Comparison - Manticore vs EQX 800 vs Explorer SE Pro

[BigTony]

FIELD TEST: I took the Manticore to the beach Saturday for it's first field test. It was a Manticore vs Explorer SE Pro hunt with my buddy using my SE Pro with my settings. I found the Manticore surprisingly simple to use. I selected the default Beach mode, upped the sensitivity at 25 and ran in All Metal. During the hunt I really did nothing but ground balance and noise cancel. It was a bit noisy with the sensitivity at 25, no shortage of blips of salt/mineralization falsing but that's how I run the SE Pro I'm used to it.

SETTINGS: The Manticore has a LOT of configurable settings. That concerned me. Prior field tests confirmed you can screw up E-Trac and CTX settings to the point that they can't get a signal on targets that are screaming on the SE Pro. The Explorer SE Pro is pretty much foolproof when it comes to settings. In all cases the users were able to adjust/fix their settings and the E-Trac and CTX were able to get just as good a signal as I was getting on my SE Pro, once I pointed out the target and let them listen via the SE Pro. The Manticore? It hit deep targets the whole hunt while the SE Pro struggled so check.

SITE CONDITIONS: Torture test. We drove out onto the north end which was horribly sanded in 3 weeks ago, there was a big trough eroded out upper mid-beach parallel to the water. The hump of sand between the trough and lower beach was like 30 inches high with a cliff on the lower side of the trough. The water had dug a big hole in the beach basically. Unfortunately, this put us much closer to the thick layer of magnetic black sand, it was only 2nd scoop down. Worse all the heavier targets were deep in that black sand layer, with more black sand beneath them. Most of the targets I dug were a minimum 2 scoops deep, frequently 3 scoops, a few more. I have a 6x12 inch scoop and I was digging straight down.

Results...

• Manticore bested Explorer SE Pro. The 2nd scoop of sand was BLACK with the black sand and more black sand below it. All the heavy targets were sitting in that stuff. Even quarters down in that black sand were heavily impacted by the black sand on the Manticore. The tone was black sand/quarter mixed, not great to down right ugly signals on the Manticore but diggable. I dug a bunch of quarters at that depth, the Explorer SE Pro dug none. Just like inland the SE Pro struggles to punch through that black sand.
• Crown Cap Tone Shape - Confirmed, you can hear the crimped crown cap ridges in the tone, nice. On the SE Pro you can hear some shape to the ridges (sometimes) but it's less defined. Manticore has high definition tone shape, SE Pro low definition tone shape.
• Target Trace - The target trace screen is quite interesting. Watching the crown caps especially false from iron (top) to crown cap (bottom/left) with some smearing across the coin area (middle). Hard to imagine ever digging a crown cap with that much target info. More on target trace below.
• ML 105 Headphones - Quite comfortable. Love the wireless. But I need to test a pair of my Sunray Gold headphones because the quality of the tones was lacking. A bit oil drum, thin, tinny. I don't know if that's the ML 105's or just the Manticore tones. For example I couldn't hear much difference between silver and clad coins during testing. On the SE Pro silver has that bit of extra in the tones that tells you silver. Not sure I heard any bell like tones or silver ringing during testing now that I think about it.
• Depth even in this black sand mess, excellent. It took two hands to drag some scoops back out of the hole, that kind of depth.
• Overall - Great beach machine!

Manticore Dark Magic #01 - Co-located targets, this is the strange realm of detector weirdness. Take crown cap/silver co-located targets. The crown caps above older deeper silver. Silver hiding in the umbrella of crown cap target signal. I observed something quite strange on the SE Pro one day. I had crown caps notched out because dang they were everywhere at this site and I was sick of them. Running ferrous tones they were giving high tones like silver. With the crown cap textbook 'pop' as the coil came off the crown cap but I was just tired of listening to the things. Then...a crown cap managed to rise just above my notched out area. It was way down below silver, still very much in crown cap territory. Switched to all metal and BAM the target ID dropped down square into crown cap territory. Switched back and walked away about 3 steps then said, wait a minute...come on no crown cap sounds quite that good. Went back and observed the same thing again. In all metal textbook crown cap. Notch out the crown cap and the target ID uplifted in the direction of silver, but no where near the silver ID locations. SE Pro users know both crown caps and big silver (quarters, half dollars, dollars, large cents) all ID with half the cursor off the right edge of the screen, and are located vertically up/down the right edge depending on the target.

So I dug a plug, on the bottom/center of this plug was the crown cap. Went in the hole with my X1 probe and it was screaming silver. Below this crown cap was a Barber half dollar, also centered. My theory is in all metal the crown cap portion of the signal was so large relative to the silver hiding below that the machine software opted to ID it as textbook crown cap. But with the crown cap portion of the signal notched out e.g. ignored, what was left was a bit of silver through the thick fog of notched out crown cap which pulled the ID down out of the silver area.

The target trace on the Manticore (unlike the SE Pro) puts a LOT of space between silver targets and crown cap targets and it's not on the same axis. That's very good news. If it's getting both crown cap and silver target info, it will be easier to spot what's going on. The only question is, will the Manticore behave like the SE Pro in all metal, will the crown cap completely drown out the silver below it. I'll have to do some testing both ways. There's a zillion crown caps out there polluting sites, with good targets hiding under them. This Manticore gadget made just sniff them out.

I remember when youposted that find under the bottle cap. Was it the SE or the XS machine?
Tony NJ

 

[Odanscoils]

Beach field test #2 tomorrow low tide! It's going to be 101 degrees here at the house so I'm escaping to the coast, high of 70 over there!

1. I'm going to adjust some iron tone stuff and look into the Stab feature to make sure it's off.

2. Coil cover is now OFF. I thought about taking it off before the last hunt, standard practice for beach hunting but the machine is brand new. I took it off for cleaning and yep it was packed with sand. Sand (especially black sand) and salt water sandwiched between the coil and the cover is bad news. That explains why I thought the signals got crappier and falsing worse as the previous hunt went on.

Can wait to read your results.
Good Luck.

 

[Charles (Upstate NY)]

I remember when youposted that find under the bottle cap. Was it the SE or the XS machine?
Tony NJ

I honestly don't remember. It was the Explorer II or SE Pro.

 

[Charles (Upstate NY)]

Update: Sand...3 feet of it pushed in and buried everything. All gullies filled in. Made the trek this morning with fingers crossed...a flat target desert of sand arrgh! So I made lemonade...took in some ocean air and sunshine, put the Audi hot rod mode and made some noise on my way home!

 

[Odanscoils]

Update: Sand...3 feet of it pushed in and buried everything. All gullies filled in. Made the trek this morning with fingers crossed...a flat target desert of sand arrgh! So I made lemonade...took in some ocean air and sunshine, put the Audi hot rod mode and made some noise on my way home!

As that gets dragged out by weather.
I've found it spreads the good stuff out nicely.
Like making a bed. Once you get some high waves.
It lays em out like a flat sheet. Just waiting to be picked.
Good Luck.

 

[Charles (Upstate NY)]

Well so much has happened in the past 2 months. I'll start with a Manticore update. While it remains king of depth, small targets, coins/rings on edge, it crushes the Explorer SE Pro in these areas. Sadly, I have discovered a few Manticore shortcomings relative to the Explorer SE Pro.

Explorer SE Pro - Smartfind Screen ID - Start with the brilliance of the Explorer SE Pro's target ID Smartfind screen. There is wide separation of targets on 2 axis. Targets are so spread out copper cents, zinc cents and Indian cents all have a different, unique ID location on the screen. Clad dimes vs silver dimes also ID in two reliable and different locations. Smaller silver coins ditto. Lead had it's own location separate from other targets. Nickels and square/pull tabs have different locations. Rusty nails, even when they false high in the coin area it's a location unique to rusty nails falsing. For gold (beach hunting) it's even better. Some gold rings ID at the same location as nickels and square/pull tabs but with a good ear you can hear in the tones the difference between them and gold. Also, a lot of gold ID's in oddball locations above, below, left/right. Due to the variance in KT, diameter and width. Targets that ID in these odd areas that nothing else ID's in is one tip-off that you might be over a gold target. So the Explorer's tone and screen ID is a deadly combo for digging good targets while avoiding trash and common clad.

Starting with the Etrac Minelab completely screwed up the Smartfind screen ID. They pretty much eliminated the varying target ID locations along the ferrous/non-ferrous axis. Most targets are bunched together on this line (axis). I'm guessing in an effort to dumb down the detector. But there went half the target ID information. Lets jump ahead to the Manticore vs Explorer. The Manticore has a (annoyingly small) ID Map instead of a Smartfind screen. Minelab wasted 2/3rd of the screen area to display the obnoxiously large numeric conductive target ID number. With the far superior Smartfind screen I never used the numeric display on the Explorer in the first place. I think allocating 2/3rd of the Manticore screen instead to the ID Map would have been an improvement. Better yet, copy the Explorer design. Give Manticore users the option of either displaying the Numeric ID or ID Map in the larger area of the screen. Next improvement, give us the option of replacing the target trace BLOB with a fine crosshair like on the Exlorer. The big blob smearing is an interesting feature, but the big blob of a paintbrush is annoyingly unprecise.

Explorer SE Pro - Conductive ID - The brilliance of the Explorer was the consistency of where targets ID on the conductivity axis. Silver dimes always ID at the same conductivity location on the Smartfind screen, with part of the ID crosshair cursor up off the top of the screen out of view. Clad dimes never get that high. Even fairly worn silver dimes ID up there. Ditto for conductivity on most of the coins, very consistent in the same location. During Manticore testing on silver dimes the numeric ID spanned 11 different numeric ID's, what the hell? Somewhere buried in that hot mess was clad dimes, annoying! Oddly a full details Seated dime ID's 5 points lower than a full detailed Barber dime, weird. So on the Manticore they also went backwards on conductivity, adding variability along the conductive axis. When you add this to bunching up targets along the ferrous/non-ferrous axis target ID is seriously a backwards step vs the Explorer.

Third Manticore shortcoming, it lacks Long Tones. This is specific to hunting beaches, not really used inland except maybe hunting a farm field where targets are spread out. The magnetic field is actually much larger than the diameter of the coil. It's electronically faked to make it appear that it only detects what's directly under the coil. In long tones you get the full coil and can detect targets well out in front of, behind and off to the sides of the coil. It's like swinging a larger coil. That can be quite useful when beach hunting when targets are spread far apart, it may be a few feet to 50-100 feet between targets. Long tones lets you cover more beach per swing, per hunt, and avoid missing targets. Which is quite easy to do on a beach. It's not like gridding an inland site, it's quite easy to walk right past your best gold target on a beach using normal tones. So the Manticore lacking this feature is a step back. I don't always use long tones, depends on the beach condiction on that day. After big storms there can be loads of targets and I'd use normal tones and a tight slow grid pattnern. But it would have been nice to have a Long Tones option on the Manticore. ALSO the Manticore's recovery speed can also further shrink the detection field. It's still good front to back down the center but much more narrow left to right the higher the recovery speed. Setting recovery speed to low, even 0 is more like an Explorer in normal tones. Further, the mode also effects this.

So the Manticore has a LOT of new capabilities, will hit on targets invisible to the Exlorer, lighter, waterproof, wireless headphones etc. But is it 100% a replacement for my Explorer SE Pro? Unlikely on the beach. There will be days when beach conditions are just better suited for the Explorer, it's superior target ID and long tones capabilities. When beach conditions are right for slower gridding then the Manticore will be the right machine. Inland, on Explorer pounded sites the Manticore is the new machine for sure.

 

[BigTony]

Well so much has happened in the past 2 months. I'll start with a Manticore update. While it remains king of depth, small targets, coins/rings on edge, it crushes the Explorer SE Pro in these areas. Sadly, I have discovered a few Manticore shortcomings relative to the Explorer SE Pro.

Explorer SE Pro - Smartfind Screen ID - Start with the brilliance of the Explorer SE Pro's target ID Smartfind screen. There is wide separation of targets on 2 axis. Targets are so spread out copper cents, zinc cents and Indian cents all have a different, unique ID location on the screen. Clad dimes vs silver dimes also ID in two reliable and different locations. Smaller silver coins ditto. Lead had it's own location separate from other targets. Nickels and square/pull tabs have different locations. Rusty nails, even when they false high in the coin area it's a location unique to rusty nails falsing. For gold (beach hunting) it's even better. Some gold rings ID at the same location as nickels and square/pull tabs but with a good ear you can hear in the tones the difference between them and gold. Also, a lot of gold ID's in oddball locations above, below, left/right. Due to the variance in KT, diameter and width. Targets that ID in these odd areas that nothing else ID's in is one tip-off that you might be over a gold target. So the Explorer's tone and screen ID is a deadly combo for digging good targets while avoiding trash and common clad.

Starting with the Etrac Minelab completely screwed up the Smartfind screen ID. They pretty much eliminated the varying target ID locations along the ferrous/non-ferrous axis. Most targets are bunched together on this line (axis). I'm guessing in an effort to dumb down the detector. But there went half the target ID information. Lets jump ahead to the Manticore vs Explorer. The Manticore has a (annoyingly small) ID Map instead of a Smartfind screen. Minelab wasted 2/3rd of the screen area to display the obnoxiously large numeric conductive target ID number. With the far superior Smartfind screen I never used the numeric display on the Explorer in the first place. I think allocating 2/3rd of the Manticore screen instead to the ID Map would have been an improvement. Better yet, copy the Explorer design. Give Manticore users the option of either displaying the Numeric ID or ID Map in the larger area of the screen. Next improvement, give us the option of replacing the target trace BLOB with a fine crosshair like on the Exlorer. The big blob smearing is an interesting feature, but the big blob of a paintbrush is annoyingly unprecise.

Explorer SE Pro - Conductive ID - The brilliance of the Explorer was the consistency of where targets ID on the conductivity axis. Silver dimes always ID at the same conductivity location on the Smartfind screen, with part of the ID crosshair cursor up off the top of the screen out of view. Clad dimes never get that high. Even fairly worn silver dimes ID up there. Ditto for conductivity on most of the coins, very consistent in the same location. During Manticore testing on silver dimes the numeric ID spanned 11 different numeric ID's, what the hell? Somewhere buried in that hot mess was clad dimes, annoying! Oddly a full details Seated dime ID's 5 points lower than a full detailed Barber dime, weird. So on the Manticore they also went backwards on conductivity, adding variability along the conductive axis. When you add this to bunching up targets along the ferrous/non-ferrous axis target ID is seriously a backwards step vs the Explorer.

Third Manticore shortcoming, it lacks Long Tones. This is specific to hunting beaches, not really used inland except maybe hunting a farm field where targets are spread out. The magnetic field is actually much larger than the diameter of the coil. It's electronically faked to make it appear that it only detects what's directly under the coil. In long tones you get the full coil and can detect targets well out in front of, behind and off to the sides of the coil. It's like swinging a larger coil. That can be quite useful when beach hunting when targets are spread far apart, it may be a few feet to 50-100 feet between targets. Long tones lets you cover more beach per swing, per hunt, and avoid missing targets. Which is quite easy to do on a beach. It's not like gridding an inland site, it's quite easy to walk right past your best gold target on a beach using normal tones. So the Manticore lacking this feature is a step back. I don't always use long tones, depends on the beach condiction on that day. After big storms there can be loads of targets and I'd use normal tones and a tight slow grid pattnern. But it would have been nice to have a Long Tones option on the Manticore. ALSO the Manticore's recovery speed can also further shrink the detection field. It's still good front to back down the center but much more narrow left to right the higher the recovery speed. Setting recovery speed to low, even 0 is more like an Explorer in normal tones. Further, the mode also effects this.

So the Manticore has a LOT of new capabilities, will hit on targets invisible to the Exlorer, lighter, waterproof, wireless headphones etc. But is it 100% a replacement for my Explorer SE Pro? Unlikely on the beach. There will be days when beach conditions are just better suited for the Explorer, it's superior target ID and long tones capabilities. When beach conditions are right for slower gridding then the Manticore will be the right machine. Inland, on Explorer pounded sites the Manticore is the new machine for sure.

Charles, very good work in your comparisons. Another thing that minelab Left behind is the warrable sound of the Exp II. I can’t hear it any longer due to hearing loss but what a cool feature it was. After reading your words I might just use my Exp II this fall.
Thanks ! If you become a dealer you will have plenty of folks buying from your company.
Best of luck,
Tony NJ

 

[Charles (Upstate NY)]

Charles, very good work in your comparisons. Another thing that minelab Left behind is the warrable sound of the Exp II. I can’t hear it any longer due to hearing loss but what a cool feature it was. After reading your words I might just use my Exp II this fall.
Thanks ! If you become a dealer you will have plenty of folks buying from your company.
Best of luck,
Tony NJ

Speaking of the Explorer...my SE Pro is undergoing Manticore inspired surgery. I think it's going to be under 2lbs. Hip/Chest mounted with the Manticore/Nox 900 carbon shaft. I 3D printed a new housing which will be waterproof.

 

[Odanscoils]

Speaking of the Explorer...my SE Pro is undergoing Manticore inspired surgery. I think it's going to be under 2lbs. Hip/Chest mounted with the Manticore/Nox 900 carbon shaft. I 3D printed a new housing which will be waterproof.

View attachment 48076

View attachment 48077

View attachment 48078

Can't wait to see how that works out.
Love to do the same to my XS.

 

[Ted S]

Charles...I have always admired your work with the Explorer! I still have my SE yet and keep it dusted off and in good shape!

 

[Mark kus]

Great info you can go in and change the tones to sound better on the manticore well make them more like the equinox.
Mark

 

[BigTony]

Speaking of the Explorer...my SE Pro is undergoing Manticore inspired surgery. I think it's going to be under 2lbs. Hip/Chest mounted with the Manticore/Nox 900 carbon shaft. I 3D printed a new housing which will be waterproof.

View attachment 48076

View attachment 48077

View attachment 48078

I wanted to do that to mine but never went ahead with that project. Good luck with yours
Tony NJ

 

[Charles (Upstate NY)]

I wanted to do that to mine but never went ahead with that project. Good luck with yours
Tony NJ

This modified Explorer will be strictly for beach hunting, which can be a LOT of swinging and few targets to dig at times. Hence the Explorers 5lbs can wipe out your arm on those days.

 

[BigTony]

This modified Explorer will be strictly for beach hunting, which can be a LOT of swinging and few targets to dig at times. Hence the Explorers 5lbs can wipe out your arm on those days.

I agree due to one arm stronger than the other. It does have its place and the more we chat, I know where to use it.
Thanks, Tony NJ

 

[autopilot42]

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.

• 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.

EQX 800 good enough? For me no. Compared to the SE Pro it's a step backwards, more primitive in a key area. Which I understand given it's price point I'm not dinging it. This is also the reason I ordered the Manticore. The Manticore could finally be the machine that gives me the key SE Pro feature I need, plus all the new capabilities. The EQX lacks a 2D target ID screen like the SE Pro Smartfind. I'm sure a numeric display is fine for virgin sites or shallow easier targets but on pounded sites most of the good targets remaining are in the high difficulty level. Where the ID can be jumping all over the place, not a fit for a numeric display. Ground plus multiple iron/trash signal mixed with the desirable target signal.

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.

You answered your own question. Everything depends. Good hunting

 

[autopilot42]

I would assume most detectors put out a constant energy and all the perceived gain is on the recieved signal and how it is processed. Some have gain some have sensitivity. Or both. You are not changing output but only modifying received signals and modifying thru software what is displayed to the individual. It is probably fcc controlled. The better the software the better the response. A controlled output and what the manufacturer does with response.

 

[Charles (Upstate NY)]

Yeah we hooked the Explorer up to scopes and figured out how it works long ago. What's important on the Explorer is understanding what it's Gain and Sensitivity setting truly are, and the order in which they are applied.

 

[Odanscoils]

Yeah we hooked the Explorer up to scopes and figured out how it works long ago. What's important on the Explorer is understanding what it's Gain and Sensitivity setting truly are, and the order in which they are applied.

Could you explain that a we bit more in depth ?
This old dog learns slow these days.

 

[Charles (Upstate NY)]

Could you explain that a we bit more in depth ?
This old dog learns slow these days.

Can you hear a coin that you DELETED from the signal with your settings? That's the GOTCHA of the Gain vs Sensitivity on the Explorer.

First, Explorers transmit at max power at all times, no matter what your settings are. So the received signal back from the coil is the full 100% max possible signal. <--- Stay tuned for a tip on that later.

So we get the signal back from the coil then settings then go to work on it.

Sensitivity DELETES targets and false signals. Thought I'd make that super clear. The lower the Sensitivity the more targets and false signals it deletes.

Gain amplifies the volume of deeper/smaller targets and tiny soil/EMI false signals. Wait for it, AFTER Sensitivity has FIRST finished deleting stuff. So Sensitivity is processed first, then Gain. I confirmed this with Minelab years ago.

The problem is, people were cranking the Gain to 10 in an effort to hear the deepest faintest targets. But since that also jacked up the volume on the tiny soil/EMI false signals to max, this made the machine seem like it was very unstable. In reality that noise always exists, but the volume was so low you didn't hear it. Until the gain was cranked to 10.

So they crank the Gain to 10, then back way off the Sensitivity trying to calm the machine down. Sensitivity starts deleting things, like the deep weak coins they were trying to amplify with a high Gain.

So find the best balance of Sensitivity vs Gain, but keep Sensitivity high as the priority between the two. Frequently I hunted with my Sensitivity at 26-28 and my gain at 7, sometimes 8 if I could get away with it. Stock coil, moderate soil. I have tested targets in the field before they were dug. Solid signal with Sensitivity 28, got choppy at 26 and completely vanished at 25. It's that dramatic a difference.

Tip - As mentioned above, we are getting the full 100% possible signal back from the coil. So FEED THE COIL. Over iffy targets shorten your swing to 2-3 inches wide over the target, swing more rapidly and feed improved received signal into the machine. This will frequently improve the target tone and Smartfind ID. It's almost like feeding it a constant stream of target signal vs a momentary beep with a normal swing. I feed the coil and feed it some more then stop suddenly to the side of the target and wait for the target ID to lock with that concentrated dose of signal.

And that ^^^ is 100% true for the Manticore. In testing it wasn't possible to swing that thing too fast. The faster the swing the deeper it went.

 

[Odanscoils]

Can you hear a coin that you DELETED from the signal with your settings? That's the GOTCHA of the Gain vs Sensitivity on the Explorer.

First, Explorers transmit at max power at all times, no matter what your settings are. So the received signal back from the coil is the full 100% max possible signal. <--- Stay tuned for a tip on that later.

So we get the signal back from the coil then settings then go to work on it.

Sensitivity DELETES targets and false signals. Thought I'd make that super clear. The lower the Sensitivity the more targets and false signals it deletes.

Gain amplifies the volume of deeper/smaller targets and tiny soil/EMI false signals. Wait for it, AFTER Sensitivity has FIRST finished deleting stuff. So Sensitivity is processed first, then Gain. I confirmed this with Minelab years ago.

The problem is, people were cranking the Gain to 10 in an effort to hear the deepest faintest targets. But since that also jacked up the volume on the tiny soil/EMI false signals to max, this made the machine seem like it was very unstable. In reality that noise always exists, but the volume was so low you didn't hear it. Until the gain was cranked to 10.

So they crank the Gain to 10, then back way off the Sensitivity trying to calm the machine down. Sensitivity starts deleting things, like the deep weak coins they were trying to amplify with a high Gain.

So find the best balance of Sensitivity vs Gain, but keep Sensitivity high as the priority between the two. Frequently I hunted with my Sensitivity at 26-28 and my gain at 7, sometimes 8 if I could get away with it. Stock coil, moderate soil. I have tested targets in the field before they were dug. Solid signal with Sensitivity 28, got choppy at 26 and completely vanished at 25. It's that dramatic a difference.

Tip - As mentioned above, we are getting the full 100% possible signal back from the coil. So FEED THE COIL. Over iffy targets shorten your swing to 2-3 inches wide over the target, swing more rapidly and feed improved received signal into the machine. This will frequently improve the target tone and Smartfind ID. It's almost like feeding it a constant stream of target signal vs a momentary beep with a normal swing. I feed the coil and feed it some more then stop suddenly to the side of the target and wait for the target ID to lock with that concentrated dose of signal.

And that ^^^ is 100% true for the Manticore. In testing it wasn't possible to swing that thing too fast. The faster the swing the deeper it went.

Thank You Charles.