Charles (Upstate NY)
Well-known member
I'm starting this comparison thread. I ordered the Manticore the other day, it's inbound. I have a EQX 800 and Explorer SE Pro charged and ready. As a managing director of software development I'm going to get into the heads of these newer machines vs the Explorer SE Pro.
EQX 800 vs Explorer SE Pro - I have compared these two machines prior. The SE Pro still crushes the EQX 800 in some areas, just as it crushed the Etrac and CTX before it. Hence the SE Pro has remained been my #1 machine all these years.
So why bother with the EQX 800 and Manticore? Because sight conditions have changed. After decades of sites getting pounded by Explorers it's slim pickings out there on the few targets they are still capable of getting a signal on. Advantage EQX 800/Manticore for the following reasons.
Users of the Explorers back in the day probably remember "bounce patterns". While the ID is bouncing around there are patterns to the bouncing that repeat. The most classic is the rusty nail/iron false bounce pattern as an example. It's pretty much 99% accurate at identifying iron falsing. That has saved me a LOT of digging and time. It has also found targets hiding in iron. Wait a minute...yes when a iron falsing bounce pattern is not consistent, get interested. The great thing about that pattern is it's consistency, textbook. But when it's bouncing iron falsing 2-3 out of 3-4 swings but the cursor occasionally jumps to a coin location, iron alone does not do that. The old triple whammy, iron, iron falsing, coin. So a target not adhering to it's bounce pattern consistently is also information. Found many a iron stain silver that way. Merged signals are another. SE Pro's will merge metals together into an oddball metal and target ID. That it's odd and ID's in weird areas is the tipoff. Now the EQX 800/Manticore superior target separation likely improves on these but if you program your EQX 800/Manticore for max depth you give up some of that separation so the 2D Manticore screen may balance the playing field. For high difficulty targets a 2D display like the SE Pro Smartfind screen makes things much easier, at least for me. The Manticore 2D target ID screen isn't the Smartfind screen of old, but looking through the user manual it gives you a lot of options to customize. Tone, pitch, areas, discrimination. it's pretty robust. I may be able to craft it into something as good, or better than the SE Pro.
EQX 800 Side Note: One key piece of information confirmed by Minelab on the Explorers back in the day is, they transmit at 100% max power no matter what your settings are. That means you can't reduce or tone down the machine with your settings e.g. reduce power. All you are doing with your settings is removing pieces of the 100% best possible signal from the coil. Slicing and dicing. This is fundamental to understanding what your settings are actually doing. Next and even more important is, the order in which the machine applies your settings. The classic mistake on an Explorer is, increasing the gain and decreasing the sensitivity. That's backwards because Gain is simply amplifying what's left of the signal AFTER the sensitivity settings was first applied. When a deep faint target was eliminated (cut out) from the remaining signal by having the sensitivity set too low, there's no target left for Gain to amplify. With this in mind I contacted Minelab again just as I did on the Explorer with the same questions. I'll have to go find that response from them and post it here.
EQX 800 vs Explorer SE Pro - I have compared these two machines prior. The SE Pro still crushes the EQX 800 in some areas, just as it crushed the Etrac and CTX before it. Hence the SE Pro has remained been my #1 machine all these years.
So why bother with the EQX 800 and Manticore? Because sight conditions have changed. After decades of sites getting pounded by Explorers it's slim pickings out there on the few targets they are still capable of getting a signal on. Advantage EQX 800/Manticore for the following reasons.
- EQX 800 and Manticore have new capabilities the SE Pro can't touch. An ability to get hits on targets that are completely invisible to an SE Pro. One example is small gold. The EQX 800 does quite well on small (I'm talking tiny) gold in the 1-3 inch range that is completely invisible to the SE Pro even if you rub the gold directly on the coil. I put the EQX 800 up against a GPZ 7000 last year on this tiny gold and it held it's own.
- Coins straight up on edge, also completely invisible to an SE Pro yet the EQX 800 hits them hard and at pretty good depths. I was stunned honestly.
- Target separation - Having dug untold thousands of targets with an SE Pro I know it's limits on target separation. Deeper iron and shallow non-ferrous trash are it's kryptonite. This trash casts umbrellas of trash signal out polluting the nearby area, hiding nearby coins and desirable targets in it's shadow. Here the EQX 800 and Manticore seem to have an advantage. With some loss of depth according to Minelab.
- Ground mineralization? It looks promising. Here in the Pacific NW it's nasty. Explorers have always had difficulty punching through the volcanic black sand mineralization here. I think it's worse than even that red clay stuff down in Virginia. Deus? Been there tried that, an improvement but still nasty. The EQX 800 was noticeably more stable and gave stronger signals on targets vs the Deus and SE Pro which was the worst of the three by far. There was a site with gobs of WWII coat buttons here I used as my test site. Dug a bunch of them with all three machines. Winner EQX 800.
Users of the Explorers back in the day probably remember "bounce patterns". While the ID is bouncing around there are patterns to the bouncing that repeat. The most classic is the rusty nail/iron false bounce pattern as an example. It's pretty much 99% accurate at identifying iron falsing. That has saved me a LOT of digging and time. It has also found targets hiding in iron. Wait a minute...yes when a iron falsing bounce pattern is not consistent, get interested. The great thing about that pattern is it's consistency, textbook. But when it's bouncing iron falsing 2-3 out of 3-4 swings but the cursor occasionally jumps to a coin location, iron alone does not do that. The old triple whammy, iron, iron falsing, coin. So a target not adhering to it's bounce pattern consistently is also information. Found many a iron stain silver that way. Merged signals are another. SE Pro's will merge metals together into an oddball metal and target ID. That it's odd and ID's in weird areas is the tipoff. Now the EQX 800/Manticore superior target separation likely improves on these but if you program your EQX 800/Manticore for max depth you give up some of that separation so the 2D Manticore screen may balance the playing field. For high difficulty targets a 2D display like the SE Pro Smartfind screen makes things much easier, at least for me. The Manticore 2D target ID screen isn't the Smartfind screen of old, but looking through the user manual it gives you a lot of options to customize. Tone, pitch, areas, discrimination. it's pretty robust. I may be able to craft it into something as good, or better than the SE Pro.
EQX 800 Side Note: One key piece of information confirmed by Minelab on the Explorers back in the day is, they transmit at 100% max power no matter what your settings are. That means you can't reduce or tone down the machine with your settings e.g. reduce power. All you are doing with your settings is removing pieces of the 100% best possible signal from the coil. Slicing and dicing. This is fundamental to understanding what your settings are actually doing. Next and even more important is, the order in which the machine applies your settings. The classic mistake on an Explorer is, increasing the gain and decreasing the sensitivity. That's backwards because Gain is simply amplifying what's left of the signal AFTER the sensitivity settings was first applied. When a deep faint target was eliminated (cut out) from the remaining signal by having the sensitivity set too low, there's no target left for Gain to amplify. With this in mind I contacted Minelab again just as I did on the Explorer with the same questions. I'll have to go find that response from them and post it here.
