Thanks guys, good information. I've been hunting a huge old park and finding a LOT of stuff with the Equinox. I think the biggest reason though, is that I'm getting a "layer" deeper than I could get with my previous detectors. I may have to re-think this, or wait for a mid-sized coil.
I hunt in the SE with red clay mineralized soil, black soil mixed with iron and much more iron mixed into everything because of the history of this city and our geographic location.
Depth is an issue here but the bigger problem is major masking, most everything last 2-3" or so gets skewed, screwed up, changed or can go completely dark depending on masking garbage that infests our devil dirt.
I have used a couple different defectors and a lot of different coils to try to get the best ID's possible and get as deep as possible...and I have done pretty well.
Then I got a Nox.
In my strange dirt it just seems to work...better, deeper too, by a few inches from what I can tell.
Using the larger coil I have noticed and dug several masked coins and even a few surprising spills from a couple of sites I know have been scoured for decades and a couple from private lawns that I have visited more times than I can count over the last few years.
Nothing was super deep, if I can get to just the 6-7" area cleanly that would be fantastic as most older targets here usually hang in the 4-6" area with a few deeper at some sites but I found there is a layer of older, great targets at that 4-6" depth area that everyone...and I mean everyone, missed over the years because they were so masked.
Many were no deeper than 4", most every detector in the planet should have been able to hit on these old coin targets but they never did.
I don't know if these coins were on edge, I can't believe all of them were, or exactly what was doing the masking but the Nox seems better at noticing these masked targets although I admit they aren't perfect ID's either.
After I got the small sniper I mounted it and it has not come off since because as great as the standard coil is at doing what it needs to do the sniper in my weird dirt is even better.
Once that sniper was mounted these items below are the kind of targets that started to show up from sites that have been scoured, two of the bigger coins were my most recent and that would be a silver quarter and the Walker half...from a public park I guarantee you had been hunted since detectors were invented.
Shockingly, both coins were in the 4-5" depth area...they should have been scooped up long but never were.
The Nox and the sniper found them though, and both these coins were tiny, short hits and were by no means 100% diggable.
Could the standard or bigger coil have hit on these the same, better, or at all...I don't know but I do know the sniper did it.
For the foreseeable future I am sticking with it, I hunt trashy, mineralized and iron infested dirt most of the time so I think the sniper gives me a slight edge over the bigger coils and I will take any advantage I can get.
