vferrari
Silver Member
- Joined
- Jul 19, 2015
- Messages
- 4,910
- Reaction score
- 8,378
- Golden Thread
- 0
- Location
- Near Ground Zero for Insanity
- Detector(s) used
- XP Deus with HF/x35 Coils and Mi6 Pinpointer/ML Equinox 600/800/ML Tarsacci MDT 8000 GPX 4800/Garrett ATX/Fisher F75 DST/Tek G2+/Delta/Whites MXT/Nokta Simplex/Garrett Carrot
- Primary Interest:
- All Treasure Hunting
- #1
Thread Owner
I hit a couple big bucket listers relic hunting recently and talked about it here: http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/today-s-finds/575197-eagle-has-landed-pa.html
In this post I want to talk specifically about how the Equinox performed during that hunt.
To recap, I pulled a few civil war and earlier goodies including a worn large cent, CW breast plate, and silver Seated quarter out of a PA farm field that has relatively mild soil but a couple challenges including a big gas pipe that runs diagonally through the property that sounds great in just about every detector and fools the first timers and even some of us repeat visitors. Also, there is a large section of the field that is littered with aluminum slag from a tractor motor explosion. The stuff is everywhere and even more annoying than can slaw and crushed cans.
For this hunt I ran the Equinox almost exclusively in stock Park 2 mode (vs. Field 2 which was my go to in Culpeper and its highly mineralized soil) with All Metal on, noise cancelled, and ground balanced. I started out in the middle of the melted aluminum waste land, figuring something might be lurking and perhaps the Equinox could coax it out. No such luck. Check out the pic below of the globs of solidified melted aluminum slag that I uncovered. All the junk targets shown in the pic were aluminum slag, crushed AL can, and the square nut were pulled before I even had recovered any keepers. I started to get a bead on what that aluminum sounded like and how it rang up on the Equinox. The big globs rang up in the 20's but VDI was highly variable with each coil pass and the audio, though high in pitch, sounded hollow and flutey with rapidly changing VDI. The aluminum can also sounded hollow and gave a variable VDI. Getting this down now was going to be a big help later on. I also recovered an iron square bolt which also sounded ok due to iron falsing (was running iron bias at 0). I also dug a couple of hot rocks which in this field, rung up a solid and repeatable VDI of 1.
As I moved away from the bulk of the aluminum slag, I hit on some keeper targets, the copper, a j-hook, and dropped minie ball all with solidly locked on VDI's and solid tones and none were very deep. Then I came across another strong target that had slightly variable 22-23 VDI, but solid audio. If I was just going by VID and not paying attention to nuances in the VDI and tonality I could have easily been fooled that I was hitting another aluminum slag blob. But this was definitely different and sweet sounding. I was thinking a large copper or smallish silver. Popped the plug and half buried in he plug was my first CW plate. Score another one for Equinox. Again, this was not about depth but about giving a solid VDI and tone vs. similar VDI but different sounding trash. Similarly, later in the hunt in another part of the field well away from the the tractor slag, there was a goodly amount of field iron with some falsing. I didn't really need to use iron bias to mask it because I was using All Metal and it was pretty obvious what was going on. I then hit a solid 14/15 VID amongst some iron signals but the iron grunts were not synced up with the solid higher tone indicating that I was not getting a mixed ferrous/non-ferrous signal from a single (probable junk) target. In the plug, was a minie ball. Again the Equinox giving me the subtle clues. The final target was not so subtle and pinged me like there was no doubt and that was my silver Seated quarter which, again was not very deep such that any beep-dig machine should have been able to hear it.
Bottom line, the Equinox is not going anywhere, it is staying put in my arsenal along with the Deus and its HF coils. I am definitely starting to really get what it is telling me audibly and feel I am progressing similar to, if not faster than, what I experienced when I was learning the Deus.
In this post I want to talk specifically about how the Equinox performed during that hunt.
To recap, I pulled a few civil war and earlier goodies including a worn large cent, CW breast plate, and silver Seated quarter out of a PA farm field that has relatively mild soil but a couple challenges including a big gas pipe that runs diagonally through the property that sounds great in just about every detector and fools the first timers and even some of us repeat visitors. Also, there is a large section of the field that is littered with aluminum slag from a tractor motor explosion. The stuff is everywhere and even more annoying than can slaw and crushed cans.
For this hunt I ran the Equinox almost exclusively in stock Park 2 mode (vs. Field 2 which was my go to in Culpeper and its highly mineralized soil) with All Metal on, noise cancelled, and ground balanced. I started out in the middle of the melted aluminum waste land, figuring something might be lurking and perhaps the Equinox could coax it out. No such luck. Check out the pic below of the globs of solidified melted aluminum slag that I uncovered. All the junk targets shown in the pic were aluminum slag, crushed AL can, and the square nut were pulled before I even had recovered any keepers. I started to get a bead on what that aluminum sounded like and how it rang up on the Equinox. The big globs rang up in the 20's but VDI was highly variable with each coil pass and the audio, though high in pitch, sounded hollow and flutey with rapidly changing VDI. The aluminum can also sounded hollow and gave a variable VDI. Getting this down now was going to be a big help later on. I also recovered an iron square bolt which also sounded ok due to iron falsing (was running iron bias at 0). I also dug a couple of hot rocks which in this field, rung up a solid and repeatable VDI of 1.
As I moved away from the bulk of the aluminum slag, I hit on some keeper targets, the copper, a j-hook, and dropped minie ball all with solidly locked on VDI's and solid tones and none were very deep. Then I came across another strong target that had slightly variable 22-23 VDI, but solid audio. If I was just going by VID and not paying attention to nuances in the VDI and tonality I could have easily been fooled that I was hitting another aluminum slag blob. But this was definitely different and sweet sounding. I was thinking a large copper or smallish silver. Popped the plug and half buried in he plug was my first CW plate. Score another one for Equinox. Again, this was not about depth but about giving a solid VDI and tone vs. similar VDI but different sounding trash. Similarly, later in the hunt in another part of the field well away from the the tractor slag, there was a goodly amount of field iron with some falsing. I didn't really need to use iron bias to mask it because I was using All Metal and it was pretty obvious what was going on. I then hit a solid 14/15 VID amongst some iron signals but the iron grunts were not synced up with the solid higher tone indicating that I was not getting a mixed ferrous/non-ferrous signal from a single (probable junk) target. In the plug, was a minie ball. Again the Equinox giving me the subtle clues. The final target was not so subtle and pinged me like there was no doubt and that was my silver Seated quarter which, again was not very deep such that any beep-dig machine should have been able to hear it.
Bottom line, the Equinox is not going anywhere, it is staying put in my arsenal along with the Deus and its HF coils. I am definitely starting to really get what it is telling me audibly and feel I am progressing similar to, if not faster than, what I experienced when I was learning the Deus.
