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Raphis

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  1. Many times, I dig a few scoops of sand out of the hole, and the signal vanishes.....but I have to just trust I heard the ultra deep target before I started digging (trust it wasn’t a false signal from salt/black sand deposit). My elliptical coil really comes in handy for those signals because I can point the toe of the coil down in the hole once I have dug deep enough and hope I hear the target getting more audible. I dig in wet, low tide sand and in dry, hard packed sand....digging deep holes in wet, saturated sand obviously causes your deep hole to begin to cave in on the sides....even digging in loose, dry sand, which turns into slightly moist compacted sand will create a cave in of the hole the deeper you dig....this causes one to have to widen the hole just to prevent cave-ins....I’m a short guy (5’7” on a good day), and I wish my legs were longer on some of the holes I dig because I struggle to keep my left leg on top of the surface while extending my right leg down in the hole to push down on the scoop to remove more sand. Many times, I just jump down in the hole (when it gets really deep) and push down on my scoop with both feet. 😅
  2. Hello Tom. Yes, I go back, but very infrequently for the past 3-4 years. I don’t live a mile from the beach anymore, but I usually find some silver whenever I go. It’s a lot of hard work digging in that hard pack!! My body wouldn’t hold up well right now for that type of digging. I’ve seen your method of digging at the beach, and there’s no way your method would allow you to dig 15-20+” in hard packed sand! 💪🏼 Hey, don’t give these guys on this forum such a hard time with your argumentative replies 😂🤣. (I read your replies to GB’s thread regarding using a PI to hunt for deep oldies at an older park). We know you’ve never been spanked before in a trashy, aluminum/iron laden old park by anyone swinging a PI machine before.....but then again, neither have I. 😆 I do, however, have one old park I’m tempted to swing my PI machine at, but it is a bit too far away from home to get the chance to try and test my luck.
  3. Congrats on your GPX finds from your beach!! I hunted my beaches for a few years with a TDI Pro and a 17x13 Nugget Finder coil, and slaughtered the deep silver, along with a decent number of gold rings....It was so tough digging those deep holes that tend to fill back in the deeper you dig. I had 3 reinforced beach scoops made years ago by Chuck from Sunspot scoops. I totally destroyed one after 8 months of digging in hard packed sand for 15-20+” targets. I surmise my TDI Pro (GB Off) with the larger 17x13” coil would penetrate slightly deeper in the sand than a GPX with 12.5” coil would, but not 100% convinced...I had thought of buying a used 4000/4500 a year ago to test depth against my TDI pro, but it never materialized. I bought my TDI Pro for $950 (used only once before by previous owner) back in 2014, and it has paid for itself many times over. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, if you or any of the locals in your area have hunted with a TDI Pro before. HH, Dan
  4. I’ve been hunting very high EMI areas where I live for many years (12-13 years with an Explorer SE, and just the past year with a Nox 800). I do find myself noise cancelling a lot more with my Nox than I did with my Explorer, but I haven’t needed to lower my sensitivity very much (22-25 sens most times). I do recall being overwhelmed by the EMI when I first started swinging the Nox for a few weeks, but after making some fine tuning adjustments with regards to lowering the volume/pitch on a range of lower target ID’s (I don’t notch out any ID’s), the EMI became more tolerable (to me). I’m still noise cancelling quite a bit, but that’s just me always trying to squelch the noise anyway I can without sacrificing depth to search/dig those deepies!!
  5. Great hunt with a 15” coil in the turf!! 👍🏼 Years ago in my area, that output would be my norm on a given hunt, along with 30-40 wheat pennies. I never used a 15” coil for turf hunting in my neck of the woods, but I had a 13” coil I used for a couple of years on my Explorer SE that performed beautifully in the high trash parks I typically hunt.
  6. Chase, this is an interesting discussion. I was always under the assumption that if I was detecting a site with a very high amount of ferrous/non-ferrous targets (numerous targets on every swing of the coil) that auto GB tracking on the Nox would not properly be able to accurately ground balance one’s machine (it can’t tell difference between ground and an actual target), and in such a case, locking the ground balance (after GB’ing a clean area of ground) would provide a more “sensitive” machine to the deeper/fainter signals on the fringe of detection. I dug 4-5 deep wheat pennies the other day with my Nox in a small area I had detected thru at least 10 times before with my Explorer SE over the years. Remarkably, I could not hear these deep wheat penny signals when I bumped the ground balance from 7 to the upper 30’s. Now, these targets were in a high EMI-riddled zone, so I was fighting EMI instability while listening to the faintest inkling of a repeatable signal above 20 VDI on the Nox. At a ground phase value of 35 or higher, the deep wheat penny targets would not give a repeatable signal. I then turned auto ground balance on and pumped my coil up and down in the general area....I had a hard time trying to find a clean area of ground to get an accurate ground balance..sometimes I would get a reading in the 30’s after pumping the coil, other times in the 40’s...I stood in the same place to try and find a clean area of ground, and on the 3rd or 4th try, I was able to get ground balance down to a 7 (which was my initial GB setting when I first began my hunt that day (I was 50 ft from where I first turned my machine on, and did my initial ground balance). At GB setting of 7 or lower, I was able to get a barely repeatable signal (I had to wiggle coil very narrowly and from only one swing plane) on those 4-5 deep wheat pennies to get a “dig me” signal....The “dig me” I heard, I surmise, would not have been a “dig me” signal for a lot of hunters....especially with all the EMI (underground electrical from light poles) barking on it...I’m fairly tolerant to a high level of signal noise from all the years I have swung an FBS machine at 75-100+ yr old urban sites. Still amazing that the Nox picked these targets from this area I had detected over the years numerous times with my older machine. The reason I wanted to change my ground balance value was that at the value of 7 (my initial value), I was hoping that I might possibly be able to hear the target a little better if I tried ground balancing again before swinging over the signal another time...It was enlightening to find out my signal had worsened when the ground balance value was increased. I also wanted to ask you if a high level of EMI in a general area would affect the way the Nox ground balances when pumping the coil up and down (while the machine is singing an EMI melody 😆) ???
  7. This!! These statements aren’t talked about in the Nox manual, but I accidentally stumbled on this effect while fiddling with the new F2 IB when it became available. I’m running F2-0 every hunt for ultra deep and partially masked/co-located targets passed over by many previous hunters (including myself) in heavy, non-ferrous trashy sites with moderate levels of deep iron, big and small, but I don’t detect in “blanket” ferrous sites that often. At F2-0, I haven’t dug any more iron than I had dug with my Explorer SE for 9 years. If F2-0 IB is not considered “Off”, I wonder if there would be anything to gain if minelab offered a negative IB (i.e. F2 -1) ...possibly even better clarity/repeatability of ultra deep, whisper targets??? Also, at the sites I typically hunt, I’d rather hunt with the least amount of iron bias looking for ultra deeps, as opposed to try and lower my recover speed below 4. In my typical ground I hunt, I don’t like the audio effect (more noisy/somewhat delayed) of signals when I try lowering recover speed below 4.
  8. You’re probably right, GB. Based on your experimentation on this subject and Chase’s reliable, insightful contributions, even though there are only 19 noise channels, and the Nox will choose one of those 19 noise channels as “the quietest” channel after completion of an auto noise cancel, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s gonna be a 1/19 probability that your machine will select the same channel as your hunt buddy’s, who’s hunting with you...because of the particular/specific sources of EMI, and also “when“ each person chooses to do an auto noise cancel when hunting together. In addition, because noise cancel is a local setting, the Nox stores many different noise cancel values in memory (one for each mode, I believe ??...someone correct me if I’m wrong here)
  9. Hello Chase, I’m glad you decided to join in on this conversation regarding noise cancelling on the Nox. It’s always better to have multiple viewpoints on subjects. Per the Nox manual on auto noise cancel: “Auto Noise Cancel automatically scans and listens to every frequency channel and then selects the one with the least interference.“ So, if we take this as fact, then the Nox software measures and records an EMI level (dB ??) of each channel, then selects the channel with the “lowest“ level of EMI. Sure, after a scan of frequencies, the software may find multiple channels with low levels of interference, but it will still select a channel with the lowest interference of the 19 channels. Now, I’d assume if the lowest interference value recorded from an auto noise cancel initiation just happened to be recorded identically on 2, 3, or 4 channels out of the 19, then the software could select either of those channels with the same lowest interference level.
  10. That’s not the way the auto noise cancel works on the Equinox. The machine will scan the entire spectrum of channels (-9 to +9) and select the channel with the least interference. Maybe your experience when you do a noise cancel with your Nox in “your” detection sites seems to only select 2-5 different channels most of the time, but I can assure you I have seen every noise channel Selected on my Nox....I hunt in urban city parks here in LA, and the EMI changes multiple times depending on where I hunt within most of the parks here....I noise cancel at least 10 times in a 3-4 hr hunt...baseball fields with large pole lights are notorious for EMI.....as are electronic sprinkler systems, and Rec center burglar alarms.
  11. It’s just a 1 in 19 chance (5%) every time you hunt with your buddy that the both of you would be on the same noise channel when you both turn on your machines.
  12. Ghostlight above said it may fit, but that was never an option for me. I’d get both a matching upper and lower shaft if you’re thinking about upgrading. I wanted to replace the upper, middle, and lower stock shafts on the Equinox with just 2 shafts: a matching upper and lower carbon shafts. It improves the Nox in weight savings, more secure (no wobble) swinging, and easy change out of coils (if you buy multiple carbon lower shafts for each Nox coil).
  13. Good Point!!! Each year one waits to get a better, upgraded detector, there’s plenty of master hunters here in So Cal vacuuming up the valuables/collectibles out of the ground....for example, if you’re a park/turf hunter, they’ll be in upwards of 1000 less silver (coinage and jewelry) to find in the ground each year an Equinox sits on a dealer’s shelf rather than in a treasure hunter’s hands. If you’re not a turf hunter, then you can wait a little while longer.
  14. There could be multiple factors for one hunter with the same detector not being able to hear another hunter’s target, and these factors I will explain below don’t even take into account any hardware differences (i.e. hot machine) we may think those detectors have over the same model detector. For many years, when I wasn’t hunting solo, I typically would go out on hunts with 1-3 of my “Minelab” buddies. We would compare numerous deep/iffy targets throughout the day. Even though most of our Minelab machines were similarly set up, sometimes a single software setting could be the difference of being able to hear the other hunter’s target. Additionally, there’s some crosstalk when two Minelab noise channel cancelling machines are in close proximity to each other, even though the noise channels are different on each machine. Also, when you get within a few feet of your buddy’s machine, each coils’ magnetic fields will stifle/interfere with the other. When all of my buddies were using Sunray inline probes, we would flip the toggle switch on our probes to engage the probe when we would stand within a few ft of each other so our main coils would be deactivated (discharged) and the interference in our headphones would be silent. Lastly, you could have two identical machines with the same settings, and one machine still may not be able to hear the deep/iffy target the other machine can hear because of the swing cadence (speed) at which each hunter is swinging over that target. I’ve seen this phenomenon countless times...Many times, hunters will swing their coils too slow or too fast and they’ll have a difficult time getting a repeatable signal on the target in question. The proper swing (wiggle) cadence needs to be learned while “scrubbing” the ground with the bottom of your coil (no air space between coil and ground). It just takes a little practice to figure out how fast/slow to swing (wiggle) your coil over a target (especially when it comes to the “on the fringe of max depth” targets) in order to get a faint, repeatable signal. Ground conditions from different hunting sites can have some effect on how fast/slow your swing cadence is. Once you figure this out, hopefully at the beginning of your hunt instead of the end😅, you won’t be missing out on targets other skilled hunters are digging up behind you.
  15. When I bought my Detect-ED shaft for my Equinox, I bought a pack of their Coil Savers (washers). They work great...I believe I used one black (thinner) washer and one red (thicker) washer on each side to prevent the coil ears from being compressed closer toward each other. My red washer protrudes slightly above the space it fits it.
  16. From 2007-2016, I had around 5000 silver coins...About a 500 coin avg per year. Most all those coins came from parks, schoolyards, and beaches. Over those years, I was always in a challenge with myself (nobody else) to try and up my previous year’s numbers. Some years I was successful; other years I found less....typically one would think each successive year of deep silver hunting would produce diminishing returns, but that wasn’t the case for me....my most productive year came in 2015...none of these coin finds were large caches...just pocket spills at best. All the silver finds during the years I mentioned above were found with two basic machines: an Explorer SE and a whites TDI Pro.....I also found about 4 lbs of sterling jewelry during that time. If Jamflicker didn’t have to work 40 hrs a week, he would easily have doubled his 10 yr output....but it does require a lot of passion/persistence/perseverance to hunt many days for many hours...if you have multiple hobbies you enjoy doing, raise a family, or live in an area with freezing temps during a portion of the year, obviously the yearly silver outputs will be much diminished. My treasure hunting during the years I mentioned above was a “perfect storm“ for me (one hobby mindset, no labor, and hunt-able weather most of the year, every year).
  17. Have you tried the Garrett Z-Lynk wireless system? It does require the Garrett receive/transmit modules, along with Garrett’s Z-Lynk propointer. You can use any wired headphones of your choice, but you’ll need to connect Garrett’s Receive module to it. I don’t own one, but I know a couple hunters that have this package/pinpointer set up on their CTX’s, and they like it a lot. Wireless delay is a lot better than standard Bluetooth (17 ms), so you won’t notice any lag.
  18. After using ML FBS machines for so many years, F2-0 IM feels like an old friend to me. I’m finding difficult, elusive oldies in all my normal hunt sites (mostly parks/schools), while only digging minimal iron. I feel like I’m not missing any deep non-ferrous targets while in F2-0. I’m sure glad this IM filter was added to the Equinox.
  19. I never used an Etrac, but Jam and I have hunted together for many years now. He has about 30+ less years hunting experience than I do, but it doesn’t show much. He knows his Etrac as well as anyone I know. When I used my SE while hunting with him, we always were able to hear each other’s deepie signals. After I got the Nox 800, there were a couple tough, one way deepies that Jam had difficulty hearing, but most of my Nox signals were heard by him....
  20. When I bought my Explorer SE back in 2007, that machine came stock with what Minelab called their 11” (or maybe it was 10” ?) Slimline coil.....that coil was a “piece of crap” compared to the Explorer II’s 1050 coil. When I ordered a 1050 coil for my Explorer, it was a big upgrade....more stability and depth and less falsing on mineralized ground on turf and sand/salt environments....I believe Minelab admitted later on that those slimline coils had design flaws....I don’t remember the following timeline exactly, but when ML released the Etrac with their new Pro coil (or shortly before), they immediately replaced the slimline coils on the original Explorer SE’s and renamed the machine an SE Pro. When the Pro coils became available, I upgraded my 1050 coil for the new Pro coil and that was the coil I hunted with for the proceeding years I used my SE...The Pro coil was a great ML coil, and miles better than their original slimline coil for the Explorer SE series.
  21. That’s awesome! Congrats! Have you been finding real deep coins since you’ve been swinging your Nox? Was this a new site (or sites) you’ve never hunted before? I found 13 silver this past week with my Nox, and all of my finds were from heavily hunted sites I’ve been detecting since 2010, but just recently have hunted with my Nox. None were deeper than 9”. 2 Rosies I found yesterday are not in my pic below.
  22. Hello Tony! Welcome to the forum. I’m new to this forum too, but I’ve been detecting for decades, and have made hundreds of finds/instructional posts across several other popular online detecting forums for 13 years now. I’ve been using Minelab detectors since 2007, and just last year, I bought an Equinox 800. You’ve already received great advise from very knowledgeable hunters here. I’d like to give you a different perspective of someone else’s finds (my own) from a different area of the US (So California). I’d consider myself a hardcore hunter...well, I used to hunt 4-5 times a week for the past 10+ years, but last year, I managed 2-3 hunts a week. I detect mostly parks, old schoolyards (if I can get in), and beaches. I have hundreds of parks/schools where I’ve dug silver coins, wheat pennies, older sterling jewelry, and a small sprinkling of gold. My parks where I hunt are so littered with aluminum trash that I tend not to dig a high number of lower conductors, such as nickels. For instance, last year I dug over 300 silver coins, 1700 wheat pennies, and 40 or so pieces of sterling jewelry. I have a 13 year avg of 4-6 wheat pennies for every 1 silver coin I find. These wheat/silver ratios have been the norm here for me for years, yet in other areas of the country, those ratios are far from realistic. I surmise your ratios will not be the same as mine, but you need to hunt at least a year at various sites around you to compute a more accurate silver/wheat dig ratio. Now, here’s something of interest: Out of all those old coins I found this year, I have maybe 10 Buffalo nickels and a few V nickels. So, in one month’s time, you nearly dug more old nickels than I did all year. You would go batty digging nickel signals in my area. 🤢 You certainly picked the right machine for what you’re interested in finding. As I stated above, I chose the Nox 800 last year after swinging a ML Explorer SE for the past 13 years. I was averaging 500+ silver and 3000 wheats a year with my SE for over a decade. The Equinox has been a joy to use so far, and has performed beyond my expectations. Best of Luck, 👍🏼 Dan
  23. That’s exactly what I did on my Nox. Works well for me.
  24. Is everyone who’s posting in this thread still using a wireless (Bluetooth/Wifi Stream) connection to their detector pods?? Yes, lots of external EMI is picked up by our detector’s coils, but aside from wrapping your detector pod in a foil hat (this is something very new to me), the best thing a treasure hunter can do to incur less EMI is to utilize a headphone audio cable to their pod....Gotta minimize the unnecessary transmit/receive frequencies generated by Bluetooth and/or Wifi Streams. I don’t seem to have any problematic issues of EMI ruining my hunts anymore since I changed to a hardwire audio cable, and turned off my machine’s Bluetooth transmitter. When I say “ruined” hunts, I mean a hunt where I had to lower my sensitivity below 20 just to be able to tell a real signal from a noise signal. I still keep my cell phone on while I detect, but I moved it in a hip pouch on my backside, and don’t have any issues with it now than I did months ago when I had it attached to my front (stomach area).
  25. Thanks, Brian! 👍🏼 I was fortunate to hunt a really good old Park scrape here in So Cal area this year. A few of us hit it for a couple months.....lots of barber dimes, injuns, V’s, Buffs, a few seated dimes, 3 silver half dollars, standing liberty Q’s, lots of mercs/Rosie’s/War nickels, hundreds of early wheats, and a small handful of silver/gold jewelry! Fun times!! Dan (captn_fi from Kinzli’s)
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