CPT_GhostLight

Given Steve's post directly below the poll, I was just curious about the whole FE/FE2 thing in general. "Do you use the Fe setting, F2 setting, both, or none? Follow up posts explaining your poll vote will provide important information. I'd ask people make a little extra effort on this one. The poll is for your benefit. Thanks." I was also curious why they kept FE in the software after FE2 came out, I thought it was a replacement for FE. And, given the launch of the new after market coils, it seemed likely that an update may be required to support those. It's all just conjecture, I'm not assuming anything about ML or Steve.

Some folks are wondering what this poll is about. If I had to guess, I'd guess there is an update coming and ML needs extra memory space to accomodate new code so they are trying to find out if it's safe for them to dump FE in favor of FE2 to make more space, which would probably have something to do with the new Coiltek coils. That's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Well I probably don't have much to add here. I have just used F2 since it came out in the update. I figured it's there for a reason even if I don't understand exactly what it does. I have noticed that I'm digging fewer bottle caps since usuing the default F2=6, but now after reading more about it, I probably should be lowering that to 0 in my mineralized soil, or maybe not. I'll have to play with that more to see what will work for me.

I use the ML80 headphones in colder months and like them. They sound fine to me and keep the wind and noise out of my head fairly well and let me hear faint tones better than the speaker, which I only use in the test garden at home sometimes. On warmer days, I use Aukey APTX-LL ear buds and love those. They really make high tones sing out and keep my head cool. I primarily hunt inland and parks as I'm land-locked, and only get to beach hunt on vacations but I don't usually go into the water and never submerse the Nox if I do. I'm really pretty happy with the bluetooth setup on the Nox. My only complaint, and it's not a deal breaker, is that if I change from the ML80s to the Aukeys, or vice-versa, I have to do a Factory reset to get them to connect to the Nox otherwise it just hangs in headphone search mode forever. Of course after a FR, I have to re-modify my favorite settings and save a User Preset again. That's annoying and a time waster in the field, so I usually do all that before I go out to hunt.

That's funny because a few months ago I was at a park and kept getting good signals under or very close to dog poo. They all turned out to modern clad coins spills but it seemed odd to me that three different poo piles had coins near them ( two directly under and one within a inch of poo ). I started to think there may be a coin sniffing dog in this park. I always check poo now when in the parks, but I haven't found anything else. I may have to add a pooper scooper to the coil. 😉

This might be a silly question, but did you check the hole after the snakes were removed? Is it possible there were pull tabs in the locations of the snakes?

Just mount a UV flashlight on your Nox's shaft and you'll see them. Scorpions glow under UV light.

Awesome finds! The 8 Reale is Mexican, not Spanish. Mexico won their independence from Spain in 1821. That's a very cool piece of history you found.

Deja Vu... I picked this one up new on Ebay last Fall.

I was firmly in the 11" & 6" camp. The 11" just works great for me and the 6" is perfect for geting into tight places and working dense trash areas to pick out the good stuff. I thought the 15" was too big, too heavy, and probably wouldn't separate targets well, or be too noisy in a high target area. Well my kids got me the 15" for Christmas and I took it out to my favorite park today and it was great! I have a counter weighted carbon fiber shaft from SteveG and I just slapped the 15" on and off I went. I thought I'd get tired a few hours in but I didn't and ran it all day (6 hours). It hit targets well, separated well, pinpointed very well and worked as well as my 11" but with more coverage per sweep. I must say I didn't expect to like it, but I do. I'm going to leave it on for few months and see how it does.

Most Chinese coins have a square hole, but it may be a good luck token. The side with the 4 symbols has Da (looks like a stick figure) at the top which means "big". The one at the bottom resembles the symbol for "clarity". I can't quite make out the left and right symbols. Traditionally coin symbols are read top, bottom, right, left. I could be wrong, but I hope that helps a bit.

Absolutely incredible find, well done!

Well done!

Thanks Chase! Anything over about 4", I just widen the hole a bit with my screwdriver and remove the find with my 12" hemostats and pinch the hole closed. It's relatively quick and clean. It's more like metal removal surgery at that point. 😉

I still think it was dumb luck, just right place at the right time. I'm also trying to learn the locations as well since the finds seem to be a little different in different parks near me. They all seem to have modern trash and modern clad coins, but the older parks have older coins and older trash. Unfortunately we can't dig holes in our local parks, only probe & pop, so I'm limited to about 6-8 inches max depth. It kills me to hear potentially really good targets deeper than I can reach, but I consider the parks as good training grounds and occasionally I get lucky with some good finds.

I got my detector last April but because of work and things, I couldn't get out to parks until October. I've gone hunting out about once a week since then and found the gold ring in the first week of November. However, it really took a few months of trying to learn everything I could about my machine's settings, tones, etc, through books, videos, manuals, forums, and working in a test garden I made in the back yard before I started hitting the parks. So when work lightened up and I was able to finally get out to my parks, I had a fairly good understanding of my detector and when I hit that 11 (on my Equinox), I could kind of tell it sound different than the usual ring pulls. It sounded really solid and didn't change numbers at all and it turned out to be my first gold ring. It may have just been sheer luck though. So while it only took only a month of weekly hunting in the parks to hit a gold ring (again, probably just luck), it really took about 6 months of learning my machine and learning to detect total. And I'm still learning! 😉

Thanks, I was beginning to think I never would, but you just never know. 😉

I get what you're saying too. I consider myself very green as well compared to many folks here. I think curveballs are just part of the game no matter what level you're playing at. Do what makes you comfortable with the detector as long as you don't give up on it. It really is a fantastic machine and it gets easier the more you use it. When I get overwhelmed with audio fatigue, I switch to Park 1 and work in a less noisy area to give my ears a break. Try out some of the notching techniques and coin shooting programs and see how they work for you in your ground conditions, you might find something that does the job for you in those tough areas. If not, you might try Park 1 and lower the tone volumes of the normal trash ID ranges that way you'll still hear any good targets that are in those ranges but the trash signals won't be as loud on the ears.

To completely misquote The Bard, "There are more things in the earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies..." Notching is pure personal preference. If it works for you, it's great. As a relative noob on the Nox, I have been tempted many times to just notch and go find some coins. But among all the excellent wisdom and kindly shared information on this forum, someone much wiser than I said to "Get to know what the detector is telling you about a target by learning and listening to the sounds it makes." That has been the hardest thing to learn on this machine for me, but I have forced myself to resist the urge to notch, and some of it is beginning to sink in. About a week ago I was really about to notch out the annoying aluminum foil, ring pulls, square tabs, and even the over abundant Zincolns in a local park that I frequent because I just couldn't stand hearing them anymore, when all of a sudden a rock solid 11 popped up through the trash and it happened to be a 14K white gold ring and my first gold ring! That drove home the advice about learning the sounds the machine makes. I could actually hear the difference between the ring and the common 11 trash. In the same hunt I heard some odd tones in the 20-21 range, which in my park are usually corroding modern pennies, and pulled 2 silver rings. Now I'm not in any hurray in my parks so I can just plod along at a snails pace and on that hunt I was in Park 2 with the 6" coil. This week I was at the same park in Park 2 with the 11" coil and pulled a solid sounding 21, which I assumed was going to be a penny, and it turned out to be a silver cross pendant. Now this is a super trashy park so Park 2 may not be the best idea, but it's really helping me learn some of the nuances of the sounds the Nox makes and I'm beginning to get a feel for what the machine is trying to tell me. I totally understand the advantage of notching to run & gun on specific targets, but for me, I'm still learning what my machine is saying, so I choose not to notch.

The 14K gold ring came in at a solid 11 and the silver rings hit at 20 and 21. The silver at 20 had a flat orientation while the other one at 21 was on its side.

I initially covered that area with the 11" coil and removed the good targets (and trash) that I found, but there were a few spots that reported multiple objects very close together and some "iffy" numbers and tones that I didn't dig, so I went back with the 6" coil and found the rings in 3 of those iffy spots, the rest were trash. 🙂

I finally found my first gold ring and a couple of silvers too! I was using the Nox with my 6" coil in a super trashy park and found two silver rings down about 5-6 inches under the trash layer and the 14K white gold ring was mixed in with trash just under the sod layer. That was a happy day. 😉

Well I finally feel like I'm getting the hang of this poppin' thing and got my first gold ring and two silver rings a couple of days ago! The silvers were about 15 feet apart and 5-6 inches down, the 14K white gold ring was just under the grass layer about 2 inches down.

I'm guessing that you are detecting an area with unusually high EMI. The best weapons against EMI are reducing your sensitivity and noise cancelling. Also a smaller coil is less susceptible to EMI than a larger coil. Covering the Control box and cable with a Faraday cage type bag may offer some reduction of EMI, but covering the coil with it would reduce or disable your coil's ability to function.

I'm no expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I have some experience with electromagnetic fields and interference. EMI has the potential to affect any electronic device. We live in a virtual soup of constant and intermittent EMF sources so electronic devices are being bombarded by EMI while emitting it as well. This is why electronics manufacturers go to great lengths to mitigate EMI into and produced by their devices. Without going too far down this rabbit hole, the short answer is yes both control box and coil and even the cable of metal detectors are all susceptible to EMI. The cable is shielded and control box uses electronic EMI control, so they are less susceptible to EMI disruption, but the coil is a giant electromagnetic antenna so it is the most affected by EMI. HTH