Need Some Help With My 800

[Chase Goldman]

3 hours ago, Dig It said:

I was wondering if I took some trash pc's and laid them out and tried to set tone and target ID #'s for trash and coins, for I have been over same area of beach a couple of times and now it's showing pretty much same trash every hunt. Does that sound like what one would try ?

I really mostly work in all metal and let my head do the discriminating which means nearly a hundred hours of "training" on a new machine before I am dialed in.  I don't set up special tone or VDI notches/breakpoints when beach or when relic hunting.  I might try using tone and notch tricks to cherry pick at a park, contest hunt, have special noise situations (e.g., an electric dog fence) or when I have very limited time at a site, but those are fringe situations for me.  50 tones and wide open for me.  I only vary the mode depending on the majority conductivity of the targets I am after.  High frequency bias (i.e., the  Park/Field"2" modes or Gold Mode) for mid-conductive or small targets like gold/brass/small lead and lower frequency bias "1" modes (i.e., Park/Field 1 and Beach modes) when going primarily for high conductive targets like pure copper, silver, or big metal targets and of course for beach hunting in general.

[Dig It]

Been messing with Sensitivity & Auto Grnd. Bal., yesterdays Beach / Park hunt produced a ton of crap till I started listening & moving around targets and did less trash digging ( I dug what I thought was trash & it was, Yeh !!! ) Did dig out a 1999 Hot Wheels Surf Crate & some coins oldest being a 1967 Qaurter. ( Did miss my first silver coin by 2 yr's. Dam !!! )

And yes that is the 800's Instruction Manual, I did print it out and I take it with, so I can reference the info for ?'s that come up during an outing.

So thank you Steve, Chase, Norm, I believe this will be my last entry onto this thread, and will join with sharing decent finds and anything I might think would be useful info for someone else.

 

Ken

[JustSwell]

Just wanted to ask Dig it, have you used Field 2 at all?   

Today was my third day out for any amount of hours.  Almost 3.5 hours this morning.  I hit up a park today that also resides next to a high rock cliff I wanted to check out.  The park was pure trash everywhere.  In park 1 and 2  I was having serious issues deciding where to dig as there is a reading every few inches and the 800 is hitting each one.  I backed down the sensitivity as I've read in this thread and it helped calm it down.  I dug everything in a 15 foot square and I stopped counting the potholes.  All trash and it didn't matter what the vdi was saying.  A solid 15 was a corroded AA battery. Nails reading 9 to 11.  Couple of 13-15 readings that I never found.  A shiny but simple thin key ring 2 inches down hit at a jumpy 18-20.  My shoulders were wore out from the hard ground as half the finds were near 10 or 11 inches and packed hard with stones.  Lots of double bent nails.  One single modern 80s penny packed tight in small rocks had a high 25 number.  That was it for the park area.  Do these numbers sound strange to anyone?

I gave up on Park settings and went Field 2 default and headed for the grass and moss around the edges of the rock cliffs.  Immediately jumped on clad dimes ringing 23-25 some solid and some jumpy.  One 1991 corroded quarter reading solid 35,  two bottle tops and one pull tab were all reading solid 30-35, one long strip of foil laced within moss was reading 35 almost all along the 3 inches of it.  Two other small foils were reading 1 and 2 on vdi.  Here's the kicker, at least 3 more nails all reading 30-38 range shallow on the rocks.  I know two of those nails were reading solid 38s.  One nail might have been jumpy 17 to 39 numbers but I was able to pinpoint it at 39 exactly to the spot.  These nails and coin finds were are all lying in crevices in the rocks just under a small layer of moss and maybe an inch of dark black dirt (and plenty of glass).  So I could get right down to the ledge rocks and see that nothing else is there (unless there is gold or silver in the rocks haha, maybe ore?).  Finding them was easy.  Identifying not so much.  A few coins were locked into the moss hard.  Long story short Field 2 was the only thing that produced coins well today.  But it was also getting me really excited over the high solid VDI of nails and I don't know why yet.

I think it was Chase who said follow the tones more and I think I'm going to try and get my ear around those using 5 and 50 tones instead of trusting vdi numbers in my neck of the woods.  Of course maybe I had a setting jacked and didn't realize.  Still learning.  

I love this detector because I don't feel like I'm missing anything that is there.  It all comes down to whether you are willing to dig them all.  I took a small bucket of that wet black dirt from under the moss and will try these coins again in my test garden verses my normal soil and see if the VDIs change.   Or is it normal to have so many items reading 35-38 on the equinox?

 

 

 

[steveg]

Glad to see you getting a feel for the machine, and starting to learn to differentiate the good from the bad!  These are fun machines, for sure -- and you've even found some GOLD with it!!

Nice job!

Steve

[Steve Herschbach]

On 4/21/2018 at 11:28 AM, JustSwell said:

All trash and it didn't matter what the vdi was saying.  A solid 15 was a corroded AA battery. Nails reading 9 to 11.  Couple of 13-15 readings that I never found.  A shiny but simple thin key ring 2 inches down hit at a jumpy 18-20.  My shoulders were wore out from the hard ground as half the finds were near 10 or 11 inches and packed hard with stones.  Lots of double bent nails.  One single modern 80s penny packed tight in small rocks had a high 25 number.  That was it for the park area.  Do these numbers sound strange to anyone?

On 4/21/2018 at 11:28 AM, JustSwell said:

Long story short Field 2 was the only thing that produced coins well today.  But it was also getting me really excited over the high solid VDI of nails and I don't know why yet.

Yes, that is all normal except the part where VDI does not matter. It does.

There is a very common and and ongoing commentary about target id numbers that where it seems to me that people think detectors put good stuff and bad stuff into neat and tidy compartments with no overlap. It simply does not work that way. For every good item there is a trash item that reads the same. It is all about percentages and odds.

Detectors have no idea what they are detecting. Items like coins that are the same every time in theory give you the same number every time. Trash unfortunately comes in every size and shape and so there is no way to eliminate all trash. Coins do read the same every time out of the ground, but put them in the ground, and add a little corrosion, and they also vary in how they read out.

That is not to say you have to dig everything however. You simply need more time and experience in learning how detectors really work and then the nuances of the Equinox in particular. What you are experiencing is well known as "ferrous wrap" or "wrap around" or just "iron falsing" where what are normally low number targets shift to high number targets. Since a silver dollar reads about 38 almost anything reading 39 and 40 is more likely to be ferrous wrap than a good target. The normal cause is too much sensitivity but it happens no matter what with many ferrous items.. Flat tin steel, hardened steel bolts and screws, steel washers, AA batteries, etc. all will fake out detectors and fall in various "good item" target id ranges.

How Metal Detector Discrimination Works

Dealing With X-Terra Wrap-around

Seeking To Understand Wrap Around

XP DEUS Iron Falsing

Ambiguous Responses To Targets and How To Decipher Them

The Minelab X-Terra is as close to the Equinox as anything, and the free Understanding Your X-Terra book has a lot of good info that crosses over to the Equinox. In particular, see the discussion on ferrous wrap starting on page 76 and then a technical explanation on page 80.

Anyway, I don't want to hijack this thread any further. There are several threads referencing target id (VDI) numbers on the Minelab Equinox Essential Information reference thread you will want to take a look at.

[Dig It]

Steve please don't worry about hijacking thread, If you feel the urge please post the info..

Gonna try Field Mode in next couple days, snow is mostly gone and ground is thawing, gonna be trashy, but I think there is gonna be a few nice finds, even if I have to dig a bit of trash to find them. It's an old mining camp, no buildings on this site just open field, the bad thing in the early 70's thru mid 80's campers trashed the place, it has since been cleaned of above ground trash of ALL types and gated off, it's gonna be an ongoing hunt due to size of field & our beloved TRASH !!!  

But still have approx. a month before I get up to claim, and I did buy the 800 for it's coin & relic modes to give me something to do in spring / fall, so off I go .........

[glabelle]

17 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

Yes, that is all normal except the part where VDI does not matter. It does.

There is a very common and and ongoing commentary about target id numbers that where it seems to me that people think detectors put good stuff and bad stuff into neat and tidy compartments with no overlap. It simply does not work that way. For every good item there is a trash item that reads the same. It is all about percentages and odds.

 

 Absolutely right Steve. The worst kind of "wrap around" is when the machine detects a deep (at the limit of detection) small silver coin as iron. I experienced this with the X-terra. I've heard this occurs with other machines as well. The V3i did it. I have a new Minelab EQ600 and a Nokta Impact, but have not run depth tests as yet, since I'm going on a ghost town trip this week, and am concentrating on separating coins from iron trash.

The little testing I have performed shows that the Impact with a 5" DD coil is superior, in dense iron trash, to the EQ600 - because the only coil available is the 11". I think with the 6" coil it will be fine.

I really like the "Fe volume" setting on the Impact. It may turn out to be more useful than "iron bias" on the EQ600, since it appears that you lose sensitivity with increasing iron bias.

George

[Steve Herschbach]

FE Volume is not the same thing as Iron Bias. You have FE Volume on the 600 also if that is your preference.

Iron Bias changes how the detector actually detector ferrous items and helps control ferrous falsing. FE Volume is nothing more than a volume control for ferrous responses and has no effect on ferrous false signals.

How Metal Detector Discrimination Works

[glabelle]

3 minutes ago, Steve Herschbach said:

FE Volume is not the same thing as Iron Bias. You have FE Volume on the 600 also if that is your preference.

Iron Bias changes how the detector actually detector ferrous items and helps control ferrous falsing. FE Volume is nothing more than a volume control for ferrous responses and has no effect on ferrous false signals.

How Metal Detector Discrimination Works

Thanks Steve, I have a look at Fe vol. on the EQ. I knew that IB was a different way of analyzing the target - but it seems to reduce overall sensitivity/depth. Is that your experience as well?