Beach Mode For Park Cherry Picking With Far More Accurate Id's On The Manticore

[Bill (S. CA)]

For some reason this sounds like, and I hate to even bring this up, what Calabash found with The Legend.  Didn't he discover (or one of his pals) that Beach mode on The Legend worked better inland than Park mode?  Perhaps this has something to do with the way the various frequencies are balanced in the different modes?

While I don't have a Manticore, several of my friends have bought them and their results mirror others posting here in that the TID #'s are not stable inland.  However, on our S. CA beaches everyone likes its performance thus far though the machine of choice remains the Deus II.  I would say that out of every ten hunters I see a the beach, 7/10 are swinging Deus II's, 1 or 2 Equinoxes and then you will still find a random PI or Fisher guy or a Manticore.  This may be due to the fact that the Manticores are still shipping.  Of my three friends who bought Manticores, 2 switched back to the Deus II and the other is trying different settings like Phrunt.  

One last thing, my buddies all like the Manticore screen but none of them feel that the 2D screen is of much use thus far. 

[TampaBayBrad]

11 minutes ago, Bill (S. CA) said:

One last thing, my buddies all like the Manticore screen but none of them feel that the 2D screen is of much use thus far. 

Count me as the opposite of your buddies. When my ears tell me to halt and investigate further, the first thing I look at is the 2D. At a glance it can tell me keep moving or keep looking at the target from a different angle. Just look at the screen when iron grunts and red underlined TID's are hitting you. You'll see smears that are usually off the center line. If I've got a coin next to it, I may also have a nice round dot on the center line in addition to the smears and all the other iron indicators.

If you think your ears are hearing a good target mixed in with all the grunting going on, check the 2D for a dot from 2 different sweep angles.

Mind you, I'm not an iron relic hunter. I'm a beach guy looking for round rings who must also dig round coins to be sure it's not a round ring. This machine will let you know when a round metallic object is under your coil. No doubt.

[Bill (S. CA)]

13 minutes ago, TampaBayBrad said:

Count me as the opposite of your buddies. When my ears tell me to halt and investigate further, the first thing I look at is the 2D. At a glance it can tell me keep moving or keep looking at the target from a different angle. Just look at the screen when iron grunts and red underlined TID's are hitting you. You'll see smears that are usually off the center line. If I've got a coin next to it, I may also have a nice round dot on the center line in addition to the smears and all the other iron indicators.

If you think your ears are hearing a good target mixed in with all the grunting going on, check the 2D for a dot from 2 different sweep angles.

Mind you, I'm not an iron relic hunter. I'm a beach guy looking for round rings who must also dig round coins to be sure it's not a round ring. This machine will let you know when a round metallic object is under your coil. No doubt.

I will mention that to them since they have not found this to be the case.  Their main issue is that they feel the round dots are not consistent in high trash.  However, this is how it goes with new machines.  The sharing of information is how it used to work before all of the knee jerk YouTubers came to be and render verdicts on detectors after just a few hours of use. 

Bill

[TampaBayBrad]

3 minutes ago, Bill (S. CA) said:

I will mention that to them since they have not found this to be the case.  Their main issue is that they feel the round dots are not consistent in high trash.  However, this is how it goes with new machines.  The sharing of information is how it used to work before all of the knee jerk YouTubers came to be and render verdicts on detectors after just a few hours of use. 

Bill

My beaches are pretty worked over/cleaned out by other guys, so I don't encounter the coin/ring next to iron very often. Twice so far in 4 hunts.

[phrunt]

I didn't get to film a video of what I'm seeing with beach mode yesterday, it was too hot to go detecting.  I'll do one this morning.

This is why I was expecting better Target Id's not far worse.

[phrunt]

OK, it started raining this morning, great news as we have been in a bit of a drought, not by Australia or California definitions of a drought but NZ definition which means no decent rain in a month or so.  The North Island has been copping it bad with massive flooding so I guess a bit of it has trickled down our way at the bottom of the South Island.

Before it rained I went out and did some Manticore experiments in my yard which should be the same soil as the sports fields I was in the other day, very close by.  I did a factory reset and started fresh and I found the lower the sensitivity goes the more stable my ID's get.  Less is more it seems when it comes to the Manticore, even though it wasn't troubled by EMI in the higher sensitivity settings it was giving less stable ID's, 20 to 30 sensitivity was quite unstable, below 20 it improved.  Perhaps it's something in my soil as when I was detecting at the beaches a couple of weeks ago I was extremely happy with it's performance even on very high sensitivity settings but in saying that I was in beach mode then.

The other day when I was comparing it with the Vanquish I didn't bother lowering my sensitivity below 20 when in All Terrain General or other modes I tried as it was working fine when it comes to EMI with no apparent EMI issues.  I didn't notice that in these modes it gives more stable ID's with lower sensitivity below 20.  I did change sensitivity levels to low ones in the beach mode as I was shocked how good the ID's were compared to All Terrain General so I lowered right down to 14 to see how low it could go and it was still picking up these deep coins.

So, now where it stands for some reason beach mode can run in 30 sensitivity and remain stable on the ID's, perhaps the frequency weighting in beach mode is avoiding some sort of silent EMI in the area that I can't notice which it doesn't respond to even holding the coil in the air or there is something in the ground that beach mode is ignoring that doesn't bother other detectors like the Vanquish but causes some instability in higher sensitivity settings on the Manticore.   My yard and the sports field I've been experimenting in are in a valley on what is an old river bed, the river has moved a couple of hundred meters away but if you dig in my yard it doesn't take long and you're digging up all the rounded river rocks, many of which are hot rocks and there are lots of small fragments of them all broken up too, the same at the sports field, it's the same distance to the new river location as I am, a 2 minute walk.

I really don't know what's going on but I'm OK with running in lower sensitivity settings as the Manticore still seems very deep in under 20 sensitivity.  I'll have to do more experimenting to see if beach mode on 30 sensitivity performs better than All Terrain modes with lower sensitivity.  Hopefully this problem is restricted to my local area with something around here causing it, as I say I didn't notice this problem when I was away using the Manticore elsewhere.

In lower sensitivity settings the Target ID's while not near as stable as the Nox/Vanquish are more what you would expect with the broader range of ID's.

For other park hunters just flick over to beach mode every once in a while on Targets and see if it also gives you a more stable ID.  It would be interesting to know if this is the case in general.

[GB_Amateur]

I like what you're doing, Simon, and what I say below is not directed at you.  But there are some things that should be kept in mind when talking about gain/sensitivity settings and VDI tightness that I think are being misstated by some:

1) On the Eqx 800 there are only 40 channels for non-ferrous.  On the Manticore there are 100.  It's NOT 2::1 as many people are saying, but more like 100::40 or  2.5::1 or 5::2.   So if the intrinsic resolution is the same the spread in signals should be more like 5 on the Manticore to 2 on the 800, on average, but see #2 below.

2) The scales on these two detectors don't appear to be tightly correlated, and why should they?  That is, the relationship between the two is not linear.  Look at the VDI's (which have been publishsed here) on the Eqx 800 vs. the Manticore.  I'm not talking width but centroid ('average') VDI.  As an example, a new USA 5 cent 'nickel' hits 13 on the Eqx 800 and a new Zinc cent on the Eqx 800 hits 21.  Using 2.5 factor that predicts the difference on the Manticore should be (if a linear relationship) (21 - 13)*2.5 = 20. However, Manticore testers have shown that the nickel hits ~26 and the Zincoln ~61.  That's a difference of 35, not 20.  (And here I'm using the smaller difference from the two Manticore charts I've seen since one of those says the Zincoln is 65-66 on the VDI scale.)

3) I'm throwing water on the argument some people are claiming:  tying the the gain scales together on the two detectors.  25 on the Eqx 800 is 25 on the Manticore?  Where'd you get that?  25 on the Eqx is 35 on the Manticore?  Where'd you get that?  Since when is what you expect a substitute for the truth?  Further, is 25 (on either detector) the even same in all modes on that specific detector?   For example, we've been told in the 800 manual that Beach 2 gain/sensitivity has been scaled back from Beach 1.  I haven't seen a similar claim from Minelab between two scales for the Manticore although I've mostly concentrated on the All Terrain modes when reading the manual.  (I'll need to correct that bias when I get the detector and read the manual anew.)  But assuming they are the same between modes on the Manticore seems to be a stretch.  Further, if the frequencies used are different by mode (and there seems to be some evidence of that in some cases), it's well known(?) that depth/distance is frequency dependent for a given target.  And what test target's VDI is invariant over frequency?

4) This one is likely true of every detector ever made and I think most seasoned detectorists know this from experience.  The gain/sensitivity scale isn't linear either.  A setting of 2X isn't twice as sensitive as a setting of X.  The gain/sensitivity knob isn't exactly like the volume knob on the old car radios (which AFAIK wasn't linear in volume, either, for that matter. Those variable resistors may be linear in resistance but that's only part of the circuitry.  And on top of that there's the issue of the non-linearity of human senses....)

I could be wrong on any or all of these, and if someone can show me I'm wrong, as always I will admit it.

[phrunt]

Yep, I think there is some good accuracy in what you're saying.

I've been trying to work out the difference in sensitivity levels between the Nox and Manticore and where for example 20 on the Nox would be on the Manticore and the best way I've been able to do that is using an tiny edge of detection target like a #9 lead pellet and seeing at which sensitivity level the target becomes undetectable, and the Manticore appears to need its sensitivity set higher than the Nox in this instance but then is that sensitivity levels or is it the Manticore just isn't as sensitive to tiny targets. 

The odd thing is the difference between 30 and 31 is looking like more than a single digit of sensitivity as a stable detector at 30 can become quite unstable at 31, much more unstable than say going from 29 to 30, if that makes sense.  That one digit has a greater effect.  I think in areas where the 31 to 35 sensitivity levels can be used they will be a good tool to have, and I already have places I can run on 35, sadly they're places with almost no targets as people don't go to those areas.

What I've noticed now is the Manticore is picking up deep targets in my mild soils at much lower sensitivity levels than the Nox can, but are those sensitivity levels lower, that's the question we can't answer.    With the Nox if I lowered my sensitivity too much below 20 my deep coins would start to ID too low and then turn to iron with the sensitivity too low, I'm finding even at 14 I am getting the good coin identification, next time I'm try go even lower.

At the moment I'm as beginner as you can get on the Manticore, I figured going from a Nox to it would be an easy transition but there is much more to it than I expected.  A Nox 900 would be the easier transition.  ?

I really like it, the 2D target trace, it's been good, I was a big fan of the CTX target trace though, it gives more information by the looks of it than the Manticore which is simpler version but still good.

One thing different with the CTX is I could lift the coil quite high off the ground and still pick up the deep coins with accurate ID's, the Manticore much like the Nox if you lift off the ground you can lose the target entirely.  The Manticore, Vanquish and Nox don't like the air gap,which is bad if you have to hunt in longer grass which I often do.  The CTX is certainly still the best detector at accurately identifying deep coins in my soils.  Even with its huge range of Target ID's with FE and CO it gives the most accurate results.

Anyway, I'm enjoying learning the Manticore, it's looking like a great detector.  

[Dug D]

It would be interesting to check a quarter at 6 inches with both detectors and back down the sensitivity on both till it looses its ID and then all detection. Maybe the beast is just a little to wild and will do just fine on a shorter leash, maybe sens of 20 is as deep as you want to dig in a park.  Maybe IDs really tighten up with with mid range sens and high recovery speed? I don't see anyone really working the settings the way I would.