Accidental Button Pushes

[palzynski]

16 hours ago, maxxkatt said:

...

The Minelab engineers using their experience with the 800 just made a very good detector with the Vanquish which is truly power on and go hunting and have fun by not fooling or worrying about do I have the settings adjusted properly. It is easy to mess up the 800's default settings. It is harder to mess up the settings on the Vanquish because the software engineers designed a machine that you can hardly mess up.

I have several permissions I cannot wait to use my 540 on. I hope to get it within a week. At least during this wait I know for sure I won't have to waste almost a year trying to lean the 540 like I did the 800. The vanquish is the 800 with training wheels.

Yes I agree with you maxxcat , it is very to mess up with the 800 settings. Also the Nox buttons are too sensible and it is very easy to activate them accidentaly. And there is no lock option which would block the Nox buttons, while this lock option is a standard on most of our smartphones , gps , etc … 

In addition , it is also very easy to accidentally reset the settings with the side power button . For example when the Nox is in a ruksack. I already happened to me 2 or 3 times , I lost a lot of time with this , trying to reprogram the Nox on the field ... 

Finally I am never confident with my Nox settings when detecting , and I must always look at the screen to check that these settings are correct. I do not have this pb with the Deus , or the Vanquish which has no side button,  less sensible front buttons , and so few settings that you cannot loose them ...

I hope that ML will have a look at this and quickly add this LOCK function thats is missing on the Nox. 

[Chase Goldman]

1 hour ago, palzynski said:

Yes I agree with you maxxcat , it is very to mess up with the 800 settings. Also the Nox buttons are too sensible and it is very easy to activate them accidentaly. And there is no lock option which would block the Nox buttons, while this lock option is a standard on most of our smartphones , gps , etc … 

In addition , it is also very easy to accidentally reset the settings with the side power button . For example when the Nox is in a ruksack. I already happened to me 2 or 3 times , I lost a lot of time with this , trying to reprogram the Nox on the field ... 

Finally I am never confident with my Nox settings when detecting , and I must always look at the screen to check that these settings are correct. I do not have this pb with the Deus , or the Vanquish which has no side button,  less sensible front buttons , and so few settings that you cannot loose them ...

I hope that ML will have a look at this and quickly add this LOCK function thats is missing on the Nox. 

Wow, in 2 years, this is the first I've heard someone bringing this up as an issue.  It takes a deliberate push to get into the settings menu in the first place and then several additional pushes to move between settings.  Then you have to press another button to even change a setting.  I suppose the power button is vulnerable to an inadvertent factory reset (I personally find it difficult to manipulate on purpose much less accidentally), but even then you can simply slide a wool cap or something like that over the control head to keep the button from being inadvertently pressed while transporting the unit and you protect the control head to boot.  If you somehow have messed the unit up and are lost because you have deviated far from the defaults, then full and partial search profile resets are available to get you back to square one.  Would be interested to know if others think this is a real world problem with Equinox, but not here.  This is a Vanquish thread.

[palzynski]

Hi Chase , Yes I know that is rather a vanquish thread here , but as maxxcatt has started this topic on the Nox I just wanted to continue on this Equinox issue  🙂.

Just one example of what I explained above. Once I was detecting in a field with my 800 , usually there I find a target say every 5/10 minutes here because this area has been strongly detected over the years.  At a moment I realized that I had not found anything since almost half an hour , and that there was probably something wrong with the 800. Looking at the screen I saw that I was in monofrequency at 5khz instead of Multi that I always use with the 800 ! So probably I had accidentally pushed the freq button , perhaps when putting the 800 on the ground.  

The Nox detecting modes are also under direct access , the dedicated button is on the left of the screen . If you push it accidentally then you change your mode , for example from Field2 to Park1 , so you might loose a lot of targets before realizing that your detectors settings have changed ...  

So a LOCK function would be a great plus on the Equinox I think ...

And again comparing the Vanquish and the Nox , this issue is too me much better managed on the Vanquish. It is almost impossible to accidentally change a setting or accidentally reset the detector with the Vanquish , as far as I saw during my last tests with the Vanquish 540.

Otherwise perhaps there is a way to transfer these posts to the Equinox forum , I let the forum administrator answer to this …  🙂

  

 

[Chase Goldman]

i guess I glance at the screen a lot and so if something changed the associated change in the icon stands out (multi frequency symbol, mode symbol, etc.) The one area where I sometimes get tripped up but usually only for a few seconds, is forgetting to come out of pinpoint.  But I have hunted fields before where you don't even get a peep of iron for hundreds of yards, so in that case, I can see where you might not notice you are in the wrong mode because if the machine is not making noise, you are not glancing at the screen (though I have an unconscious habit of running my coil across my shovel blade periodically just to make sure it is still working under those conditions).  I understand better your concern now, thanks.

[palzynski]

Actually my 1st detector is a XP Deus Lite , there is just the coil and shaft , and wireless headphones , thats all , no digital display. So I have the habit to rely on my ears, and actually I do not look very often at the Equinox screen ... This explains why it took me a long time to see that my settings had changed after having accidentally pushed this freq button …  

[Jeff McClendon]

I have never had a problem with accidental button pushing after my initial month or so of using my Equinox regularly. However, most of the hunting I do is in areas where I hear multiple targets on each swing. So, I rarely get to just hunt by listening. I am constantly using the display and often dig 50 or more targets in one hour.

When I'm gold prospecting with the Equinox 800 I don't have nearly as many targets but I still use the display since I am only hunting in 1 tone using the Gold modes.

I don't see a need for a function locking button. 

 

Jeff

[TedinVT]

I made the “forgot to come out of pinpoint mode” a couple of times when I first got my 800.  Easy mistake to make coming from an ATPro where you have to hold the button down.  After hunting for 20 minutes without a target and discovering my mistake I've since learned to check the display.

I don't see a need for any lock buttons.  Looking at your display from time to time should keep even the novices out of trouble.

[palzynski]

Actually I do not understand why there should not be a lock on a detector while it is a standard on most of our cellular phones , I also  very frequently use the lock function on my Garmin Dakota 20 GPS. For me a detector is even more subject to accidental contacts than a phone or a GPS  because a detector is often used in difficult conditions , in woods , among the vegetation and so on ...  

So to me it is still an issue, and if I remember my first years detecting at the begining of the 2000s I had a similar pb with my tesoro silver sabre potentiometers which tended to to turn too easily , I remember I had to maintain them with elastics to prevent them from turning  ... 

On the XPs like the Goldmaxx in 2007 they started to use specific potentiometers more difficult to turn,  then preventing accidental settings change when detecting.

On the very recent Nokta Simplex+ you must push the buttons quite strongly to activate them , no risk to activate them accidentally, a very good idea I think ..

So to conclude this detector settings lock story is not a new story   …  More or less taken into account by the manufacturers ...

 

 

[palzynski]

Yes I remember I made some some tests in 2005/2006 with a GPX4500 . I remember having even broken a  potentiometer on the GPX back control panel , and my GPX had to go back to Minelab for repair. Yes clearly the Equinox is much more protected against accidental settings changes or bumps than the GPX , but probably I will make a kind of plastic hardcover so that I will be sure that my Nox settings stay the same while detecting ...

BTW at this time I rather use the Vanquish 540 than the Nox . I think that I will probably keep only 2 detectors , my trusty Deus HF 9i coil and the Vanquish 540 V12 + V8 coils.  I can do all what I want with these 2 detectors , detecting in high iron trashed areas with the Deus and using the Vanquish V12 for finding deep coins in low to moderated iron trashed areas.