the "preorder" but rather just made a list of those interested and would then contact the people for payment as the units come in. That's how my normal dealer does things.

If any dealer has empty places, put me down for 1.

It looks very thought out for simplicity. No continuous menu scrolling, etc. I'm not sure why you'd want a semi multi freq machine for gold prospecting though...just doesn't seem to be in its wheelhouse. Especially with all the gold specific machines already on the market. This ticks all my boxes though for a multi purpose relic/beach machine though.

I agree with the weight vs performance thought. Performance is much higher up the scale...in fact, overall weight isn't even on my consideration list. I've swung the GPX with DeTech 15" coil for 10 hrs a day, for a whole week. The CTX feels like nothing compared to that GPX setup. I've hunted with the CTX from our beach condo to distant features on the horizon. One yr it was detecting to a pier I could see and back...turns out it was 5 miles one way to it. I loved every step. Came back to the condo...put it on the charger, went to supper with family, and then back out hunting at night until the sun came up. I'm 39 and out of shape. Detecting never has been a strenuous hobby for me. Civil War hut digging though...different story.

Not for me any more. Seems every time I turn around, another year has came and gone. I go to sleep on New Yrs eve and wake up and it's almost Christmas again. Where does the time go?

Competition drives new models from manufacturers for sure. You can almost guarantee one of the first new Minelabs will be on its way to Turkey to be taken apart to be reverse engineered. It didn't take them too long to make a competitor model to the Nox, and might not take long to do a competitor model to the Beast. You can guarantee Minelab knows this and probably isn't letting the R&D and Engineer dept take too long of a breather after releasing the Beast.

Didn't Tom also say that they had worked on the Beast's ability to handle EMI more since he had it on an inland site where he was running it at 28? I may be remembering wrong but I thought he said his most recent testing and input had been salt beach hunting and tackling that. Which hints at further development of EMI handling to me. I know they have said the machine in the videos is not the final product, that they are buttoning up some loose ends. I hope so because what I see and hear in the videos, is a very sparky/chatty machine. I'm not a fan of running them that hot when they chatter at everything, just holding it still.

Good deal. I have a Dell G5 gaming laptop that says it has three 2.0 SS USB ports on it. The D2 remote updated without a hitch but I didn't have the other data cable in my Deus box. They must have left it out with the red and black seal/plugs because I didn't get either of those either. Must have been a Friday packing job for their QA haha.

I've kept mine on .6 until tonight. Finally updated the remote to .71 and was going to do the headphones but I apparently didn't get the data cable for it in my Deus box. None that I had in house would transfer the update...so I have a new cable ordered now.

Competition drives the companies to keep moving, and we all benefit from it. Nokta set its sights on Minelab and went after them full bore to offer their version of a Nox for less $. XP blind sided everybody and threw the D2 into the arena. Nasa Tom said the M-Core had been in development for around 3 years if I read his post correctly. Calling it "the Beast" brings back memories of the Tesoro Tejon. Everybody had such a hard time pronouncing Tejon that everybody started calling it The Beast.

That's a bit steep for me, not knowing how it will perform. My detector buying guinea pig days are done. I'll let you guys give it a good run down first. I didn't necessarily like the Infinium or ATX so it will be interesting to see what they have done with the Axiom and if it is any different from their previous pulse offerings.

Just when I step out of the hobby, they do something like that to perk my interest. But still, the same thing would be true for me. Can have the best machine in the world but it's not any good without places to go with it. With gold prices soaring at all time highs, it makes sense to release a new gold prospecting machine.

I will have it when it comes available for sure. I've just gotten used to swinging larger coils and even though the MDT is 11", it's still an elliptical and seems small to me. I don't run to the concentrations of iron like some do...so bigger coils tend to fit me. Most of the time my Nox is wearing the big coil. I only put the 11 inch on to compare it with the MDT. My finding is they are pretty close to the same depth if the Nox is wearing the big coil...but if a larger MDT coil also ups the ante, then it will be one of the deepest non pulse machines out there. This is in the relic world anyway. The beach may be a different story.

I did this video last week at one of my bullet places with some hot dirt. I mainly was just trying some new settings on the machine to see how it would respond. I dug several bullets and towards the end of this one, you'll see a deeper bullet "live" dig between the Equinox 800 and Tarsacci. It wasn't meant to be a comparison video but I had both machines with me and was signal checking as I went along. The Nox is usually pretty good for me but I was kinda surprised that on some of the deeper bullets, I didn't get the best of signal. By mistake, I cut out the settings for the Nox....which was Park 1, sens 20, recovery 4, Fe2 = 2. I like Park 1 for most of my hunting these days and I did cycle through the modes while I was signal checking to see if any others responded better. They did not. The Tarsacci impresses me more and more every time I use it.

It could be possible, as I have a coil for the Tarsacci that was made for testing in the US in the infamous iron dirt of Culpeper, Virginia. I'm not sure what exactly is different about it spec wise, but it is the same size and uses the same mold as the stock Tarsacci coil.

Yep, Bass Pro bought Cabelas out. Now both stores carry the same items. It is kinda odd strolling through one or the other store and seeing Bass Pro/Redhead stuff in Cabelas and Cabelas stuff in the Bass Pro store. At one time they were big competitors. Dicks Sporting Goods can pound sand. I wouldn't take a free bottle of water from them if I was dying of thirst.

The highly mineralized soil part of your equation is going to make this tougher on you VS someone else that is just wanting to eliminate iron. Any detector has trouble dividing the ground minerals from iron and then again to divide the iron from non iron...particularly in ground where the mineralization IS a form of iron ore. What typically happens is that the non iron targets will start to "read" as iron on most machines, or at least the ID is dragged down into the iron range (or up, depending on how you look at the iron scale). Now, for nails and such...that is hard to say too. It depends on what metal the nails are made of to start with, and what degree of decompose they are in. I have been in several sites and encountered nails that MUST have had some kind of copperish metal applied to them or something, because they read well on most any machine. I agree with Steve though...play around with the newer iron bias settings. You can set it aggressive and that will cut out a lot of the iron falses but you will also lose some depth. I tend to go the opposite direction and try to find a good balance of depth but not to the point that I start getting into a lot of iron that fools me. That number will vary so it does take some experimenting while out in the field. I can set my Equinox up in the test garden and especially with the new FE adjustments, can make it sound off perfectly on a 12 inch minie ball. The original iron bias settings couldn't make it do that...it was a mixed signal, mostly iron sounding. The catch to that is, that a lot of the deeper iron will also now start to make a good tone at that setting.

NASA Tom has eluded to this on his forum and I have experienced it myself with the Equinox in particular. That being, just because the detector is quiet...i.e. not erratic or pulsing...does not mean that it is safe guarded from emi. It is called silent EMI, and sometimes it is hard to pick up on it. The Equinox seems to be more prone to it than a lot of other machines and in most of my documented cases, a depth reduction of 2-3 inches seems to be the average (compared to the same settings in a non emi area). Tom says the Fisher CZ series is the least prone to emi of any machine he has used; but the CZs do a terrible job in the soil where I'm at. So even in that regard, an emi hindered Equinox will do better for me than a non hindered CZ.

It is no secret I have a huge dislike for most people in general. The more nosey they are, the bigger my dislike of them. I figure I mind my business, and they should mind theirs. But that is often the opposite of what most do. One day I had a crazy idea and the even crazier part is, that it works, and works extremely well. I have an old park close to my house that I like to detect, but it is popular with snobby people that walk/job the walkways around the park. They will give you the stink eye big time. The crazy idea was...I had noticed the local city workers usually wear a hi vis safety vest when they are working, and nobody even seemed to pay them any mind or attention. So I bought one and gave it a try while detecting. It works so well I will never go hunt a public area without it. I guess people just assume you are doing cleanup work or some kind of maintenance and leave you alone.

If you are a fisherman, you will get this and if not, it will be Greek to you. The setting adjustments on the 600 vs 800 remind me of a 5 speed trolling motor vs a variable speed trolling motor. On a 5 speed, with each "click" movement, it jumps quite a bit over the previous setting. You have 5 of those speeds and the biggest one is top out speed. The variable speed motors have a rolling dial...the max and low end speeds will be the same as what is on the 5 speed. The difference is, you get to control those "in between" speeds instead of just jumping from one to the other. A person can get by with a 5 speed, but once you go to a variable, there is no going back. In trolling, I've seen it to where fish seemed to key in on baits at a certain speed...say 2.5 mph. On a 5 speed trolling motor, one setting may be 2 mph and the next be 3.2 mph. So you'd end up not catching those fish that a variable speed trolling motor would have let you key in on. On the 600, that's what you are getting...the equiv to a 5 speed trolling motor. Whereas the 800 lets you get those inbeween settings for finer tuning. In a lot of places, you may never need it. But there will come a day when that slight difference can make all the difference in the world.

The explanation of the Beach mode stability and performance in mineralized ground was put to me, in this way: is a combination of it using lower transmit power and the frequencies are lower weighted than any of the other modes. Lower frequency machines have traditionally done well in mineralized ground. For results in the air, the other modes do detect coins and jewelry better. But that comes with a cost in being bombarded with false signals and noise in mineralized ground. A good signal can simply get lost in the noise. On most forums, particularly the Nox forum at Findmall, when people ask for setting help for freshwater, 99% of people will say "the beach modes are designed for saltwater beaches. You will get better performance in the Park or Field modes". I guess better is a relative term. If I can use the other modes with stability, I will but it looks like in some freshwater places...probably on land too...where the beach modes seem to do a great job.

Just my opinion but I think a big part of the Equinox mystery is that there is so little hardcore factual info about what makes it tick. I'm always looking for an edge and keep an open mind toward listening to what others say and or their experiences/data. I currently have all the little books/guides on the Equinox and every one of them is filled with hearsay and guesses as to how this or that works. Not at all what I was hoping for. Take the detect modes for example. On most other detectors, those modes are nothing more than saved programs that have different discrimination patterns and tone options. It's no big deal to jump from one to the other and you can know you probably aren't missing anything unless that particular mode has it discriminated out. It's different on the Nox, because each mode acts like a different machine. The only clues to how to utilize the Multi IQ and the modes, are found in a few short words in a chart from Minelab. Everything else at this point...books included...are just guesses/theories. A lot of us have had this machine for over a year now, and speaking for me personally, I still haven't wrapped my head around a full understanding of the machine. Sure, I have found a lot of stuff with it but I'm always doubting myself with it, wondering if I have missed something by not selecting the optimal mode. This almost always leads to me rehunting the same areas with different modes and a lot of mode flipping while I've got a target located. It is nice for a change, to read someone's direct involvement with the product, to begin explaining a little more of what this or that does instead of it all just being mysterious and educated guessing. I find myself in the boat of always wanting to learn. Based on what I've learned, I can take that and apply that knowledge to helping me make a more solid choice in finding optimal performances for me. Maybe even making a light bulb click on, to something I had not given any thought to. In my case for recovery speed, I personally experimented a lot with that, and still do from time to time. Over in my world, in more severe mineralized soil, I found I get better target response by using the faster recovery speeds. However I admit, I have actually never really experimented much in Park 1. Most of my hunting has been done in Park 2 and the Field modes. I have dabbled into the Gold modes some due to some claiming astonishing performance in mineral vs the other modes for relic hunting. I can't say that has been my experience with those particular modes. I seem to have better success in the regular modes and opening the whole disc screen (horseshoe button). Now, a great example of something I would have never thought to try: I discovered this a couple weeks ago at a badly mineralized freshwater beach I hunt. This particular beach, a machine like the CTX 3030 would null continuously due to the ground being so bad. That particular machine wants to run single digit sensitivity there. The Nox is extremely chatty in the Park and Field modes there. In fact, all machines I've had there are that way, some are useless at it. Nothing is deep there, so the way I always hunt it is to just lower the sensitivity down to extremely low levels and scoop the solid hits. This helps but does not eliminate the falsing on the Nox. I read on one of the forums where another person was experiencing this, and had tried the Beach modes and they said their machine was quiet as could be. By my understanding, the Beach modes on the Nox are just for salt beaches and salt water. Everything you read on the forums say to use the other modes for freshwater. Well guess what. I gave the beach modes a try and the Nox is insanely quiet on this beach now. I can run my sensitivity up to 18-20 and not hear a sound until the coil is over something worth scooping. See, I would have never figured to even try that since the books and manual says it's designed for saltwater use, and that there is no way to ground balance in it.