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Received a USPS notice this AM that my new 600 is on the truck for delivery! Woohoo! I conducted what will probably end up as the finis-hunt with my aging GTI 2500 yesterday. (Not that is not a coin hound...2 40's wheaties, 3 60,s dimes, and a ton of copper cents...all from a yard of a soon to be demolished house across the street from our Base House) The itch I have had waiting for my name to move up the 800 list with my dealer will be scratched by being able to use the 600 to learn all the basics of the Nox. When the 800 finally gets to my door, it'll just be the process of learning the fine tuning of the advanced features. I saw a post here or somewhere about another person who had both the 600 and waiting on the 800. He said he plans to keep the 600 and use it for the accessory coils when they are available, and keep the stock coil on the 800. I really liked that idea, so I've made the decision that once I have both detectors in hand, I'll keep them and use the same way. That means the GTI 2500 with 4 coils (two are imaging), and the Treasure Hound "Eagle Eye" dual box coil will go up for sale. ( My arm and shoulder will also thank me, as it weighs about 1.5lbs more than the Nox) Haven't been this enthusiastic about a purchase in a long time. Multi-generational leap over what I've been using since 2006!

My brother and i have been waiting all winter to find a spot to see what the mighty Nox 800 can do. I have to set the stage for this site because i have to keep us both happy. A spot for my brother to detect for coins and relics and a place for me to go after i get bored with coin hunting and can go look for gold. We left it last winter on one of the last days we could get in. Trash pouches full many times over with assortments of relics. This place produced very little in the way of coins but i think they are there. The F75 (fantastic detector) has been over the whole place and some good finds have been made. But the best was made on the first day with the 800. An 1870 s mint seated liberty half ! Well I know this has been gone over and probably should have been found but the fact is the 800 is the finder. We really did not know how to use this detector. I read up on it and we set to Park 2, auto ground balance, connected the awesome wireless headphones and off we went. Still not sure of Iron Bias or much of anything else. We both agree that this detector has depth. I only found an old button and was getting bored like i usually do so off to the gold I went after being inspired by the posts from MR JW . I went looking for little gold with the GPZ. The silver round piece is off an 1893 police whistle. Many good things to come in the way of silver i think.....

Anyone else finding that it is saying everything is way deeper than it actually is? This can be a detriment to the machine in a park hunt where you are trying to avoid anything 4" or shallower.

Ok so I went to another home site that I have been pounding for 4-5 years. I found 3 wheat at about 7-8" a button "Red Fink's Bar" circa 1912 8" and that was the extent of the keepers. What is ok about that is I usually hunt for an hour and find just 1 wheat anymore and some relics. The first hour was a headache filled signal fest, but when I got a repeatable signal I decided to try something that CDV recommended and that was to turn down the sensitivity. Reason he suggested it was to see if I could get the volume of the tone to change on a target that I would consider deep enough to dig in a park (another story line there). So I turned it down to 16 before I started to get a change in volume. Funny thing is, that the volume changed AND the signal cleaned up. This place is iron infested and it seems like by turning down the sensitivity it improved the machine's performance! The reason I think I missed these in previous hunts is due to A) iron being in the hole and B) the wheat were worn so thin the date is all but gone! My take away is that if I have been hunting here for 4 years and the deepest coin I have recovered was at 8" and the machine is hitting wheat at this depth at 16 sensitivity, why shouldn't I continue to hunt at this sensitivity? I mean so many non-iron targets really started to pop when I did this. NOW with that said it is really wet here and the chemistry of iron is funny in that it can leech into the soil creating a halo. This halo will increase and decrease in masking other targets dependent on soil moisture (if you would like a chemistry lesson on how iron behaves in anoxic conditions let me know). I will most likely bump up sensitivity in drier soil conditions, but as crazy as it sounds I think I may need to adjust sensitivity at each site and hunt to get the most out of the machine. Is it nutty to want to work with less sensitivity even if it is stable at 22-24?!?! Thanks for reading! Picture of hunts with the CTX and the keepers found for a little eye candy:

Very well done - this should help people a lot...

hello I wanted to know if it is possible to improve this result with the Equinox :

Out today on this holy weekend I found Jesus about 4 inches in the sod at a local park. I also found a small heart pendant and a wedding band from some guy named Carbide. So if you know someone by the name of Tungsten Carbide, please tell them I have their ring. Wow does Park 2 find small jewelry and aluminum trash nicely. Bill

My first Gold Coin! I was working my way back to the truck today while hunting an early 1900s city park when the unimaginable happened.. I had about 5 minuets left to hunt and got a nice solid, deeper sounding 18-19.. I had pulled Indian Head cents out of this area of the park before, and I’ve had a couple on the Equinox bounce down and touch this VDI region in the past, so I thought I might be on to either an Indian or very early Wheat cent.. Little did I know my Indian would turn out to be a 1910 Indian Half Eagle Gold Coin! When I first opened the plug I went down about 5” and found a small piece of junk.. Its an old snap cover or something unrecognizable.. I put the plug back together and and gave it another sweep figuring the target I pulled didn’t really match the signal.. Back came the solid 18-19 signal, only better. I reopened the plug and started scooping out the dirt when a nice chunk of round gold appears in the hole! It looked good, but without my readers on, and being fooled a million times in the past by gold foil and such, I wasn’t sure.. It looked good enough to get my heart racing.. I don’t normally talk out loud to myself, but I blurt out to who I don’t know.. “You Better Not Be F***ing With Me!!” I put on my glasses, picked it up and instantly felt the weight.. I then knew it was gold! To say I was shell shocked is an understatement.. I don’t consider this area to have great potential for a gold coin, so I never really thought I would find one.. Thankfully, I thought wrong.. Equinox 800 - Park 1 - 50 Tones - Recovery 4 - Iron Bias 3 Approximate depth 7”.. Bryan

When I got involved with Equinox I was at the end of a couple years of testing various VLF detectors and I was getting a little frustrated. I kept bumping into what I refer to as “the wall”. This magic limit in my bad ground on any detector getting decent depth and target id accuracy. The mineralized ground here cuts depth to about 50% of the max depths reported back east. Further, any single frequency detector suffers from poor target id, especially regarding “up scaling” of aluminum into the silver coin range. The machines that did best for target id, like my Minelab CTX 3030, lacked the depth of the best single frequency detectors, had poor target separation, and were weak on my favorite target - gold. I discuss this at VLF Detectors & Depth and in particular on this long thread on Euro vs U.S. Style Detectors where I mention I am selling my first CTX. ”I don't need many hours to know a CTX can't get a whisper on targets easily found with other detectors in my ground conditions. Masking is not my problem with the CTX, it is lack of depth on a clear target in the open. Single frequency just packs more punch in my ground, and all the hours in the world won't change that.” I therefore kept coming back to single frequency as having the best depth in my ground and far superior recovery speeds / target separation. Yet try as I might I could never find a single frequency VLF that truly blew me away as being much different than a dozen others. First Texas, Nokta/Makro, and XP had me butting one machine against another for quite some time, all extremely good and yet none really putting the others away as markedly superior. In particular a divide existed between the high frequency units hot on tiny gold and the best silver machines. The ability to play well in saltwater was a major sticking point for me also. I was keeping certain detectors simply because they might see use 10 days out of the year in saltwater. No matter what I seemed forced to own at least three VLF detectors to cover the bases. Long story short, I know my detectors and Equinox came along, and I tossed it in the mix. When I got my hands on Equinox I finally saw something different. The Minelab Equinox has performance characteristics that are unique and observable in the field, and as a result I knew just using it that finally something genuinely different was in my hands. BBS/FBS might be the king of silver, and now I could sense true multifrequency finally coming into its own on a machine both hot on gold and with incredible unmasking capability, the two areas where BBS/FBS are weakest. At the very same time, it matched the best single frequency machines for maximum depth, but while delivering more accurate target id results. My first real Silver Finds Post put it like this: ”I am not trying to prove anything per se here, but what I saw convinced me Equinox has that little bit something extra I have been looking for in a coin detector. It is not purely a depth thing but a combination of depth and speed that seems to pull silver out of places where I had not been having much luck for three years with quite a few VLF detectors.” Despite all the talk about hype I purposefully undersold Equinox since day one except to state I believed it would be a best seller. Pretty safe bet there. Performance though I purposely understated and evaded. My belief was that I would be immediately be discounted as a biased shill. The best way to proceed then, given my faith in the detector, was to just sit back and let others “discover” it. Finally, after some months, that is where we are now. Enough people who really know what they are doing in circumstances similar to mine are seeing the same things I saw, and for the very same reasons. There are those who have not laid hands on an Equinox who continue on telling those who are actually using the detector that they know its “just another same old same old”. This leads to a bit of frustration on the part of those who know better. The bottom line is Equinox has a technological advantage over those detectors, and anyone that thinks this is just another VLF detector like the last couple dozen to hit the market honestly needs to take the blinders off.

A little background on the site: I had been driving by this old house for years and saw someone working in the garden one day and it turned out that he was the great grandson of the person who built the homestead in 1840 and he himself had been born there in the 1940s. He gave me a wonderful first hand history of the farm and told me of the journals that his grandfather kept and that he still owned. Turned out that they used to build longboats for the canals on the farm. A friend and I had hunted the site several times without much success until we found "the hotspot". He had a T2 and I had an Etrac, and we just started finding all kinds of buttons. Over the last 4 years of I have been using the CTX to track the progress I have made at the site of any button or coin I have found there. I am going to go to this site first with the 800 because it takes hours to find anything non-ferrous here anymore. Some 30+ buttons, 6 largies, a flying eagle, and a union army navy 1864 token have come out of here between my friend and I. We feel confident that we are missing some small silver and from all the videos I am seeing, it seems like people are doing amazing in places they have pounded with other machines. For all these reasons, that is why I want to hunt here first. I do have a question for you all though: I really like tracking progress with the CTX, does anyone know of something comparable on my phone that I could use? Is it trust worthy (wont share geo location meta-data)? Thanks for your time! Here is a picture of my progress at the site with just the CTX

I was cleaning up my gear for the trip to OZ this year when I noticed that there was a ton of beach sand under my coil cover. Took me a while to get it all out. There are depressions in the very center of the coil that are a great place for sand to pile up in. The thick part of the coil that goes from 12 noon to 6 0clock. I think before I hit the beach with it again i will put some clear RTV caulking on it and then put the coil cover on. I also have a couple of 1'x1'x 0.0625 " pieces of Lexan coming to make 2 coil covers. I will glue them right on my coil cover like I did the 19" ZED coil. Doing this so i can scrub the ZEQ in OZ without getting hung up ! Cheers mates.....

New 800 charged last night for an old rodeo grounds hunt with Tiftaaft today. I've pulled a barber quarter and dime as well as a buffalo and wheats out of there so my expectations are always high. I only found a few coins, one wheat, but Tiftaaft has a good story he may share. The tones in my headphones sound muffled, not clean/crisp. I tried Tim's wired phones supplied with his 600 and the sound was much crisper. Is this normal, if so, I need to get an adapter and hook up my Pro Golds.

Looking at the classified section of another forum and on the first page there are 8 Deus for sale, for trade or marked as sold. Must be quite a few comparisons being made out there.

Hello , i dont understand one thing about the tone break . To make it clear I give you an example . I have gold chain 18k who read 1 in the ID . Only park 2 , beach 1 and gold mode detect this chain . If i put all metal , park 1 and the 2 field mode detect that . The problem is if i run in field 2 , i will miss this chain . I thought I could solve this problem by adjusting tone break , but when i change the value of tone break from 2 to 0 , i hear a change in all metal but not in normal mode .. So my question is : Is it possible to configurate the field 2 for that it is able to read and detect the value 0 and 1 in normal mode (no all metal)? (I run in 50 tones all the time )

Today, as I moved towards High Tension lines, my 800 acted up while running Park 1 in Multi IQ. Noise Cancel had no affect nor did changing to Park 2. I decided to run through the frequencies. 5k was noisier, 10k a little better, 15k & up was quiet so I continued in 15kHz. One more Equinox learned item for me.

Hello All. Has any one found a Platinum Ring with their Nox 800? If so how did it read on the scale. I will be searching for a Platinum Diamond Ring lost about 24 years ago. Thanks...

Today was a nice day at the beach. It was actually too warm for my long sleeve shirt. I started out at a very low tide and found next to nothing. It was time to get up off the wet sand and go hunt behind the lifeguard stations, away from the non-producing wet sand. What a relief. No salt water, no hot rocks ... just a few bottle caps! I could use beach, park and field as I wanted. I was on the dry sand for about 2 hours which is the most for me in a few years. I think I'll do it again in the right area. The pin is a Dade County Police Chiefs Association lapel pin. I'm in California. I don't know how it got here. Some research that I did indicates that that sociation has renamed itself the Miami-Dade association which would make this pin older. I don't know what year but interesting to me. The big coin is a 1998 Two Pounder. Mitchel

Finally got a break in the rain in not so sunny Sunnyvale, and got an invite from some detecting buddies to go explore some outback sites. First site they'd already located an old homestead but were searching for two more. After a brutal (for me) hike up a mountain, we didn't find the homestead that was supposed to be up there, but the view was spectacular, so still worth the effort. Did a total of a solid 8 hours of detecting at various spots, and lots of hiking around. I had to dig all of this: To get this: We hiked back down to the site that they'd already found and after hours of finding nothing but bullets, and shotgun butts, I finally got my coil over some keepers. First was a well worn 1886 V nickle, it was so worn that I initially thought it was a token, then a shield nickle, but then in the sun I could see the V. Just a few feet away from that I got the badge looking thing, no idea what it is, looks like a Navy or Marines insignia, anyone have any ideas? Also got a Southern Pacific RR seal: And a couple of buckles: We went to a second site, it was purportedly an old picnic grove. The day before a 1907 $10 gold eagle was dug there, and numerous other coins over the years have been dug there, from reales, seateds to barbers, one guy got a V nickle, the other guy got a toasty IHP and I got the buckle above there, it's marked PAT. MAY 2,1990. The oddball looking buckle looking thingy above it is marked PAT DEC 21, 86. I've never dug so many beer cans, I stopped counting at a case I ran the EQ800 in Field2, noise cancel, GB, SENS between 21-23, everything else default. Didn't seem like I dug any more iron then any other machine, got a couple of nails, and a couple of BIG pieces of iron. If anyone has any idea what that badge looking item with the anchor on it is, I'd appreciate it. HH, Brian

I really enjoy the reports and photos of finds, but in some cases I'm left wanting a bit more -- that is, settings. If you think about it, the Equinox 800 is really four detectors (Park, Field, Beach, Gold), or maybe eight detectors since each of these has two submodes. All of those 8 have different blends of frequencies. And since you are given the option of going into single frequency there are even more than 8 detectors in one! As an example, on Saturday in a mildly trashing site I was fine in Park 1. Yesterday I got a couple hours free and tried the same settings in a heavily iron (mostly nail) infested site. This is part of my experimentation -- to figure out the limitations of the different detectors, err, make that 'modes'. Next time out I'll go there and use Field 1, which the operations manual suggests for iron trashy sites. (According to the manual, Park 1 is for aluminum trashy, typical of parks.) Please keep up the great reporting, but don't forget to include your modes and settings.

I just joined the Forum and Fan Club today but have been metal detecting with a Whites XLT on land and Garrett Infinium LS for the past 14 years. Looking to upgrade to a Minelab Equinox 600/800 after having done the research , reviewed the manual, and watched the YOUTUBE posts. I do land detecting around Reno,NV and beaches at Lake Tahoe,so, have to deal with the mineralized ground. In my 14 years I have found 19,376 coins while also pulling 17,835 pieces of trash/garbage from the sand/water at Lake Tahoe. I would have to consider myself semi-hardcore when it comes to detecting. Looking to branch out to mining camp and gold nuggets shootings, thats why in part looking at the Minelab Equinox. ( can't afford the CTX 3030). My question. What's the best way to get a Minelab Equinox 800? Hard to find one currently in stock anywhere. Also, looking for a hunting buddy in the Reno,NV area . Thanks.

”One of the EQUINOX’s best features is its strong Target Identifications (TIDs) system. I’ve never seen a detector able to give such reliable TIDs at depth like the EQUINOX can. Not only in Multi-IQ (multi-frequency), but also in all single frequencies, and the TIDs for non-ferrous targets are stable across modes and frequencies. .. So, for example; a copper coin giving a 21 TID in Field 1 Multi-IQ will still be a 21 if you switch to Park 1 10kHz, etc. However, this TID stability in the non-ferrous range doesn’t continue for the iron falsing that occurs. A Multi-IQ TID of 15 from an iron crown bottle cap becomes a 27 in 10kHz. Interestingly, this phenomenon opens an opportunity to practically discriminate tricky items that iron false on all metal detectors.” Full article at https://www.minelab.com/anz/go-minelabbing/treasure-talk/dealing-with-bottle-crown-caps

After what felt like weeks of rain, Sunday was a beautiful warm sunny day, and I was able to get out with some detecting friends and get a solid 8 hours of detecting. Something that's been bugging me, is those darn surface, or near surface targets. Amazingly something as large as a flattened beer can sounds pretty darn good, coming in at a solid 26, the same as a silver dime. Now most machines would overload on a beer can an inch or two under the surface, and you'd likely move on, especially after digging several As the site that was loaded with said beer cans has been known to produce some good old coins, it was hard to pass these, but I gotta tell you that after digging well over a case of them (some were 12"-18" deep, many were shallow), it was defeating. Interestingly for the most part, I did not get that double blip signal indicating a surface target, one or two perhaps, but not the majority. I did raise the coil on a few, and sure you could raise the coil 8" before loosing the signal, but what if it was a rare quarter or barber half (which understandably should register a higher TID# then 26) I should mention that on Saturday a 1907-D $10 gold eagle came out of this site, and last fall a AU condition (PCGS graded) 1913-S Barber Quarter came out of this site, for those that don't know coins, let's just say you could buy a decent used car with that one, or pay for 12 EQ800's with change for gas and a few coils : http://www.pcgscoinfacts.com/Coin/Detail/5666 Don't get me wrong, I dig my fair share of trash, especially in relic sites, where you're usually rewarded (eventually) if you dig all conductors, but there has to be a better way to deal with these cans or like nuisance targets?? HH, Cal

I just got back from DIV 40 and wanted to give a quick report on how the Equinox 600 performed in the hot Culpeper soil. Mind you I am not proficient with the detector yet. In addition to the Equinox I took my GPX. I used the Equinox for a total of about 8 hours in the three days I was there. I did find some good stuff with the Equinox which included an Eagle coat button, minie ball and a New York coat button. For me I found that the Equinox ran quietest using the beach mode in five tones iron bias one and everything notched out up to 5. If not in the beach modes the machine was really chattery. It can accurately ID a Target to about 5 inches but has a real hard time with low conductors in that soil. With the adjustments the 800 offers you might get better results. At one point I buried a nickel at 6 inches in one of the fields and could not get it with the equinox, the GPX easily picked it up. Overall I thought the detector performed well and was very helpful in the iron infested areas. I know there were other Equinoxes there and some good stuff was found by those using them. I know of at least 1 breast plate found with the Equinox.

Just got back Not a lot of relics for me. Some round and minie balls but other then Twelfth GA flat buttons (some deep, old, and partial, others amongst thick iron) and some modern bullets and casings, I hit no period brass but plenty period lead and iron. I have confidence the Equinox would have pulled me a button if I had gotten my coil over one or two. So as a relic hunter...disappointment. I have a chance to redeem myself in a couple weeks. As a detector geek, it was a really good time. Some of the below is "repackaged" from abenson's thread, so if you are having Deja Vu... I wanted to start my own thread with all the info consolidated but also directly address some of abenson's issues based on what I observed, hence the repeat info. EMI, Ground Noise and Coil Noises: 1) Manual Noise Cancel helped on some occasions when Auto didn't pick the optimal channel IMO (a feature the 600 lacks). This was ESPECIALLY important here where you could have up to 25 - 50 GPX's within a few hundred feet. Only once or twice, though, was interference really bad such that I had to pause detecting. Never had to reduce sensitivity below 17 and tried to keep it around 20 and no higher than 22 (again, try to stay near the presets folks, they do appear to be optimal for most situations). 2) Did not use GB tracking (except in Gold Mode which has tracking on by default) but Auto GB'd frequently and found GB (in Field 2 mode) varied anywhere from 4 to 6 in some spots and between 44-56 in other spots. This variability could result in some adverse performance if you just went with the defalt GB setting or did not rebalance frequently. I also noticed a strange phenomenon when GB was set high (i.e., in the 40+ range) that the coil would false on impact with corn stalks or even if you just shook the coil in the air. This did not happen when GB was set close to zero. When I first experienced it I thought I had a loose coil connection or imminent coil failure until I cycled through the modes and noticed that it did not happen on all modes. I finally figured it out when I had re GB'd to a lower number and it went away. Will try tracking at the next mineralized site but did not want to "chance it" here. I have more confidence in it since using gold mode - one of the things I learned from gold mode. Also note that I did not really have a chance to actually gage mineralization because I never pulled out a detector with an Fe302 mineralization meter on it to correlate the GB readings to mineralization. 3) Very important to run the Equinox fast near its defaults on recovery speed. In this soil, 7 worked well on "ground noise" and sometimes 8. This is where the 600 maximum recovery speed limit might make a difference. I did not have a 600 to compare but I know I would not run Field 2 below its default of 7 which is higher than the max setting equivalent setting on the 600. I ran my Equinox 800 in mostly Field 2 and it was great. I used it all three days and only used the GPX for a few short hours in the morning of the third day. I forced myself to stick with it and while I did not score any Eagle buttons, did get some minie and round balls. One round ball was deep 9+ inches and ID'd clearly though the numbers wavered between 14 to 16 and you had to have the coil centered and wiggled to lock in the ID. I found one minie not deep but in highly mineralized and trashy ground under a tree root and the ID was very choppy as a result but dug and was rewarded. Iron tones (ground noise) abounded in the mineralized soil I set up two Field 2 programs. One I kept in the user profile which was basically the default Field 2 50 tones with Recovery at 7 (Very Important to note that this is slightly higher than default on the 600 which is limited to the 800 equivalent of a 6 setting max) and Iron Bias at 0. I used this program when in thick iron and wanted to be sure I did not inadvertently mask non-ferrous or to interrogate targets that gave off choppy high tones in my "main" Field 2 program (described below) to see if the high tone was falsing or wraparound (if the high tone increased in the presence of a ferrous tone then I could pretty much confirm it was an iron target and not a masked non-ferrous, this technique is not foolproof, however). The other I ran most of the time which was exactly the same but without much fear of masking in the open fields, I ran Iron Bias up to 6 to limit falsing on nail heads. I sill need to experiment with Iron Bias but I felt this set up well for how I was hunting. I also dialed in a little threshold. This enabled me to not be completely in the dark on iron if I chose to run discrimination. I made liberal use of the AM button either to flat out search in AM or to interrogate choppy high tones as describe above. Threshold kept me apprised of the iron situation full time regardless of the disc mode I used. In a thick bed of nails house site on the property, I experimented with Gold Mode and THAT was very interesting and promising. More on that later... Not a great DIV for me with respect to finds (and believe me there were plenty of great finds to be had, they were just concentrated in a few specific couple acre camp areas on 1500 acres of farmland), something I did not figure out soon enough, lol. However, it was a great opportunity to learn the detector as I put nearly 30 more hours on it and learned a hell of a lot. To be continued...