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21 hours ago, Dirtshark said:

Yeah, I love PS, but I admit I raised a couple eye brows on some of his comments.

I love his video's, they're very entertaining but sometimes I raise an eyebrow or two too 🙂 

Today, I received the booklet "A Beginner's Guide to the Legend" by Clive James Clynick. That book explained a lot more about the Legend than any Youtube video. I can recommend it but keep in mind that however the book claims to handle the version 1.09, it in fact covers version 1.07 and only gives the information about 1.09 that you can find on the Nokta website. But it does give a very good explanation on how a SMF metal detector, and more specific the Legend, works.

I just updated my Legend to the latest version and will be testing it in the field this weekend. At the moment it's horrible weather here in Belgium with lots of rain and wind and so the ground is literally soaked.

Sunday I went for a hunt on a grass strip between two fields and tested the 3 multi frequencies. M1 didn't perform really well but was stable, M2 was very noisy and gave a lot of falsing but M3 did the job. The ground was soggy and water even leaked into the pits I digged from the sides. So the claim of Nokta that M3 works well in wet ground? It does! And used that way it's also sensible to the smaller targets. I digged up a small peace of brass, only 5 mm across (1/5th of an inch) from a depth of more than 15 cm. 

Next weekend, I'll be hitting a similar piece of land and the weather will be bad all week long so I'll be testing the M3 again but I also want to see the difference between Park and Field. The ability to filter out bottle caps is interesting but I'll test that one in my garden first to get to know it better. I just wonder if it works on twist tops too?

17 hours ago, Jeff McClendon said:

Would you rather take a chance and dig some iron that sounds like non-ferrous along with real non-ferrous targets with the iron filter on 1 OR avoid digging any iron and non ferrous targets that are nearby with a higher iron filter setting causing only ferrous audio responses that you can forget about and walk past?

I don't mind digging the occasional iron because sometimes there's interesting stuff to find that way like old agricultural relics. The fields I search were already fields when the Romans entered Belgium. Not that you'll find anything pre-Roman but you never know 🙂

I'm trying to learn what the iron filter and stability settings do and how I can use them to my advantage. This is what Nokta explains on their website : 

Quote

Iron Filter (IF) setting ranges between 1-8 and the default value is 8. Default value 8 is the same as the previous versions (v1.05, v1.07) Legend with no iron filter setting.
Lower IF setting will increase the probability of ferrous targets to be classified as non-ferrous targets and vice versa.
Stability setting (st) is the fine tuning for the IF setting.
When the IF is set to 8, the st setting will be inactive in the Park, Field and Gold Field modes.
When the IF is set to any value below 8, the St setting can be activated by pressing the right or left button and can be adjusted by using the + and - buttons.
NOTE: The st setting in the beach mode is different than this new st setting!

This has me a bit confused, why would I lower a setting so that the separation between ferrous and non-ferrous becomes less clear?

21 minutes ago, JCR said:

For me, it is all site dependent.

For me too, unfortunately the weather has been so bad recently that I didn't get much opportunity to go hunt in the field. Normally we go hunting on fields that have been harvested and where you can swing pretty close to the ground however a few days ago, we went out on a pasture with the grass being a bit tall. This was something completely different to search on. Here the depth was an issue because we were swinging our detectors approximately 10 - 15 cm above solid ground. But still the Legend performed 🙂

Another thing is the luck factor. You need a bit of luck to swing your detector over a target. No matter how good the detector is, if there's nothing in the ground, you'll do a lot of swinging and very little finding 🙂

2 minutes ago, JCR said:

1 requires a VERY slow sweep or it will miss DEEP targets. 2 is not near as finicky, 3 is almost as deep as 1.

I ended up with 3 - 4 being the "sweet spot" where I only lost a few cm but as you say, the swing speed was a lot better. It's not all about depth after all 🙂

A lot of things can be different like the type of target, sensitivity settings (at 20) and so. But I was also surprised to see this result. So I'm interested to see what results you'll get.

I did some "air tests" this afternoon (I know, they're only air tests) and found out a few things that I misunderstood. The tests were done in my kitchen.

1.  M1 and M2 are quite similar in performance but I think that M1 goes a little bit deeper (only a cm or two, nothing more).
2. The depth performance for Park and Field are similar but I noticed that Park was more stable. 
3. Single frequencies are less performant, especially the higher ones. I had the feeling that with all single fequencies, there was something that was missed or less easily detected.
4. Reactivity matters a lot in the depth of the detector. There was +/- 10cm difference between 1 and 10 where 1 was the deepest. I got the best result with 4 so that's where I set my reactivity now. But keep in mind that the places where I search are relatively clean.
5. Audio gain & tonal settings are not to be underestimated. Ok, they do not affect the depth in any way but think of it as the sonar of a submarine : the deep targets sound a lot quiter with a lower audio gain which means that you can miss them (certainly if you work by ear like me). Same goes for the volume of each tone, if the volume is too low, you run the risk of missing it.

On 12/17/2022 at 1:42 AM, Digalicious said:

M1 includes 15 khz. The new SMF will be 4 khz and 10 khz, but weighted toward 4 khz. It's getting the frequency below around 10 khz that allows the much better coin ID's on many coins that are masked by nonferrous trash.

Is there a difference in wheighting between the Park and Field mode for the multi-frequency? I would like to know if for example M1 performs the same way in Park and in Field mode.

I'm really hoping that 9.5x6 coil will be available soon here in Belgium. Would be a nice addition to the standard 11"

Great, I was able to order it straight from his website. Shipping was not too expensive, only 10$. 

Does anybody know what the status on the coils and software update is? I thought they were shipping the coils out last week but I don't see them anywhere?

The book is not sold in Europe. Shame 😞

Read it, did some tests in my kitchen too (for what they're worth) and it gave me more insight to work with.

A possible improvement for Nokta would be that somehow as a user you could create your own SMF. Imagine that you can select the frequencies for your own custom SMF. 🤔 Now there's something the competition does not have. 

Two or three is fine by me 🙂 I'll have to figure out what mode to use when hunting, but that's part of the fun. As soon as the weather gets a bit better, I'm going to do some tests in my garden with the different multitones. But at the moment it's raining cats&dogs out here 😞

It's a pity that they don't specify them. After all, for a detectorist it can be handy to know what frequencies are working when he's detecting. For instance, is there a mode where all frequencies are used?

I'm starting to learn how the Legend works but one thing I wonder is on what frequencies the different Modes work (so M1, M2 and M3)? I thought they worked on all frequencies but I read that they only work with specific ones? Does anybody know what frequencies are used with what mode?

Went out detecting yesterday, a few hours of diggin in frozen soil but found a coin from 1764 and a fired Minié ball. I'm starting to get to know the detector and it's really a great machine.

I'm a bit confused however with the different multi frequency modes but I'll keep that for another subject. 🙂

Not really, I set it in the middle because I think that the lower you set this the better you can distinguish iron from other metals? 

I am searching to find a shop in Europe that sells the book by Andy Sabisch about the legend but no luck so far ☹️ Only one shop in the US but paying 65$ to have a 25$ book delivered is a bit too much for me. If anybody knows a shop in the EU or able to deliver to the EU that sells the book, let me know.

I tested the detector today in my backyard. This is a very infested garden with a lot of iron, scrap metal and foil/tin cans. And no surprise but that's all I found with the Legend. But, and that was te purpose of the test, I was able to identify them mostly for what they were. And I was very impressed of the target separation I got. At some point I had 3 different signals next to each other and I thought it was only one item. But to my surprise there were 3 different metals in +/- a square foot. Very happy with that result 😎

I was using the all metal discrimination but the sound level for targets between 0 and 11 was only at 3. I raised it to 7 and dropped the others to 8 and now I have a nice low sound for the iron. 

The reason I don't want to mute the iron is because you can find some good stuff in the 7 to 11 range. For instance 1, 2 and 5 eurocents show up in that range but some WW2 ammo does too.

Yesterday I found out how good the legend is at finding silver within iron. I was testing for the iron tone and I wanted to see what happens when a high conductive target is amongst iron. So I took a silver ring from my wife and some rusty nails in my hand and passed it before the search coil. It was able to filter out the silver ring amongst that iron. I was seriously very impressed.

Did some playing around with those settings and I believe I get it sounding right now. I'm putting all these changes into a custom user profile so that I can play around with them some. Still lot's to learn but we'll get there.

In the meantime, cleaned up some finds from yesterday and I have a 1 cent copper from the start of our country. Minted under Leopold 1, unfortunately very toasted and no dating is possible. A bit further on the field I found a 1 cent copper of King Willem of Holland, so to say the predecessor of Leopold 1. So both are from around the Belgian Revolution in 1830.

Since two days I'm the happy owner of a Nokta Makro Legend. Went out into the fields for the first time yesterday with it and it worked great but one issue I had was the iron tone. For some reason (user related I'm sure 😉 ) I could not get a clear tone when hitting iron. It was kind of a muted sound but not as clear as the other tones. I have been looking in the manual where I need to adjust but I'm not seeing it.

How can I setup the iron tone so that it sounds clearly ?

Nice beer too, Blue Chimay  is one of my favorites 😋

Just got my Legend today 😁 Unfortunately it was already dark and I couldn't test it in the garden but I've got a trip planned for tomorrow afternoon 🙂