Calmark

Some other things about the Axiom I've remembered: It handles EMI very very well. I had no issues with EMI even when I noticed planes passed overhead. I've often gotten loud "zings" of audio from planes on my other detectors and my GPX 5000 would go nuts when they passed. Scanning the side walls of the creek, I also got no EMI noise. Very nice! Tone pitch selection ability is nice to have. Day 1 I quickly moved the Tone pitch control up and down and settled on 70 out of 100. 50 is the default. That made the tone higher and I just went with it. Day 2 I did a factory reset to try to repair my headphones and tone was back at 50. It sounded a bit better than I remembered, so I spent more time selecting tones. I settled on 45 for the day. A target I swung over sounded better to my ear at a lower setting. This is probably an underappreciated feature by some, but I'm glad its there as it gave me the ability to fine tune the audio to MY ear. My dad will also use this machine and he has hearing loss in the higher frequency range and likely will want a different setting. Nice feature to have, even if relatively minor!

Thank you for the link to the receiver. I may need to go that route. I really do want to go wireless since I had in mind to use this detector on steep slopes covered in bushes. Corded headphones constantly get snagged and its a real pain. My audio issue was a bit odd. It seemed the closer the headphones got to the coil, the worse the audio dropouts became. I did have the receiver side of the headphones away from the Axiom (on the left ear, swining right-handed). At one point I did swap the sides of the headphones, but honestly I stopped using them not too long after for the day. I'll have to do more testing, as I really would like to go wireless.

I can echo Rob's impressions having used my Axiom out 2 days hunting in northern California last week. It was easy to just grab and tuck into my backpack. I appreciated the light weight and nice build quality and once at my site it didn't take long at all to get started swinging. While its not ML SDC 2300 easy to set up in seconds, it isn't difficult at all, and I do appreciate the availability of multiple controls to change plenty of settings to ones I prefer. I found 4 small, and 1 larger nuggets in the two days out on previously searched ground. My machine ran perfectly stable related to EMI. Even passing planes or swinging my coil on slopes didn't affect it. Very nice. I primarily used the 11x7 mono, but found one .13gram shallow nugget with the 13x11DD too. My really hot ground did elicit ground noises, but it does for all of my PI machines. You have to use the sensitivity control to get this smoothed out. The jury is still out for me on maximum depth and sensitivity possible with the Axiom since I reworked old spots where larger coils and other machines have been, but first impression is both are quite good and I definitely think in new areas, you won't miss much.

Great topic about possible use for a PI to search for coins and relics by learning tones. I've meant to do this with my White's TDI at a rural late 1800's two-room schoolhouse that burned in the 1970's. The foundation was filled and the lot plowed. I've found a dozen older coins, including wheat cents, buffolo nickels, a Chinese coin and 1893 V nickel over the years. No silver and non ferrous signals are sparse. I went last spring with my brother's TDI as mine is sold, but alas I forgot to bring the battery! Now that I have the Axiom and the ground is moist again, I did a brief test for close to an hour today. I ran sens. 1, normal timing, 13x11DD and Sunray Pro headphones. It ran beautiful right near some powerlines. I stayed 30-40 yards from the debris strewn-zone and even so, there were a lot of blaring signals all over. I know most is iron from past detecting. I didn't pay attention much to hi/low or low/hi tones, just what signals sounded smaller, tighter and better. Ir was a bit overwhelming really. I passed a lot of signals, gave up digging on several when hitting roots or the pinpointer told me the item was large. I just wandered around with no particular plan other than to see what happened. I suppose with practice I could come back and try some more for coins later. I will let my nugget hunting experiences with the Axiom attune my ear better to tones. Here's what I dug in 45 mins or so.

I have an ideal spot to try out the hot rock window balance method, but it likely has some snow at the moment, so it will have to wait until spring. This area has seams of magnetite and cobbles of it are found in the dirt path leading to the spot. There are a few small pits where the old time miners actually mined this iron-rich ore on a small-scale. The nearby creek was haphazardly worked for gold and has iron junk all over. Should be a very challenging test spot for the Axiom with just the hot rocks present in quantity. I hope to put the DD coil and iron reject feature to good use there too. I can't wait to get an 11x7DD for just this scenario and perhaps as a small coil for a spot or two with iron I'd like to check for coins.

I hit the hills with the Axiom again early this morning. After a 1 hour hike I arrived several ridges higher above my main patch from last trip. There are faint old-timer workings here and the plan was to make the spot "pay" up. Well, no luck again, skunked for the 5th time. But, I had my aces in the hole, a mini patch and medium patch on the way back to rework to hopefully end the day with some gold. Things turned out ok and I did manage 3 nuggets, the first 2 with the 11x7 mono and last with the 13x11DD. The first was a .33g I missed 10ft. from where my ML SDC 2300 got a 1.62g nugget at the mini patch and later a .14g nugget 3in. down at the medium patch. I swapped in the 13x11DD and got the final nugget a .13g that came out after the first scrape with the pick. The takeaways are gold sources aren't necessarily higher up from patches, the Axiom is very sturdy and nugget #1 was found smashing short bushes where the SDC had been. And the 13x11DD hot spot in the center of the coil found the smallest nugget of the day. I definitely agree with Steve H.'s warning to not try to overdo the sensitivity on the Axiom. I did a factory reset today and repaired my headphones, but ended up using my Sunray Pro Golds. I had the same issues as my first trip with the connection. I kept sensitivity at factory 4 with headphones. Higher is a bit loud on the ears and you start to get ground noises if the ground is highly-mineralized. I ran a bit noiser than I usually do, but all in the name of science. Related to the sensitivity control, I noticed I had to "juggle" settings for threshold, sensitivity and volume to get things sounding smooth and not over-driven. My settings for speaker use and headphone use differ greatly. I used way lower settings for headphones so watch out for that. One nice surprise that I might be imagining is the overload response to targets is shorter than for other PI machines I've used. Nice to get the blaring over with quicker. Maybe the Axiom has a faster recovery speed doing that. Spot #1 today had a part of it burn in a wildfire. I run across spots of carbon from burnt stumps or roots there and they've sounded off using my ML GP3000 and SDC. I did get some noise today too, so the Axiom responds to charcoal like the other PI. However, I ran all day in automatic ground tracking and it smoothed things out a lot so most burn spots weren't an issue. I tried a manual balance for a brief time and those charcoal spots got really noisy, so back to auto ground tracking for me. At times spots of ground get a bit noisy. A few pumps with the ground balance button pressed and back to quiet operation. Very quick and easy to do and works great. The Axiom likes certain hot rocks, but I get the same response to them on my ML GPX 6000 here. I get some occasional extremely heavy, dark magnetite of good size in the area. The larger ones deeper got me excited with faint signals and I dug several. It seems the golf-ball sized ones fooled me. At least those are easy to spot once out of the hole. I know you can tune out hot rocks with the Axiom, but since I only ran across half a dozen there was no need. I'll possibly add more as thoughts occur to me and try to answer any questions people have. I didn't do any empirical testing today, just beep and dig.

I've been out again with my new Nokta Legend on the hunt for some gold jewelry. So far the gold is still eluding me, but I did manage another men's silver ring as a consolation prize for digging countless pull tabs along with other trash and clad. This time its the ring on my middle finger in the picture (the other 2 I got a couple of days ago) and its a large ring size, as it still too big even for my average sized hands. I got an ID# of 94 on the Legend and I was nearly positive by the locked on number and sweet-sounding tone it would be silver and likely a ring. I dug it about 3 inches down on the outskirts of a softball field where spectators sit in the shade of a tree. In case anybody is interested to know, my settings were Park, M2, 28sens, G(round) disc mode, 6 recovery, 4IF/3stab, 4 audio gain, using 60 tones. I had the 6in. coil attached. It works great for pinpointing the smaller targets and still gets the big ones.

The ring initial stands for "calmarK" I think. I hope you get a break in the weather so you can get in some hunting time with the Legend soon.

"The ID resolution of IDs 11-15 is different in Park versus the Field mode. You may get a different ID in each mode for targets that fall within this ID range." This is from the Legend manual. The manual does seem to indicate Field is for areas with ferrous trash and Park more to combat foil. Definitely what I've believed true all along. I'll have to experiment with toggling between Field and Park when I find an "11" in Park mode to see if the ID number changes and dig ones that do.

Nice haul on hunt #13 and great you got to meet up with a fellow member. He led you to a great spot with coins and jewelry with good age. Way to go!

Now that everybody is full from a tasty Thanksgiving dinner, I did a weigh up of the 2 nuggets. Nugget #1 weighs .25g and nugget #2 comes in at a dwt. or 1.58 grams. Not bad of a day at all and I'm quite happy with that. Once I got those nuggets out of the way I felt I could relax and enjoy swinging the new detector over some familiar ground. I passed the exact spots I'd found many nuggets in the past and it was nice bringing back those memories. I think I need to next take the Axiom to some less familiar ground in the future and see how it can do. I think this may be my machine to grab when checking new areas since I can use a DD coil in bad trash and with the Axiom settings potentially tune out micro targets which can be a real pain in a new area and really slow down exploration for a new patch.

Awesome finds all around! I'm impressed you found both gold and silver today in a park. That's no easy feat. The fact you dug a "1" for that silver chain shows real dedication. Nicely done. And yes, I'm jealous of your nice zinc penny, haha.

I agree with your here Jeff. I came to the same conclusion based on having used the Deus 2 and how it notches out coke, etc. between 23 and 25 on many of the programs. Most "11" signals I dug were foil though. I used Field mode day 1 and Park mode days 2 and 3. I seem to remember Field having some greater variety of targets ID# 11 or above. I seem to recall in the manual the numbers roughly from 10-15 can vary between Park and Field. Perhaps its to allow in small, cut and thin hammered coins for guys in the UK? Maybe Field mode is a bit lower frequency weighted to hit small, higher conductors better? I think I got more #12-15 in Field Mode, but I'll have to verify that on a future hunt. Definitely something to investigate further.

Well, the show is about over. Time to head home to cook fajitas and tacos for the 4 of us for Thanksgiving. 😁 I hope you all got something from describing my day out using the Axiom and had as great of a day as I have so far. The final few hours on max 8 sensitivity on speaker allowed me to find around 10 small targets on hard hit ground. All ferrous but for half a pellet and the final target of the day...a full pellet of course. The final pellet wasn't the smallest size, but was small. It sounded off at max 8 sensitivity and vanished on a setting of 2. Sens 3 gave a whisper I would have missed if I didn't know the target was there. This pellet was less than 20ft. from where my dad got a 5 gram nugget and it had been missed. That was the target that told me the Axiom does pretty well on the small stuff and the kind that builds confidence. The big ones take care of themselves 😃

I have to say I agree 100%. I'm thinking a nice 2 coil combo for me to use when hiking into steep, remote areas would be the 11x7DD and mono. Light and nimble and easier to get around obstacles.

Next time I'll try out my Sunray Pro headphones. I think I'm in love with the 11x7 mono. Not that the 13x11DD I used 3-4 hours at first wasn't nice too. It found the tiniest targets so far, a few slivers of iron. The area on the DD in front of the coil bolt is super hot and I instantly found targets in the scoop. I have the power now, sensitivity jacked to 8 max for the home stretch. 🤣 It's found a few small missed targets now that my brain and ears have adjusted to the sounds of the Axiom.

Time to move to the main patch area that's mostly devoid of any signals from all of the detectors my dad, brother and I have been on it with over the years. This will be a better test of how sensitive the Axiom is. The other nuggets I found today since I'm very familiar with this spot and knew exactly where my best chances at gold were. Still, the Axiom did its part and sounded off over the goods! I've bumped the sensitivity control to 4-5 using the speaker. Time to try to find something tiny though i feel naked with no headphones! 😁

Happy Turkey day everyone! Yes, I'm a prospecting scoundrel being out here at this very moment nugget shooting on this family-oriented holiday. But, I got the go ahead from the wife and kids to do a late dinner tonight. I've done a few quick tests of my new Axiom in a familiar patch area that's like an old friend on life support. Sad to see a patch dry up, but I know there is still gold on the fringes. I tried out the 13x11DD on the hottest patch of dirt I know of and it drives all of my PIs nuts, especially when wet like right now. I got the machine calmed in Normal mode/timing and sensitivity at 2-3. Nice to have adjustability like that. Next I headed up the ridge to "milder" dirt, its "only" highly-mineralized instead of red hot, haha. We've cleaned it pretty well, just a few pieces of small rust and an almond-sized hot rock with the 11x7 mono equipped now. I did snag the smaller nugget on a steep, very rocky spot 2-3in. down. It was likely missed by larger coils that didn't fit. I just pulled this second nugget at a spot where an old timer's ditch hits the creek. It's loaded with nails and is a spot we've "saved" until last. Down 3in. on bedrock, I was sure it would be a nail. It was not, and something to be thankful on this day! My tough ground is challenging the Axiom pretty hard. I'm in Fine mode, but on sensitivity 2. Higher sensitivity levels are too much, as Steve warns in his sensitivity control guidelines thread. HEED his warnings! The only hitch has been the wireless headphones. They frequently "pop" and wireless is lost for an instant. Seems to happen when my head nears the coil to dig or run the scoop over it. I've had a few times its totally disconnected. Standing up reconnects it. Multiple repairing and even a factory reset haven't solved it. I'm running the speaker now and I'm glad this unit has one. It's plenty loud and clear.

Rick, I used the following settings today and yesterday, though I was at 28 sensitivity yesterday and 5 recovery speed. Today to find the rings, Park M2, 8 recovery, 4IB, 3stab, 60 tones, tone break 8. I used G(round) descrimination pattern to knock out ground noise. I left everything else pretty much stock settings and was able to hear iron on low volume. Soil was 2 bars today instead of 4-5 on the mineralization meter. VID# seemed a bit more stable. Nice. I did skip a lot of foil yesterday and today, but did dig some "11" signals to see what they were. I like your idea of going for the big gold first and skipping "11" until the place is already somewhat cleaned out.

I did another 4-5 hour hunt session today in a couple of parks. I hit the right location and lucked out and scored some BIG men's silver rings next to the basketball court at the first park. They were ID# 51 for the honker pinky ring and 55 for the other. Here are a few things I am liking about the Legend: Virtually no EMI noise in the city I've where hunted in 4 different locations. That's running mostly 28 sensitivity and I can go to 30. The only chattiness comes when the machine is on the ground as I dig and the coil is vertical. I love the lack of distracting noise. Handles the ground really well. The descrimination patterns are really well thought out. The "Ground" pattern is working great! On my Equinox 800 the ground chattered like crazy and I ran sensitivity at 19 to help with that. I realize now it was EMI rearing its ugly head and the horseshoe "all metal" mode let ground signals through. The combination was unpleasant and I actually gave my Nox a 2 year break after the first year. Expanded VDI range. 0 to 60 seems to work really well for having a decently wide range of numbers for gold and for silver. Sometimes I think a bit more of a range would be good, but 60 is a nice middle-ground. I do notice to the downside, a lot of targets get stacked at ID# 11, the lower foil range. Since most people like to skip foil anyway, I guess that was a good choice by Nokta to stack small aluminum and gold there. I don't plan to go after micro gold much anyway since parks and fields are so polluted with foil its crazy. I'm sure I'll think of more to add later, but so far its been a very fun detector to hunt the turf with and the performance and feature set are great as well.

This is a timely reminder about the unique center of the Garrett Axiom 13x11DD coil. My Axiom arrived today (thank you Gerry) and I'll be sure to use the 13x11DD first thing once I get out on a hunt with it. I may even go tomorrow for a half day just to give the machine a test.

Well, I just got my Nokta Legend with extra 6in. coil 3 days ago. Today I hit a small park and started around an outdoor basketball court with the aim to find some jewelry. Day 3 detecting with the new machine turned out to be the charm! So far I have about 15 hours coin-shooting and looking for jewelry in parks and sports fields with the Legend, and I have to say it handles my highly-mineralized soil quite well with its SMF capabilities. Thankfully with my experience running 2 other SMF detectors the past few years, watching videos and reading the manual last week, I think I've gotten a solid handle of how to set up this machine. It might take a newcomer much longer to get to where I am, but the Legend is easy to use and even in the default modes and settings would work great for a less-experienced detectorist. Ring #1 was about 6ft. in the grass behind one of the basketball hoops. I thought a VDI# of 51 would mean it was a quarter, but imagine my surprise when this heavy, initialed with a "K" pinky ring turned up. I kid you not, it weighs exactly 1/2 oz. of sterling silver at 15.55 grams on the scale! Five minutes later, I knew I had another silver ring when I saw 6ft. over a VDI# of 55. I'd never seen an ID# that high in my previous outings, but being so close to a honker ring, it had to be another...and it was. A nicely styled, large man's ring. Its not a whopper like the other, but a respectable 7.23 grams. I attribute these two finds to 3 things, location, location, and the 6in. coil on the Legend that gave me the courage to dive into this zone heavy with trash, lol. In my short time out with the Legend, I'm really enjoying it a lot. Its a ton of fun to swing with the "dinky" coil, has great sensitivity to low conductors and works great in a variety of situations like in parks, fields, tot lots. Other detectors I've owned have struggled in my hot dirt, but the Legend handles it decently for the time being. Someday I still hope for technology that tames my dirt, but this newer crop of detectors with SMF are opening things up some. You still have to swing over the treasure though, and I'm glad I was able to get over these two beauties.

Great to hear you are cleared to get out there detecting again even slowed by the boot. Nice digs on those rings. I've been dreaming of turf finds like those and dig those mid conductors with my Deus 2 also, but no big finds yet. Thanks for the inspiration for me to keep at it!

I'm looking forward to the 9.5x5 coul too. I was on a sports field today with the 6in. coil and barely made a dent covering it.

I received my Legend WHP package +6in coil yesterday and have spent 2 half-days putting it through its paces. So far I've enjoyed the time spent with the new detector. Thankfully I have experience with 2 other SMF detectors, so the transition to the Legend was no problem at all for me personally. It didn't hurt I watched some Legend videos and read the manual this past week before the Legend arrived. I tried running all search modes except for beach. I feel like I have most all of the controls and features figured out now, and in the future it will just be a matter of learning the nuances of the audio and doing fine-tuning. I fiddled with a lot of settings and one thing I noticed was its pretty difficult to make mistakes by changing things. 'A beginner would do great in the stock search modes. The overall ergonomics and build quality of the Legend are quite nice. With the 6in. coil I didn't feel it was too heavy at all and the detector felt easy to swing. The small coil was awesome in the thick trash. I liked the feature set of the entire detector and the v1.09 sure added a lot of them! This is one nice do-it-all detector and handles my heavily mineralized soil well. I noticed the Legend also handled the EMI in my area extremely well, and maybe the best of all 3 SMF machines I've owned. I could run at max 30 sensitivity if I wanted, but I kept it at 28 most of the time. The only chattering was at times when the detector was on the ground while I dug targets. It was not really affected by some underground power cables to street lights that gave my other machines some chatter. The machine quickly and easily ground balanced to my 2-5 bar mineralized soil, according to the Legend's mineralization meter. I ran mostly M1 Field on day 1 going for older coins, and today ran mostly Park in M2 going for jewelry and clad. The Legend was very sensitive today to smaller targets like foil, small pieces of lead and can slaw and I dug a lot of tiny targets in areas I'm slowly cleaning of junk. Unfortunately I found no gold, but did get 2 pieces of small silver earrings. One area the Legend was very good at, but didn't excel in was VDI# stability. It was better than most other detectors I've used though and plenty able to ID both trash and treasure pretty reliably. I have hot dirt with a lot of iron content and that naturally affects depth and target ID. The Legend would give ID# that would vary a few numbers, but still lock on fairly tightly on targets up to 3 inches. I rarely dig any coin-sized targets past 5 inches, so that's really decent. With just a few hours of practice I found my brain would "average" the numbers and give me a good idea what would be under the coil. The 6in coil had me digging targets down to about 4 inches for now, but I can run a slower recovery speed or use the 11in. coil if I want to go deeper. I dug a lot of targets in those 10 hours, with a lot of lower conductors. Those really stand out in M2 frequency and makes this my choice when looking for gold. I found some older wheat cents and the highlight, a 1920S Mercury dime on day 1. All were shallow somewhat iffy signals but with higher tones mixed in. I'm nearly certain the dime at only 2.5 inches deep was on edge from how it looked in the plug. It gave a low ID#, but in 60 tones I knew to dig it with some high squeaks coming through. I'll let you all know more about my future experiences with the Legend as I get out and use it more.