Equinox 900 Or Manticore?

[GB_Amateur]

10 hours ago, phrunt said:

The sizes I'm talking about where the Nox appears to be excelling over the Manticore are when you get to 0.05 of a gram and below, especially when you're in the 0.00X of a gram range (I've got it right this time) that's where the Manticore is significantly worse than the Equinox.

Less than 0.01 gram?!  Wow!  My ballpark comparison (0.030 g gold 'nugget' -- assuming 90% purity -- vs. our 2.5 g silver dime, 90% purity) is very close right now with the gold/silver price ratio around 80.  An 0.010 g piece of gold with 90% purity is worth about $0.50 USA in bullion value at the current ~$1850/ozt.  And you choose not to recover NZ coins with face value less than $1 (NZ)....  Now that's trophy hunting at its best -- to the extremely small end of the scale.  (I'm not deriding.  I like digging Wheat cents which most of the time are worth maybe $0.02 in copper bullion value and no numismatic premium over that.  It's the very small chance that I find a scarce or key date+mm that keeps me interested in those, but unless the condition is well out-of-the-ordinary for dug copper alloy coins, even that only pays in satisfaction/enjoyment, not real $).

 

[EL NINO77]

Simon .. I have one question for you... what results do you get with the Manticore and Equinox on 11" coils in the #9 lead shot  in test?

...since I have done many such comparisons on my detectors over time...so I am interested....

[strick]

1 hour ago, EL NINO77 said:

Simon .. I have one question for you... what results do you get with the Manticore and Equinox on 11" coils in the #9 lead shot  in test?

...since I have done many such comparisons on my detectors over time...so I am interested....

 

Third paragraph down

strick 

[phrunt]

Yes, that was my main confirmation as the depth difference was the most noticeable.

I have asked Minelab do that same comparison so they can see the difference also.

 

[phrunt]

6 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

An 0.010 g piece of gold with 90% purity is worth about $0.50 USA in bullion value at the current ~$1850/ozt.  And you choose not to recover NZ coins with face value less than $1 (NZ)....  Now that's trophy hunting at its best -- to the extremely small end of the scale.

The thing with gold is it's a different game to coin hunting, it's a much bigger challenge, especially here with coins being relatively easy by comparison.  Finding the micro specs of gold is the ultimate challenge, obviously the smaller they get the harder they are to find.   The added bonus to becoming really good at finding tiny gold is it improves your ability to find larger deeper gold that others may miss as a big deep on the edge of detection nugget behaves the same as a tiny little flake nearer to the surface.  It's a way of honing your skills chasing and recovering these tiny bits.  The better I get at doing it the better I will get at finding gold overall.    Finding a tiny spec can be very exciting as long as you're not detecting for money which I never do anyway, never will I sell any of my gold, not a chance.

Gold prospecting often involves getting the most faint of hit, something you could very easily miss, so much so you don't think you ever heard it but just in case you go over the spot again and you try hard to find that signal, circling the spot you thought you heard it and these can be the times it was a deeper bigger bit, or just a tiny spec near the surface but that faint signal you were questioning yourself if you even heard was the indicator you needed to find it.  You really have to have your brain locked onto the job and if you don't you'll miss a lot especially on ground people have been detecting for years.

You need to rely on either having better equipment than the previous people who detected it, or you have to have better skills, I've been replying on equipment, and working on improving skills 🙂

So this may go somewhat further into explaining why I'd like the Manticore to have the small target ability of the Equinox and hopefully it is something they can resolve, it's so close but just not there yet.

As for coin hunting the Manticore so far is I believe outperforming the Equinox 800 11" vs 11" on small silver coins, the bigger silver coins in my area are getting very hard to find now but there is still some smaller ones (threepence) that didn't give a clean enough ID on my first rounds of going over the areas or perhaps so deep they were giving me iron indications which preventing me from digging.  The threepence also target ID's the same as common pull tabs so my method there has always been dig deep pull tab numbers leave the more shallow ones, I'm hoping the Manticores target ID range expansion may help sort the tabs from the silvers, still yet to be determined there the CTX appeared to help a bit with this.  I just can't dig enough holes to get every pull tab as they are in abundance especially around the club house area.

The CTX steam rolled through quickly with it's 17x13" coil and found quite a bit of silver I'd missed with the Nox and now I'm planning to use the Manticore to find anything left that was potentially masked by bottle caps or pull tabs or whatever with me using such a big coil, it's too dry at the moment to do much digging so I've not dug a lot of targets yet unless I was pretty sure it was a coin which is why I was quite upset by the Manticore jumpy target ID's until I lowered sensitivity and they cleared up to be quite good.

I'm currently 90% satisfied with the Manticore, that extra 10% is if they can fine tune that small gold ability then it will be my favourite VLF detector surpassing the CTX and Nox 800, it's currently ahead of the Nox 800 already.

[Rob in (ca)]

Some beach hunters are saying the Mani Loves Deep nails ….. ……. I’m on  the sidelines …….Looking like a Nox 900 & Deus 2 for The salt water Beach ……run them on odd / even days.