Thank You Minelab For The Manticore

[strick]

Nice work Jeff. As you know I jumped on the M-Core early...I had been waiting for a faster and lighter CTX for a long time. Here in the east bay we have mostly modern parks so I'm looking for gold and silver jewelry only.  This post made go back and look at the early threds I started... "a stroll in the park" and 'M-Core in nails" by my third hunt I realized the machine was deeper then the Nox 800 and said so in one of my posts. It was fun going back and re reading those threds.. the iron falsing thing and all the talk about it...

I'm still on the fence about doing the up date as I'm still using the machine as it came out of the box and doing well with it.. I have one fresh water trashy black sand beach on the delta where it gives me fits... seems that it doesn't matter which program I try...the deus 2 is actually easier to use there. I will probably try the up date soon just so I can see if it will work on that particular spot now that I have the small coil. The equinox actually worked great there but you dug a lot of bottle caps. The dealer I got the m8 coil from said he thought the up date was a good thing...

In my opinion machine is a park hunters and salt water beach hunters dream..once you learn how to use it. 

strick 

[Bayard]

I have used my Manticore twice at old parks where I previously found dozens of old silver coins with my Etracs and Equinox.  So far, the Manticore has not found anything amazing.  This is the Midwest and the soil is mild.

[UT Dave]

Thanks for the excellent summarization of your experience with the Manticore Jeff.

Mine has been much the same.  I've had mine for, 14-15 months or so now.  While park hunting is not my favorite type of hunting, it's what is available on a daily basis.  And I do like it, quite a lot.  Just not as much as ghost town/coin relic hunting.  But I can't hit a ghost town every day after work or any weekend morning .

So I do a ton of "trashy park hunting".  The Manticore has "opened up" to "coin" a tired cliche (or two!), so much productive clad and .925 hunting in spots I'd tried and give up with the Nox 800.  EMI handling is a large part.  But the immunity of the Manticore to bottle caps, to include the dreaded Corona cap, compared to the 800 is night and day.  The 800 was very good at calling nickels from aluminum tabs, but the Manticore is on another level.  And the Manticore just likes to "jump on to" a high conductor amongst aluminum trash.  It's like a chicken on a Junebug amongst modern park trash when it gets over silver or a high conductor clad coin.  Even with the stock 11" coil, it will just go from machine gun tabs to "locked on" to a higher conductor and not letting it go in a way that makes sniping good from trash just, "easier".

My parks are poor in silver coin.  Most are just too new to even have any.  But they seem pretty decent in .925.  My overall silver count with the Manticore is close to 30 silver coins and over 40 pieces of .925.  Only four gold items though.  I probably ought to dig more trash 😁. 

But speaking of trash.  That's the most impressive part of the Manticore to me, over the 800, for so called trashy park hunting.  I need to be selective in what I dig.  In a park setting, I'm generally very selective.  Very.  And my trash ratio is just astonishingly small when I am that selective.  The 800 was very good too, in this respect, but again, to me, the Manticore as at another level.  Not long ago I dug over 100 coins in a park, in a super trashy area I'd previously started to avoid with the 800 - and only about 15 trash targets.

But your finds, given the restrictive digging conditions and tools at your disposal, are a testament to skill!  

- Dave

 

[Jeff McClendon]

The Manticore definitely has a distinctive US nickel sound at least for me using the Normal audio theme and giving nickels a dedicated tone and fairly tight tone bin (20 to 28). I just make it a point to dig anything in that range if it has that nickel "thud" sound. Sure, I will dig the occasional pull tab, damaged pull tab, detached beaver tail from a ring pull and those aluminum freshness seal off of modern pull tab cans. Why on earth do people remove those. They can seriously cut you. I also get good sounding can slaw sometimes. Otherwise, that percussive well defined nickel thud is either a nickel or something even better especially when the target IDs and 2D pattern is very tight and well defined. The 800 could make a similar percussive sound on US nickels but there were just way too many other targets that shared 12,13,14. I actually appreciate the expanded target ID range of the Manticore for that reason.

Your characterization of the Manticore locking on to high conductor coins and jewelry has also been my experience whether it's a surface or near surface target in a sea of aluminum/steel trash or something deeper. Even on very iffy sounding possible deeper high conductors, there is so much information provided by the Manticore through tone nuances, red and black target ID patterns, the onboard pinpoint function, very accurate depth meter and the 2D screen that I have started to really experience some patterns of behavior that I can depend on as far as "is it a high conductor coin/jewelry/relic or is it an iron target". 

Thanks for posting your experiences.

[CoinShooter]

Jeff,

Great job! You are killing it for sure 🙂

Like you, I think the Manticore is an awesome machine.

John

[Bayard]

On 3/24/2024 at 10:16 AM, Bayard said:

I have used my Manticore twice at old parks where I previously found dozens of old silver coins with my Etracs and Equinox.  So far, the Manticore has not found anything amazing.  This is the Midwest and the soil is mild.

I tried the Manticore again yesterday at two more of my hunted out sites.  The Manticore didn't find anything old at the first site. At the second site, I found a beautiful condition 1946 quarter and a wheat cent.

The masked silver quarter signal was subtle, definitely not obvious or screaming. The signal was similar to a fringe depth silver signal on the Etrac, although today's 1946 quarter was not especially deep. I think I might keep the Manticore for a while longer.

[bklein]

I wonder how it would be if we could assign a modulation to an ID bin. Like if that gold range is unmistakeable. I have been playing with my Manticore and discovered the default tones for coins/gold/silver 5 tone bins were really really wrong. Even so, for me the gold ring or nickel bin did not have enough uniqueness for me. I suspect my mind would treat it as a target but not a special one. Hearing a frequency rarely heard is not enough. 

[Redneck]

Look up a you tube by iffy signals.  He adjusts the 5 bins and also the volumes and tones of each.  I find it to be a killer notch set up for my park hunting.