Legend - First Impressions

[Ridge Runner]

Bless your mother and you for being there for her. My mother will be a hundred come November. Theses girls came up in hard times and takes a lot to put one of them down for long  

 The best to you.

 Chuck 

[cjc]

Glad your Mum is managing.  I like your test kit--this is the way to learn a machine and see what it does. 

cjc

[Jeff McClendon]

I am back in Denver and had a chance to run the Legend through my test garden. I only tried the Legend in Park M1 since I didn't have much time. Headed to northern Montana tomorrow to meet my 1 month old first grandchild.

The Equinox 600 and 800 can not only hit all of the targets in my test garden in Park 1, they can also correctly ID all of the targets which are a modern US nickel, zinc penny, copper penny, clad dime, clad quarter and lead bag seal all of which were buried at 6" depth 3 years ago. The Vanquish models do very well on these targets too. However, since they cannot ground balance on the high iron mineralized dirt in my area, all of the targets also have iron responses.

The Legend also not only hit those targets but it also correctly identified them........so compared to the 35 or so other detectors that have been over those targets and failed, I am very impressed with the Legend. 

The Legend in GoldField has easily hit .05 gram gold nugget test targets also with the 11" coil.

I was able to go for a very short hunt today in a park that has very bad EMI and noisy iron mineralized dirt. By bad EMI I mean, an F75, T2, F70 and Omega 8000 could not function at this park.....I tried them and EMI was overwhelming.

The Legend ran quietly at sensitivity of 25 out of 30 and did very well during this 1 hour hunt giving more outstanding results on deeper low to mid conductor non-ferrous targets and even hitting an 8" silver Roosevelt dime with a faint but very repeatable proper high tone in 6 tone Park M1 along with correct target IDs. It was a dig me all day target.

So, in less than 6 hours of hunting with the Legend in moderate and high iron mineralization, the Legend has detected a .2 gram 10K gold opened hoop earring, a bling ring, 4 other bling earrings, a 1942 wheat penny, a 1962 silver Rosie and over $10 in modern US clad coins........... I will happily take those results and I haven't even moved out of 6 tone Park M1 yet!!!

[JCR]

I am also similarly impressed so far with my Legend. After logging 8 hrs. testing & playing with settings in my test garden I finally had a chance to take it on a real hunt. It did very well on my hard hunted race track site. This is low mineral sandy ground with lots of nails & bad EMI. The last few hunts here have only produced 4-6 small low conductor targets for 2-3 hour efforts and no real keepers. The Legend ran stable & quiet @ 22-25 Sens, TH @ 8 in Field M2  4 tone, first TB @ 7, Recovery speed mostly 4. The audio has a lot of intelligence and the TID is very confident & accurate. I had very few targets that were iffy or surprised me. Big Iron is easy to tell. Co located targets also. I only dug 2 deep small nails & 2 small pieces of very rusty tin can that fooled me. The preset Iron Bias did a good job. More time on the machine will help. I ended up after 4 hours with 18 Non Ferrous targets, including several keepers, most co located with 3D iron. Some of them were very small, like one brass boot eyelet @ 2".  The 11" stock coil is very sensitive but still works efficiently/effectively thru the nails very well. I did notice it is a little knock sensitive above 20 sensitivity.  I did not hunt with the 6" yet but in the test garden it will hit 8" targets just fine. I am still running V1.04. I'm still testing on high minerals but it seems to do quite well.

[GB_Amateur]

Good report, Jeff.  Please keep them coming.  Couple questions below:

12 hours ago, Jeff McClendon said:

So, in less than 6 hours of hunting with the Legend in moderate and high iron mineralization, the Legend has detected a .2 gram 10K gold opened hoop earring, a bling ring, 4 other bling earrings, a 1942 wheat penny, a 1962 silver Rosie and over $10 in modern US clad coins........... I will happily take those results and I haven't even moved out of 6 tone Park M1 yet!!!  (emphasis mine)

What is the mineralization condition in the park you found the 8" Roosie?  And are you going to get a chance to detect while you're up in Montana?  Enjoy the trip and the visit with your family, including its newest member.

[Jeff McClendon]

12 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

Good report, Jeff.  Please keep them coming.  Couple questions below:

What is the mineralization condition in the park you found the 8" Roosie?  And are you going to get a chance to detect while you're up in Montana?  Enjoy the trip and the visit with your family, including its newest member.

Mineralization bar on Deus 1 at that park is 3/4ths full. 
 

Unfortunately I won’t get any time to hunt here in Montana
 

 

[Jeff McClendon]

Well, for those who want my first real world opinion……..it really is just my opinion gained from the sites I have hunted which are all moderate to extreme iron mineralization sites…….here it is.

If you are looking for your first simultaneous multi frequency detector for coin, jewelry and relic hunting and some of that detecting may involve fresh water hunting AND you are on a tight budget say around $500 to $600 US, you currently have two viable choices. The Equinox 600 and the Legend. At this time after thousands of hours using an Equinox 600 and less than 20 hours using a Legend, I would pick the Legend every time, everyday. 

I am not going to go too far into the whys of my opinion. However, basically the Legend has a feature set that is very close to the Equinox 800 and is far more feature rich than the Equinox 600 with very similar performance on the targets mentioned above.

So, I would skip over the Vanquish series, the Garrett APEX and the Equinox 600 and go straight to the Legend for anyone that is considering those detectors for purchase and has budget constraints.

Until Nokta Makro straighten out the saltwater beach performance and the adjustable iron bias settings through an update along with releasing the 10X5” elliptical coil, I will not compare the Legend any further to the more expensive competition as far as saltwater and gold prospecting detecting.

[Jeff McClendon]

I had the opportunity to hunt a sports complex here in the Denver area two days in a row under similar ground and weather conditions. This sports complex has soil made up of sediments from the last mountain building/erosion episode of the Rocky Mountains and is filled with weathered granite and volcanic rock particles and ash. It will fill up the mineralization meter on a Deus 1 and nearly filled up the mineralization meter on a fellow hunter’s Simplex, so it is very bad ground which allows single frequency detectors to get about 5” of depth on coin sized objects and around half of that for any reliable target ID accuracy. Coin sized targets that are deeper than that are basically undetectable by single frequency detectors in this type of dirt no matter what frequency they run at or what they cost.

This is not a comparison by the way between the Equinox and the Legend other than to note that their performance on the same ground was virtually identical.

The first session was with the Equinox 800 which I used for 2 hours. The important target results were detecting and accurately identifying 7” to 9” US nickels and various pull tabs along with 7” to 9” copper pennys, clad dimes and clad quarters. Target IDs were only slightly up averaged or wider than normal on these targets so that an 8” US nickel would respond with 11, 12, 13 and 14 target ID numbers instead of just 12/13. That same slight spreading of target ID numbers also occurred with the other coins. In addition, the high iron content of the ground also created some minor occurrences of minus numbers and 39/40s along with the accompanying tones on all of those deeper coin sized targets while running the Equinox 800’s iron bias set to F2 = 3 using Park 1.

The Legend also was used at this site for two hours and its results were so similar to the Nox 800 as to be uncanny. It had no trouble detecting and correctly identifying the same types of coin sized targets and pull tabs at similar depths. There were also iron responses that accompanied these deep non-ferrous targets along with the Ferro-Check meter being confused by the mixed responses from the iron rich ground and the coins/pull tabs. Hopefully, the addition of adjustable iron bias settings will help the Legend not give so many of those deep targets so many iron responses along with Ferro-Check confusion. Using Park M1, I also noticed a lot of one way hit target ID 11 responses coming from the ground even with numerous ground grabs which also may be cured by being able to lower the amount of iron bias used in the future.

I actually recovered almost the same type and amount of targets using both detectors in different areas of the sports complex after hunting roughly the same amount of time. I just concentrated on digging obvious coin sized non-ferrous targets with relatively stable numbers and repeatable tones. To add to the uncanny performance similarities, I was fooled into digging only one ferrous target by each detector out of over 50 recovered non-ferrous targets by each detector.

[JCR]

I also had a chance to hunt on some higher mineral ground with the Legend this weekend. This is a red dirt relic site I have hunted pretty hard with the Anfibio Multi, Vista X & Tarsacci MDT 8000. The clay ground balances out on the Tarsacci around 850-900. There are plenty of nails in the best spots but no modern trash. If it's not a nail, you dig it on this site, including the big iron. Targets are old.  Running Field mode in 4 tone, M2, first TB @7, sensitivity 20-22, Recovery speed @4. GB about 68. I dug 18+ non ferrous targets, mostly small low & mid conductors at 4-6" with fairly good, narrow TIDs. Keepers included a parasol slide, cuff size flat button, fired pistol ball, half of a toe tap, 2 other buttons, a lever from a musical instrument or small weighing scale, US marked brass horse bridle piece?. I also purposely dug some nice big iron.  I have a test Nickle @ 8" that hit soft but solid with good TID. Overall the detector did very well in handling the ground conditions & small iron finding good targets. I'm happy that the SMF seems to give a different look than my other detectors.

The Legend is a good addition for me.

[GB_Amateur]

11 hours ago, Jeff McClendon said:

(Equinox 800) Target IDs were only slightly up averaged or wider than normal on these targets so that an 8” US nickel would respond with 11, 12, 13 and 14 target ID numbers instead of just 12/13. That same slight spreading of target ID numbers also occurred with the other coins. In addition, the high iron content of the ground also created some minor occurrences of minus numbers and 39/40s along with the accompanying tones on all of those deeper coin sized targets while running the Equinox 800’s iron bias set to F2 = 3 using Park 1.

The Legend also was used at this site for two hours and its results were so similar to the Nox 800 as to be uncanny. It had no trouble detecting and correctly identifying the same types of coin sized targets and pull tabs at similar depths.  (emphasis mine)

Excellent, detailed report, Jeff.  I highlighted a couple things which I would like more explanation.  Specifically, did the Legend dTID's also spread out and/or up-average for the deepest coins, similar to the Equinox's performance characteristics?