I bit...An 800 is going to be shipped out to me later today!

[REVIER]

Did I fall for the hype, no, not really.
Even though it was supposed to be good in mineralized dirt I held off until I saw what the thing could actually do in real life here in MY devil dirt here in Birmingham Ala. because things are far from normal where we live.
We don't just have the heavy SE. mineralization problems but way extra and insane helpings of iron from microscopic to large...everywhere but especially in the older parts of the city and even into the suburbs.
Depth is pitiful, most can't make sense out of signals past 5" around here, plus masking isn't just a small problem in all of our sites...it is much more than just problematic.
Hunting in Kansas and Missouri was a dream for me, hunting here can be and usually is a nightmare....especially here in the city.
Neighbors in Georgia, Tennessee and even other parts of my own state have it rough to but where I live it is way worse...we have the perfect storm of most of the worst challenging issues most of us come across and deal with.
The only way I have become successful hunting here with my detectors and especially my F70 is by learning a whole new language and set of target behaviors on signals past 4" deep and observing and learning to understand exactly how iron affects everything.
It wasn't easy, it took many hours, lots of work and I am nowhere near a master of anything but by thinking way outside the box and using some pretty crazy setting combinations I have shocked myself with what I have been able to find, how deep I have been able to find a few rare ones and surprised by how many great targets are still around and not all that deep...just masked severely.
I sure wasn't going to be the guinea pig but a hunting buddy got one and I got a good look at this thing and swung it a bit.
It was light, not perfectly balanced but good enough, the tones were pleasant and it seemed to lock onto targets pretty well.
Not thrilled with the short range on the VDI spread but here the tones will carry more weight using this one.
My buddy took his out in his back yard that he has hit a hundred times with an AT Pro and AT Max and still managed to find a couple of good targets including a pretty deep wheatie or two.
On that hunt in an old park in an area we have scoured in the past and I am sure many others going back to the 60's he found and dug two silver dimes within 10 minutes.
That is when I really started to pay attention.
Another hunting buddy I talked to yesterday got one recently basically just to use it in the water because he has been a Whites guy since the early 90's and has boxes of silver coins and other things his tools have found for him.
He took his out in the backyard too, a yard he has scoured and is loaded with tons and tons of round and square nails and it shocked him when he was able to come across 5 non ferrous targets he totally missed pretty easily.
The first time he took it out at a park he came to the conclusion that it was broken, he had way too many false signals and way too many that were too deep...several inches deeper than the 5" or so that had been the norm for his XLT and other Whites units he had been swinging for close to 30 years.
Now with a little more time on it be has come to understand that it was not broken and it wasn't falsing, he was actually picking up signals better and deeper than he was ever able to do in the past which shocked him.
What he knew and assumed to know about targets here and the depth we could reach was just, wrong, something about this technology just works here so he had to learn to think in a whole new way.
Neither one of these guys are great with these things yet and of course I know nothing but the signs are there, the evidence is building that this multi frequency technology seems to work here in a way that what we all used in the past just couldn't.
Even a friend I have that runs with an E Trac is really challenged here, something about this one could be even more advantageous than the FBS technology...maybe.
Will it get massive depth like others can in great soil well, no, but just to be able to reach as little as one, two or three inches deeper in the bad stuff with recognizable ID's could be huge and game changing for us.
Is it going to be perfect at managing and overcoming the major iron masking problems we have...of course not but it sure might be able to give us even more helpful clues than we have had in the past with our other detectors.
Again, unless you have hunted here and understand how bad and frustrating our soil and masking problems are you won't be able to realize how life changing this could be for us, also.
We have all done well here, this seems like it could possibly take us all to the next level.
I hope it will at the very least and right now I am optimistic.

So I was lucky enough to come across a dealer that for some crazy reason had one available and mine will be shipped out to me later today.
I am excited, learning a new detector and exploring all the setting combinations I can think of is just about as fun for me as finding all that great treasure...and this one has a lot of settings to fiddle with.
The three of us working together will share our experiences and help each other along the learning curve and there is another member of our group that will probably be getting one too if I know him.
We have a lot to learn, not just about the machine itself but how we can take advantage of its abilities in our crazy dirt but both of those guys have stated even with limited experience the potential for success is definitely there.
Also I have never been a water guy before...now I can be and on hot humid days when the dirt is dry and hard like concrete being able to hunt in a whole new and more comfortable environment is a definite plus.

I won't be getting rid of my other detectors, I love switching around way too much, but for the foreseeable future I have work to do, a new machine to learn, a new language and behavior to understand and man, that is exciting.
The mad scientist in me is rising to the surface and the possibilities seem endless.
Of course I will be posting about what I learn as I learn them, I can't help that, I just have a need to help out the next guy if I can because that makes me feel good and it is just what I do.
I will be spending a lot of time in the Equinox forum here, learning, absorbing, and trying out as much as I can.
I thank you all now for the knowledge I am about to steal from many of you, it is all going to be appreciated highly, trust me.
I will pay it all back and share what works for me and what doesn't, plus whatever helpful things I can discover on my own in some probably way too long posts...like this one.
I can be strange, thinking outside the box about some sometimes crazy settings is my thing and some have called me crazy but I have the resolve and patience to stay on that path until I have success...or not.
They say it is not always just the destination but more about the journey, I am hoping this will be a great one.

Stay tuned, I am thinking this is going to be eye opening, hopefully shocking and definitely a lot of fun.

 

[Rick(ND)]

Good luck with the 800 as it is quite the detector from the little I have had time to use it. To me it seems very hot on lower conductors and see them quite deep. Just need to get more time on it to see how deep the higher conductors will do.
I use field 2 and did some disc so I run disc at 10 and notch out everything from 14 up to 18 and been running sensitivity at 20 and believe iron bias at 2 for now as I am a coin hunter to get to know it well, then will drop the disc and notch to see more.

Good luck
Rick

 

[dfmike]

It will be interesting to discover how it will manage against your beloved F70. I'd like to see a comparison on the tube with live digs comparing signals from both detectors.

I was excited to see those machines come out (the 600 and 800) but I don't know if I can ever get used to the tones so I have put off buying one for the time being. I could never get used to the X-Terra 705 for that reason.

Keep us posted either here or in the minelab forums.

 

[vlad]

after all the expanded range on other units made me hold off.

 

[REVIER]

after all the expanded range on other units made me hold off.

Thanks to all!

Yes, I use both the screen info AND the tones when I hunt with the F70 and the tones rule all of course when I stand behind my Tesoros, so I take it all in and believe nothing unless I see some repeating behavior that I have learned might...might be indications of a good target.
A very high percentage way to hunt because digging a ton of junk is just not my thing anymore but this way of hunting has been working for me for the past few years.
If the info is weighted more on the tones side instead of the short range of the VDI numbers so be it, I can and will adapt.
I have already learned a few things about behavior in this dirt that can be real helpful so once I get out there I hope I can expand on that knowledge.
It just appears that this one is very good at unmasking, or at least in our soil and site conditions it seems to be, so that is big.
Everything we use here and every coil we add or machine we upgrade too is not about making massive jumps in ID's or depth because this just can't happen here...but just a little movement on either of those abilities in a positive direction can be huge.

There is no perfect detector but each one we try might be able to bring something new to the table that we can use to be successful.
This one is definitely bringing something to the party, now it is our job to take advantage of them to up our game.

 

[still looking 52]

Revier, this sounds exciting to read. Just think if this unit will go just a couple inches deeper than your F70 you'll have to hunt all those worn out sites completely over again, somebody's got to do it, mise we'll be you.

 

[treasure_hunter]

Hint, sometimes the Nox will see deep targets but not give you any TID until you remove some soil, if your screen gives you " - - " it isn't a false signal, it is a deep target.

 

[REVIER]

Hint, sometimes the Nox will see deep targets but not give you any TID until you remove some soil, if your screen gives you " - - " it isn't a false signal, it is a deep target.

Exactly the kind of thing we all need to learn and see if it is true in our neck of the woods so thanks.
According to tracking mine should be here early next week so I got a lot of studying to do so I can hit the ground running.

 

[chuck ky]

Some hunters say that on their detector it won't give an accurate TID on deep targets but in audio it will give the correct sound for that target. I would think that if TID says gold on a deep quarter then the audio would also say gold.

 

[REVIER]

Revier, this sounds exciting to read. Just think if this unit will go just a couple inches deeper than your F70 you'll have to hunt all those worn out sites completely over again, somebody's got to do it, mise we'll be you.

You should have heard that guy I mentioned that thought his was broken talk about his experience.
He is no newbie, he has tons of silver he found from a long time ago and for the most part in the last several years 99% of the places he hunts are lawns he gets permissions at.
He is great at this, so far he is up to 50 silver coins this year and they all came from private lawns because most of the veterans around here just quit hunting parks because they consider all of them hunted out...the easy stuff was found long ago and now they just consider these public areas done and done so private property is the only thing left.
I know this isn't true at all because 99% of the time that I hunt it is in those parks and I have found some great things but not near the volume that you can find if you hunt in virgin private property.
Not even close.

Anyhoo when he got all those signals past 5" when he first took out his 800 he was sure the thing was bonkers because for all the lawns he has hit and all the hours he has spent hunting it was rarer than rare for him to find much of anything past the 5" mark.
It was unbelievable to him that there could be much hiding out there any deeper because he didn't remember that happening.
When he finally dug a few good targets on the next couple hunts easily 1,2, and even 3" past that 5" barrier, and a nickel at about 15" when he took a little side trip to a beach, only then did it dawn on him that the 5" barrier most believe we can't get past is beatable.

I thought the same for a long time, my F2, my Compadre and even my Vaquero never found me much of anything past 5" for the first couple years of my career because I started that career hunting here.
Even with the Vaq I got a big DD coil, I tried hunting in all metal, tried supertuning, adjusting the GB positive and negative and all kinds of things to get deeper but I still don't remember digging anything past 5" in the several hundred hours I used it in dozens and dozens if different sites all over the area in the city and up to 50 miles away.
Once I dug a dime that was a solid for sure dime signal at 7" with my F2 and boy did that shock me but that was in some very different kind of very nice black fill dirt that was next to a ball field in a fairly new park.
That kind of soil is rarer than hen's teeth here, there is only two other places I have ever hunted where I found similar soil conditions and one of those is in some woods on a small mountain, everywhere else is the other kind, the bad kind, even if it isn't the red stuff.

After I returned here and started to hunt with my F70 I was finally able to get past that 5" level and dig good targets but it took time and work and a completely new language and way of thinking about some very strange signals to get to that point.
Still, most targets still weren't much more than 5" deep even old ones in really old sites and I have been shocked completely when I think of how many great things, Indian heads, silver coins, old tokens and more, that I have found in sites that were surprisingly shallow...maybe 3-4 or at the most 5" deep.
It's that major masking problem we got going on here, I know what normal masking is but what we deal with on a daily basis is way beyond that.
This is also the reason I don't believe any of these public parks are truly hunted out and why I was able to find so much in these sites that others gave up on long ago.
I figured out some very strange and yet still repeatable behavior and used some very unusual settings with that F70 that helped me to do all of that.

What we believe is going on here is something about that Multi Q technology somehow is able to do what I learned to do...give us good indicators on masked and deeper targets but in a much more sane and understandable way.
You don't have to be crazy to do better here with this one, although I still hope crazy helps some because that is something I don't think I can change all that much.
Or that is my current theory, anyway, I still have to get some hours on the thing to even begin to see if any if this is actually true or it is something else...or nothing at all.

Whatever, all I know is I wasn't exactly bored with the F70 but now I get to learn a new detector, a new language, experience new things with a great group of guys all going through the same thing.
Like I said, this should be fun.

 

[vlad]

when not enough information is returned to analyze. (remember a delta pitch set up literally has a separate tone to each number)
Depth is not the only factor though. A ground balance that is incorrect can knock off inches.
Also a piece of trash above a target can too. NASA Tom talked about placing a single small steel staple above a coin and detector being silent.
A way to minimize this is using little or no discrimination. Seems using one tone, no disc, and watching the i.d. has gotten me the best results. (and use pinpoint to see If you hear multiple targets)
Any amount of discrimination can alter the phase shift in an IB unit (from the initial point in the null before a target is hit) between the tx and rx windings in the loop.

 

[chuck ky]

But most say that it will only change the screen i.d. that the audio will always be accurate.

 

[vlad]

A piece of trash (or extreme depth) can cause no visual i.d. and no tone at all. Target is there machine senses it but.....not enough signal. (A negligible response is firmed up from removing dirt.)
Silence on a target is a best example. Hundreds on here comment on newly buried targets not giving a signal/visual response at all.
Depending on meter sensitivity it is possible to get no audio, but a unstable waveringTID (often mistaken for mineral or emi interference.) It can take more signal in a multi tone set up than a single tone
also. On a unit using say 3 tones, (low-med-high range conductors) broad target notches are less likely to be affected.

 

[vlad]

Detectors are often made to bump a target up (TID/tone i.d.) higher.
Example; experience on a CZ can have a nickel bump up higher to pull tab-- you just went from a coin tone to a trash tone-same as TID.
But in a 3 tone set up the nickle/tab being adjacent, both will have same tone. Delta pitch will have a corresponding increase in tone to match target number.
("some" hunters sure do get around.....reminds me of DIGGERS)