New Update Has Arrived

[StevenB]

Haven't had a chance yet to test the new update myself, but based on what I'm reading here I think a good strategy to try will be setting F2=0 or 2 to unmask those difficult targets, and set User Profile to F2=9 to quickly recheck targets for bottle caps and other iron falsing.

[Jeff McClendon]

I am in the same situation as Steve H with high mineralization. I generally leave my 600 on Iron Bias 0 and will occasionally switch to 2 if I hit an interesting deep target that I want more information about. Here in my area, the absolute worst bottle cap for giving NO indication of iron even with the All Metal button engaged are Coronas. With v1.75, Coronas would give a slight iron tone near the edge of the bottle cap as I moved the coil away at Fe=2. With v2.0 F2=2, I get obvious iron tone anywhere on Corona crown caps. These results were on actual wild bottle caps still in the ground, found today using the Nox 600. So, some progress has actually been made with this update it seems. Love the backlight adjustment too.

 

Jeff 

[Noah (FL)]

21 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

 

Thanks for posting this graphic Steve!!   I thought this was what NASA-Tom was trying to explain about the new F2 settings but I’m a better visual learner and this graphic is ??

[Cabin Fever]

My first impression of FE-2 0 is that I see no going back to FE 0 unless needed for a specific situation.  This view could change since it was only a 3 hour hunt.  Everyone’s experience might be different depending on location and the way you hunt.  I am an audio hunter and was impressed with what I experienced yesterday.  From what I read before going out, I was expecting a difficult hunt where I would have to ease into the new more aggressive settings..  I generally hunt with very aggressive settings  and am used to lots of noise. The new more aggressive FE-2 0 setting actually seemed to tame my detector audio. Dig decisions were much easier and more clear to me.  

Bryan

[Steve Herschbach]

On 9/30/2019 at 1:29 PM, Noah (FL) said:

Thanks for posting this graphic Steve!!   I thought this was what NASA-Tom was trying to explain about the new F2 settings but I’m a better visual learner and this graphic is ??

Thankfully Minelab simply added the new options instead of replacing the old ones, so we can choose what works best for each of us, plus compare more easily without having to go to the old version and back again.

[Flowdog]

That graphic settled for me some of the complex Fe/f2 "equivalence" scale, It also got me curious 

The F2 scale shows it to be broader than Fe, therefore F2 must have courser iron bias adjustments than Fe. However, according to Tom, given that F2@4 is identical to Fe@0, and further given, that each downward adjustment in F2 below 4 are finely stepped decrements of -.25. This must indicate that changing bias in the center range - near default - will have a greater  impact on processing and much finer processing on the lower end. Tom did not mention much if anything about the higher end properties, but I would guess that In reality, the graphic may be more accurate if was drawn as a bell shaped curve. For giggles, I'd like to see the undisclosed Fe and F2 bell graphs superimposed.

FWIW, three days in the field totaling about 10 hours, I went way out of my comfort zone with F2. Aa few hours in lighting and snow and foil-lined fleece jacket probably didn't help on the first night, but when I covered a dime there was no doubt. The rest of my hours were spent in bed of iron conditions. Sticking with F2 was very harsh, and the gap from hunting park/school to an old homesite had me making quite a few adjustments- not only iron bias. I will say that when running quieted, running F2@9 sounded like I had cotton in my earphones. F2 @ 0 was falsing off hundreds of iron bits, square nails, rusted cans, but would sometimes resolve the TID into a dig tone without benefits. Nevertheless, just like I got comfortable running Fe@0  I will be leaning toward operating F2 with no-to-low bias as the norm.

[Oiwon]

Hi all.

I have a nox600. I love the new backlight update. The stock backlight was almost unusable, and way too bright. I actually almost sold the detector because the backlight was so bright, i never understood why it was so bright, and i'm glad they decided to correct the situation.

Anyways I'm not that smart, but i'm trying to make sense of all this F2 stuff surrounding the new update. It's hard to get simple information for the 600 and I don't want to continue to further confuse myself, so i'm just going to ask and perhaps this can also help others:

The 600 with the 2.0+ update has the option to turn on F2. Default is 0 and 1-2-3 can also be selected.

What is the difference between 0-1-2-3? Which one should i be running and or experimenting with?

The man in me says crank it up to 3, but the old man in me says start it off at 0 and take it from there. Obviously if this new update is going to reduce how many bottle caps I dig, I would love to be able to take advantage of that seeing as how I am in Hawaii and do mostly beach/snorkel detecting. Thank you in advance for clarifying this for us 600 users. I really dig this site, and although I haven't posted before - I have spent countless hours on here.

HH

[Jackpine]

Flowdog I had pretty much the same experience hunting the nails where an old church burnt down.  Many many times I would get falsing that in my experience constituted a high probability of a non-ferrous in the iron only to be the iron tricking me.  These were not the grasping for straws that we sometimes go for, some of them I thought should have been non-ferrous.

But then, F2 0 did it's thing when I got a nice smooth fainter yet quick high tone that stopped me dead.  I spent a lot of time interrogating this one.  luckily I had initially hit it just right as it was only discernible from a narrow sweep angle.  With a tight well centered sweep It gave a repeatable TID of 17.  After removing the plug the signal disappeared and cleaning the loose soil from the bottom of the hole gave the same result.  I loosened the soil in the bottom to a depth of around 8" and started running handfuls over the coil.  Eventually I had it in my hand, It was not the IH or junk target I had surmised but a 1916 wheat penny normal TID 22-24.

Tom

[Chase Goldman]

12 hours ago, Oiwon said:

Hi all.

I have a nox600. I love the new backlight update. The stock backlight was almost unusable, and way too bright. I actually almost sold the detector because the backlight was so bright, i never understood why it was so bright, and i'm glad they decided to correct the situation.

Anyways I'm not that smart, but i'm trying to make sense of all this FE stuff surrounding the new update. It's hard to get simple information for the 600 and I don't want to continue to further confuse myself, so i'm just going to ask and perhaps this can also help others:

The 600 with the 2.0+ update has the option to turn on FE. Default is 0 and 1-2-3 can also be selected.

What is the difference between 0-1-2-3? Which one should i be running and or experimenting with?

The man in me says crank it up to 3, but the old man in me says start it off at 0 and take it from there. Obviously if this new update is going to reduce how many bottle caps I dig, I would love to be able to take advantage of that seeing as how I am in Hawaii and do mostly beach/snorkel detecting. Thank you in advance for clarifying this for us 600 users. I really dig this site, and although I haven't posted before - I have spent countless hours on here.

HH

In the simplest terms it is a tradeoff.  F2 appears to behave differently than the existing FE iron bias filter and may be stronger at the highest setting (3 for the 600) than the FE filter.  For both, the higher setting you use may reduce falsing off round, mixed ferrous like crown caps and other ferrous targets but you may also mask nearby non-ferrous targets by doing so.  Test it out on sample bottlecaps and then with a coin next to or on top of tge cap to see which setting best cancels the bottlecap yet still allows you to hear the coin.  Note that the best way to tell if a high tone is a ferrous false signal is to go to all metal using the horseshoe butyon and listen for a strong iron grunt along with the high tone.