Equinox Fe Vs Fe2, Set At Zero?

[GB_Amateur]

19 hours ago, Chase Goldman said:

I’ve tested masking in F2 at default settings and it is not an issue.

Just for clarification, you are saying you've never noticed a downside for the F2 Iron Bias defaults?  Is this from field detecting, test garden, etc. investigation, or both?  And what ferrous targets have shown improvement, sheet metal scraps, nails,...?

[Badger-NH]

32 minutes ago, GB_Amateur said:

If you're more interested in old USA nickel coins than gold jewelry then it helps a lot.  Last year in 311 hours of park and school detecting I dug 1423 pull tabs (all types but half of those were beaver-only and half of the remainder were the smallest ring+beavertail).  Maybe 10% did I dig trying to clear the way for masked good targets.  Those 90% that I dug thinking they might be good were all centered somewhere in the 12-13 sweetspot (on the ML Equinox) for USA nickels, with some spillover to 11 and occasionally 14.  I probably ignored at least 5000 (not kidding) that were above USA nickels, where modern pulltabs and the larger ring-and-beavertails hit.

IMO, any detecting session needs to keep in mind both site and goal(s) of the hunt.  Around picnic shelters and tables the number of pulltabs can be daunting.  If I'm at a site which had activity in the 1800's (or earlier) then I definitely am not going to be so selective as many coins from that century ring up from about 6-7 to 19 (what I like to think of as the location of most aluminum trash, exception being the larger pieces, especially aluminum screw caps around 22-23).  And if there don't seem to be many pulltab hits I'm more likely to dig the 14-19 region to see what else might be there (e.g. gold ring if I'm really lucky).

What does this have to do with Iron Bias?  Not much, at least directly, from what I know about Iron Bias.

Wow, I can definitely see where some notching would help in that situation. I don't encounter many pull tabs or pull rings so I don't need deal with it much. As a relic hunter and beach hunter, I'm used digging anything non ferrous and never notch any specific targets. When I want discrimination, I just reject everything below 17.

 

[Chase Goldman]

3 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

Just for clarification, you are saying you've never noticed a downside for the F2 Iron Bias defaults?  Is this from field detecting, test garden, etc. investigation, or both?  And what ferrous targets have shown improvement, sheet metal scraps, nails,...?

Test garden and general usage.  First of all, I am not really into science experiments and exhaustive testing.  I still have a day job, so my swing time is precious and I would rather get to it and find targets rather than spend countless hours collecting exhaustive data in test gardens and plastic boxes full of hot dirt.  I appreciate the folks who are willing to do that and share the information with us but the fact is that the variables are many and unless all possible combinations of conditions, targets, detectors, coils, settings are tested, then I take all test information with a grain of salt for my situations and how I hunt and make general conclusions - I don't obsess over results because we are using a crude detection instrument in the first place and like I said, conclusions are suspect when you are only testing a miniscule subset of possible variabilities. 

That being said, I do have some reference non-ferrous targets that are intentionally placed near iron and iron that falses and I see a definite difference between FE and F2 in the way the target signal behaves and I prefer F2 because the signal seems more crisp, don't see any significant downside to running at the default F2 setting, so I mainly just leave it there, and really like how it cleans up all types of falsing iron from small nail heads to large pieces of flat iron.  The falsing mitigation is stark and huge for me and is worth a lot more than worrying about the extreme low probablity of masking that might ever occur. 

Let's talk about potential downsides to using iron bias -

• It doesn't do what it says it does - makes iffy iron targets or falsing iron targets sound "more ferrous".  I kind of felt that way on FE - felt it wasn't worth the trip vs. the possible downside of "masking" or whatever you want to call it.  F2 - completely different ball game.  As far as I am concerned, ML can do away with FE now that they have F2 but that would probably cause much consternation to folks who have convinced themselves that FE is better.  
• Turns a non-ferrous target into a ferrous target - Never seen this happen.  I don't think I have ever dug a target with the Equinox that I thought was 100% ferrous that turned out to be non-ferrous.  There are iffy targets, to be sure (even with F2 engaged).  But if F2 shifts a falsing or iffy target to full ferrous, it IS full ferrous in my experience.  I have played with F2 on or off in the field and haven't run into the situation yet (see below for corollary).
• Masking of non-ferrous targets - This is a hard one to prove outside of controlled conditions.  I can see how this might happen in theory - IB is a filter that takes some finite signal processing time, so it IS possible it could affect recovery  or the ability to separate targets (e.g., perhaps a recovery of 6 turns into 5.5 when IB is engaged to max effect - making these numbers up for the purpose of illustration).  My personal experience tends to counter this theory.  I have dug plenty of iffy signals that turned out to be mixed ferrous and non-ferrous targets in the hole simultaneously or turned out to be purely non-ferrous.  And rarely I have pulled a huge ferrous target and have subsequently found a non-ferrous on a subsequent scan.  What I can't tell you is whether that target would have been masked regardless of the F2 setting.  However, I don't recall an occasion where I have ever engaged F2 on a falsing ferrous target to make it sound 100% ferrous, dug the ferrous target and found a non-ferrous.  If I ever did do that, that might be a case for F2 "causing" masking.  I have not encountered it but I have also not dug 100% of all 100% ferrous targets indicated with F2 engaged.  So my experience says it is rare but not impossible.

To be frank - I would worry more about whether I am covering every inch of ground with my coil than the whether F2 could ever mask a target.  I am generally pragmatic, play the odds in my favor (or take chance out the equation - i.e., dig everything that beeps).

Bottom Line:  I simply like how F2 mitigates ferrous falsing, genuinely notice it's absence when I am working single frequency, and simply don't lose sleep over any potential downsides because I think they are insignificant IMO. 

Cheers

[GB_Amateur]

18 minutes ago, Chase Goldman said:

I prefer F2 because the signal seems more crisp, don't see any significant downside to running at the default F2 setting, so I mainly just leave it there, and really like how it cleans up all types of falsing iron from small nail heads to large pieces of flat iron.

Thanks for your detailed post/response, Chase.  I just looked at the most recent Equinox Instruction Manual I have stored (which is a couple years old...).  It indicates that the Iron Bias F2 defaults for the 800 model are all set at 6, regardless of the Detecting Mode (and a value of 2 for all modes of the 600 model).  So that is what you are using?

[Chase Goldman]

13 minutes ago, GB_Amateur said:

Thanks for your detailed post/response, Chase.  I just looked at the most recent Equinox Instruction Manual I have stored (which is a couple years old...).  It indicates that the Iron Bias F2 defaults for the 800 model are all set at 6, regardless of the Detecting Mode (and a value of 2 for all modes of the 600 model).  So that is what you are using?

6  -  When I say I use the default, I mean I use the default.   I have been impressed where ML has set the defaults on Equinox and I honestly don't stray much from them in any search mode other than to set sensitivity appropriately and the number of tones to my liking (usually 50 when relic hunting, 5 at the beach or in a park), perhaps a tweak to recovery speed a tad to calm things down (meaning I usually increase recovery ABOVE the default) and ensure I always noise cancel and do an auto Ground Balance.  I either have a Gold Mode program or a single frequency variant of the mode I am searching with stored in the Custom Profile slot to enable quick target interrogation - single frequency target interrogation is where I really notice the comparative IB "ON"/"OFF" target response.  I personally do not think IB = 0 in either FE or F2 mode turns IB completely off when using Multi IQ - it simply minimizes the effect - so if you really want to know what the minimally filtered and processed target signal sounds like, you have to go to single frequency.  But that's really neither here nor there, I suppose. 

[Steve Herschbach]

That’s a couple great posts Chase, we think much alike, and I have a similar attitude about getting too deep in the weeds. Despite all the tech, I will still lean on a good location, and getting my coil over the target. Sometimes we make it sound like metal detecting is rocket science, but my reality to this day still looks a lot like beep-dig! 

Lots of people really question and obsess over updates. But my training from prototype testing basically says “update good, load ASAP” and get on with it. The only question usually then is how to improve on that update... not on how to go backwards. If an update comes out, I wait just a couple days, then I load it up, learn it, and move on.

People sometimes forget the engineers actually are genuinely trying to make our lives better, and a lot of work goes into an update to make the detector better. They’d never release an update, unless they really believed it made the machine better at what it does. I work with these people, and I do trust that they are a million times smarter than I when it comes to this stuff. That trust tends to make me more comfortable just grabbing the latest updates I guess, as it really surprised me that anyone would feel differently about them. No detector is ever truly 100% done, and this ability to keep tweaking and tuning after release is one of the best things to ever happen in the industry. Twenty years ago, the only way to get any update was buy the next model, because that’s where all updates went

 In this industry, for a long time, the first genuine new model was often a finished prototype, and it was always the follow up model that was best tuned and tweaked. I saw this for ages with a Minelab in particular and still do. You can bet second generation Multi-IQ is to die for. Equinox just proved it has potential, and now the real work begins. Same with GPZ 7000. Just proving ZVT works. The next gen will be what we were really waiting for. That’s still the pattern but updates help smooth the process, and keep the first time efforts a little safer for purchasers. I feel way more comfortable getting something hot off the press if I know it can be updated. Knowing what I know now, I’ll not get another detector unless it can be updated. The cutting edge is too complex, and the chances of new machines getting to market and needing updates just too great. If the machine does not have an update facility, they won’t even be trying, and in fact are more prone to play down faults. A company with a good update facility has less to fear from a major bug, that would have the other company doing a recall.

Lotta blah blah blah to say I always thought original FE was deficient, and F2 is just what it should have been all along. That’s the power of being able to update.

[EL NINO77]

I have now done 2 short tests separation tests, namely 3D separation test and Monte performance nailboard test to compare the Iron bias FE and F2 settings.

In the first test-in the deep separation test, the nail is at a distance of 20 cm from the coin .. and Equinox is set in Program Park 2 at recovery speed 7.

 

The first test / 3D test / shows that equinox did quite well with the separation also on the setting of Iron Bias F2 -9 max .... which is a really good result .... while in my opinion the setting of Iron Bias FE is a safe setting somewhere at the level FE1-2 max ... and a higher setting of FE than 2 is already significantly signed on the significantly reduced 3D separation ....

However, this test evaluates only one of the two separation situations in detection well ..... I can now say that in another second test of the 2D surface separation type "Monte performance Nailboard Test" it will show how high we can move the Iron Bias F2 setting without so that we do not strongly limit the separation properties of the detector in this type of separation ...

I also did this test .. but tomorrow I will repeat it in daylight and load it from Gopro..and you will see the differences in the individual settings ..

[Chase Goldman]

BTW - I consider the link below to be the definitive iron bias thread.  Some of it slightly contradicts my conclusions regarding whether IB can exacerbate masking non-ferrous in the presence of ferrous but it was the thread that opened my eyes on the usefulness of IB F2.  I am still trying not to over think it and just keep IB at 6 to simply balance the indisputable upside of IB against the debateable downside of using the feature.  IB 6 for me all the way.  As Steve said above, the best adjustment you can make when detecting is simply cranking up your ability to get yourself onto a primo site through research and people skills and then efficiently cover every inch of ground you can with your coil while you are there (tactics vary depending on whether it is a one off visit or have lifetime privileges).  Much more effective and valuable than any detector tweak.

 

[Phillips_R]

Chase,  I appreciate your thoughts on FE versus FE2 as I think we both hunt the same kind of soils with clay and hot rocks. I keep looking back to both Your and Steve's past threads on this. 

Steve you are right on the money with the thoughts on the software upgrades.  We're long past the days of hardware being the main method of getting newer better capabilities.  The 600/800 is a very capable hardware platform and I'm glad to see ML making adjustments to the software to enhance their capabilities. You wouldn't get these free enhancements in a hardware only environment. I suspect these are coming from ML's development of other similar platforms that they are developing.  Frankly you wouldn't generally spend cycles on further development of a stable platform and provide the SW updates for free, unless they had that post launch dev costs considered in their original business case for the platform.   I just hope they keep it up.     //R    

 

         

[EL NINO77]

Other tests for setting Iron bias F2 vs FE this time it's original Monte Performance Nailboard Test ..