REVIER
Well-known member
Got a Nox 800 in mid June, got on a list and received a 6" sniper a few weeks ago.
I still do not have many hours on this thing, here in the deep south I usually avoid hunting in my most common sites, public parks and lawns and curb strips though the dead heat of the summer.
I am not thrilled with the hot temps but it is more about the heat cooking the dirt into a concrete like structure and pretty much guaranteeing I will destroy any nice areas and grass digging holes.
Sometimes we get a little rain and that helps some but mostly it just stays hot and dry so I just tend to wait it out and look forward to my real hunting season that runs from actual fall to late spring.
In the three months I have owned this thing I would be surprised if I have even 10-15 hours on it so far.
That should change soon, we are still in the 90's and dry here but we will finally start to cool off a bit by the end of the month and when rain patterns normalize the dirt will become diggable again and I can really put some time on this thing and see if my investment was worth it.
With only a few hours on it so far I have been surprised, shocked and thrilled so I hope that is a trend that continues.
A little background about why I decided to get one, it wasn't the hype and I had no intentions of replacing my other detectors at all but a buddy got one and what I saw it do on a hunt shocked and surprised me.
We have really bad soil here, red dirt clay is mostly everywhere and if it is not on top it is still hiding a few inches below the black stuff.
Even in areas with deeper black soil it is all still very mineralized and causes us major problems.
On top of that there is a much bigger issue, iron...and ridiculous amounts of it infesting most every site I hunt especially if those sites are anywhere in or around the city, even the lawns and curb strips.
This is due to the geographical area we live in, the elements that exist in our dirt that enabled us to become huge in the iron and steel industry for over 100 years plus the history of the city and how most areas are built on sites where there older neighborhoods and buildings that were knocked down.
If you ever hunted in old home sites where you had to battle iron from large to small to to tiny to microscopic well, that is what we are up against here in close to 100% of our sites both public and private.
Depth is pitiful using most any detector of any brand, even if we can get deeper most targets past 5" or so have such skewed screwed up signals that it is hard to make sense of most of them.
We are used to that here, depth is what it is and we still manage to find a ton of great things limited as we might be but a much worse problem is the masking issues...it is very hard to explain how bad it is here.
For those of us that have learned to deal with the masking the rewards can be great and I have succeeded doing that somewhat using several of my detectors, specifically a couple of Tesoros and my F70.
Am I perfect at it...not on your life, it is an ongoing process and every little thing I learn is another tiny piece of the puzzle that has helped me be more successful here than I ever thought possible.
Still, there is so much more hiding here begging to be found and a lot of it can be way more shallow than you might believe especially if you are lucky enough to only have hunted in much more normal dirt.
We are always on the lookout for that one special tool, detector, coil, or setting that can make things easier around here for us to locate and notice good targets.
Do I believe there is a "magic" detector that can see all, find all, go super deep and identify all trash and iron while defeating all the masking issues and do everything perfectly in this strange place...no, but there sure could be something out there that might make our job easier and excel in one or more of those categories.
This thing could be the best at doing all this so far from what I have seen with just a limited time spent with it.
The jury is still out, I have yet to learn to understand it well, play with the bulk of the settings, put more than just a few hours on both coils especially that sniper but again, what I have seen and experienced so far has kinda shocked me.
Hype means nothing to me, what I see with my own eyes and experience with all the rest of my senses is everything to me.
I now am in a group of 3 of us that own these now, we might be seeing a couple more friends getting one eventually.
Between all of us we have seen what other detectors can do here, a couple of different Fishers, 4 different Tesoros, several Whites, a Deus, an E Trac, Xterras, a few AT Pros, an AT Max and a few others.
Most times after experiencing what it can do here for a short time it is the Equinox getting the call to duty now, I just can't believe this is hype because we ain't stupid or gullible.
We just all want to use the best possible tools that work for us.
It all started when a hunting buddy surprised me and got his hands on a Nox 800 and I went hunting with him at a public park site we had both hit so many times before along with uncounted others for many decades.
I was curious but still skeptical...what I saw on that hunt shocked and awed me and started me on this journey and this is where I am so far.
When things get back to normal around here, temps and soil conditions, I will continue on this journey and will probably share all my experiences here...it's kinda what I love to do.
Can't wait!
All of this was on another forum and you can't link to them here so I will copy and paste it all here to start.
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Buddy got a Nox 800...
PanheadDan got a new Equinox 800 yesterday.
He took it out in his backyard that he hit 100 times before and found a wheatie he missed fairly easily he says.
He sent me a small vid that he took of another really sweet sounding signal that he didn't dig but he will soon.
All the hype is just that to me...hype.
Now we will see if this thing will actually have any advantage in OUR location.
This mineralized red clay trash and massive iron infested place that has what we call devil dirt for a bunch of very good reasons.
Later today we are meeting at one of the oldest parks in the city we know with a huge amount of history and where we both have found some great treasure in the past.
Great targets are few and far between but a few are still there.
We will hit several areas we know of that still might have some good targets we missed and see if this thing can live up to that hype.
I will watch him closely an we will compare some signals with my F70 which seems to do pretty good around here.
If it does seem to work well I will wait till he is intently concentrating on a signal and sneak up behind him with a big rock.
If my plan goes well tomorrow I will be starting a new log about future hunts with MY new Equinox 800.
Stay tuned.
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In an area we have both hunted hard almost immediately after walking into this site and within 10-15 minutes he found not one but 2 silver Roosevelt dimes.
Nothing super deep but one was in a coin spill with a wheat and a memorial.
Like everything here there was some heavy masking going on or we probably would have found them before with the F70, an AT Pro and an AT Max.
My F70 could hit them easily but the signals were both jumpy.
I had the big Cors Cannon coil mounted and I changed it to the Sharpshooter right after because of the jumping and I discovered the coil was a bit loose attaching to the head unit.
Not saying this affected the signal but maybe, with the small Nel coil I still was getting jumpy behavior which is normal around here but the Nox seemed to zero in way better and the numbers seemed more stable.
I mean dead on if you hit the target just right.
He got a high tone nice warbling both along with a little lower tones but by circling he was able to get that constant highest tone to repeat consistently but from one direction only...but it was enough to decide to dig.
I don't know how this all works but I think he said he was in either 5 or 7 tones, or something like that.
It also seemed to deal with our intense iron problem very well which is huge.
I picked it up and swung it for a couple of minutes myself.
I like the tones, it is pretty light but not exactly the most ergonomic and balanced rig but not all that bad.
I could deal with it easily.
A smaller coil might even things out.
Pretty cool, maybe this thing can deal with our locations better than all the others we have used before.
More hunts and testing to do.
One of these might be in my future.
Not only does it work well but there about a million different settings and adjustments you can play with and I love the chance to do that kind of stuff most of all.
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First Nox hunt...this is crazy!
Haven't been out nearly enough this year, something always distracts me, I really don't like hunting in the heat much at all anymore, unless it rains around here the digging is just tough plus it is not easy to avoid wrecking up the grass in drought conditions.
I was happy with my detectors but a buddy got a Nox and I saw what it could do in my challenging devil dirt with the red clay, high mineralization and massive iron masking just about everything everywhere.
The hype I didn't care about, what I saw with my eyes did so I got one.
Now I guess I have to get out there more if only to learn the thing.
I have two friends with them now and neither really knows what they are doing yet but they were both shocked at what it could do here.
I have studied the manual and watched a ton of vids and it is still confusing, I barely know how to turn the thing on...still, I went out on my first hunt today.
Short, just a few hours to start to get acclimated and the heat is a killer but it rained so the digging was fine.
Spent a little time in a local park I can walk to where I found a lonely modern memorial cent but I hit two houses on my block that I have hunted continuously and much more than just often for like over 2 years now, it has been awhile since anything decent has popped up at either so I figure a good first test.
The 1920 wheat was found first in one lawn with factory settings Park 2.
The second what was found on my way back after I changed the settings a bit to cherry pick high tones just before I found those nickels at the other house.
I believe I was in Park 1, I disced out everything but a few numbers above and below 13 and changed it all to high tones then I knocked out the rest except for the high conductive stuff.
I chose well.
Both nickels were in the same hole with some iron in there too, numbers bounced a bit from 11-14 but repeated so I dug the hole.
Honestly I never expected to dig up a nickel let alone 2 and a war nickel and a buff together blew my mind.
Any one of these older coins would have made my day, to find them all on one hunt in lawns I scoured to death...and found them fairly easily too, again, mind blown.
I am good at getting around and dealing with my masking problems but none of these older coins ever showed up on my radar once and none were particularly deep, just well hidden.
I didn't feel like digging much trash either so I will throw in a pic of all the trash I dug today, which you might not believe.
Considering I know hardly anything about this thing and I could do this in our dirt with such limited knowledge and skill bodes well.
First hunt, found my first silver for the year plus more.
Wonder what I will be able to do in the future with more hours under my belt?
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Don't have a clue about the tones yet, navigating the main and sub menus and getting them to do what I want them to do is still hit and miss but I am excited to see what happens when I can.
Yesterday I just looked for small ranges of numbers that repeated and found these very masked older coins in very small front lawns and exact areas I can guarantee you I had gotten coils over from 5 other detectors.
Don't know why I didn't get any dig me indications from any of the others but on this one there was no mistake that I should open some holes.
Just finding one of these masked coins would have been astounding, to dig all four to me is like not ever playing golf but finding a magic driver that can get you a hole in one on every swing despite any lack of skill.
Everything we use or try here is aimed to try to unmask targets as well as possible and to penetrate deep as we can because it ain't normal in this place and both of those things are not easy to do...with any detector.
The massive iron we have hides so much and digging it all just to try to unmask the good stuff would be insane.
Depth we can get, at least up to 8 or 9 inches in some cases but almost every signal past 4-5" gets so skewed an screwed up that they are all but unrecognizable.
The one and its technology at first impression seems to handle the mineralization and masking problems and appears to be...different.
There are tons of great targets here that aren't real deep but have been missed by many for so many decades due to masking so this one may make that task easier.
Now we have to figure out how to penetrate a bit deeper than we ever could before if we can and see what else is hiding down there.
Even an extra inch or two can make a huge difference to us and open up a whole new world, if we can get even deeper well...that would be something.
It is all about not just getting signals but UNDERSTANDING signals here...as time goes on we will see if this tool can help us do that better as it appears to be doing.
Plus I am a jewelry hunter at heart...I wonder how successful I will be standing behind this one in that area.
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Originally Posted by WildDigger
Congrats! The Nox has impressed me as well. I just knew I had to get one and see for myself. It was so impressive 2 of my buddies that are die hard Garrett guys both got a Nox. LOL And both have been pleased by what it has shown them. GL&HH.
I am really enjoying it, the few hours I have swung it, anyway.
Is it perfect, no, but what detector is?
Way too many targets come in at that short range of mid level numbers.
I love the full 99 number range of my F70 so this is hard to get used to.
There might be a way to differentiate between good and bad targets in that mid range with some accuracy even if the signal isn't great but I have no idea how to do that yet if it is even possible.
It seems to deal with my widespread iron problem pretty well but I have not used it in a ton of different places so far.
There could be conditions where it will cause this thing to totally lie to me, miss or ignore great targets or make it go schizophrenic but that remains to be seen on future hunts in a myriad of different sites.
How is it on jewelry, gold of different shapes and sizes, broken rings or other open loop jewelry and especially chains?
Great I hope, or at least pretty well.
All kinds of other questions too but it is fun learning the answers.
I know it seems to like nickels and high conductive coins and seems to lock on pretty good to them in some challenging conditions.
How bad does it need to get to defeat this thing I don't know but the areas I searched so far are pretty normal and common around here and it seemed to do well.
If all I ever use this for is to cherry pick the high conductive non ferrous targets in sites I guess I could deal with that as long as I can bring other tools along to do the other tasks but I am thinking this won't be the case.
If it can't do it all it can probably do most of what I need it to do...and then there is that go into the water thing which none of my other detectors can deal with.
It is cool, it is different, it is finding me neat stuff pretty easily and others that hunt around here seem impressed with it too.
Tomorrow is hunt number three, I wonder what I will learn on that one?
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Bucket lister...been looking for this thing for over 6.5 years!
I should have found one of these long ago but for some reason I never did.
I found a seated dime, plenty of mercs and silver rosies, even a Barber quarter but a Barber dime always eluded me for some reason.
Until today.
Second hunt with the Nox, second silver for the year, second surprise on consecutive hunts...this coin triggered a big smile.
I am happy.
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Originally Posted by NCtoad
Congrats on the new NOX and the barber!! What I know about you from all your posts is that you'll love the nox...just so many tweaks!
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Ahh...a tweakers dream!
Way different than using my other detectors that I understand so well, I am still a little lost on understanding everything and all the settings but I am getting there.
My first hunt yesterday I messed with a few and found silver.
Today I was able to learn a few more, raised the disc, adjusted the tones and volume and eventually tried 50 tones which really sounded great to me and that's when the Barber popped up.
Those settings went into my user profile to use on the next hunt.
I can't say for sure because I never experienced it before but I think I heard that flutey silver sound all the Minelab guys always talk about.
More settings to play with and understand but two hunts, several masked coins and two silvers total for just a few hours swinging so far.
I am not doing bad at all.
Now I need to graduate from kindergarten on my learning curve, get through elementary, junior and high school and get into college.
What I understand now I will hopefully laugh at in a few weeks.
Can't wait but all in good time, I am not in a hurry.
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Nox 6" coil...the bomb!
I haven't been out for awhile because of the dry conditions but we got a little rain recently and yesterday I got my 6" Nox coil in the mail.
My back is wrenched and screwed up but I had to get out and try the thing for as long as I could last.
I am impressed.
In a small lawn I have been hitting over and over for over a year, where targets have become sparse and few and far between I came up with these coins.
This is a huge deal, they were all easy to find even though severely masked as are most targets around here.
I reset the Nox to factory specs out of my custom settings, Park 2, multi freak for awhile and it worked.
Eventually changed to 5 kHz and it worked.
Hunted in two tones for awhile and it worked well...the high tones stood out and the good ones really stood out from the false ones.
I dug mostly the more solid signals that didn't jump up and down a lot, I had several that were high numbers but dropped down to low a few times and these were iron, even in the lawns around here I have nails and bits and pieces of old iron pipes galore.
Eventually I switched to the horse shoe to check things and the false high tones switched over to just iron so I did that on most and quit digging iron.
The zincolns were pretty stable and ranged from the high teens to the low 20's, I dug a few 15's but they were old, smashed crown caps and I just avoided most of them after that.
The copper cents and the dime were a bit jumpy but if I moved the coil just right they stayed high in a pretty tight coin range and repeated from a 90 degree direction so they got dug.
Every coin was a surprise and a welcome sight when they popped up.
None were super deep but even shallow targets here can be masked completely so this coil is doing exactly what I hoped it would do, every site I go to can open up more because of this coil or has the possibility of doing that, anyway.
Coming from an F70, one of the most ergonomic detector on the planet, the rig with the big coil always felt a little out of balance to me, a little off and uncomfortable...I think shortening the rod a bit will help with that but I hadn't done that yet.
With this coil all became right with the world again, swinging was effortless, like there was no coil on the end of my rod at all.
This is the one for me, the right coil on the right tool that just might be the best so far for hunting in this strange place.
I don't know about depth yet but I assume it will get as deep as I need.
Because of the clay layer here not many targets hang out much further than 4-6" deep but there are a few areas with still mineralized but more of the better black dirt where I have found a few good targets past that up to the 7-8" level.
I have confidence I can probably hit that with this coil, maybe even deeper but time will tell.
I am much more concerned with unmasking abilities and that seems to be the big headline here, several times better than the standard coil, (it seems), but that is probably no surprise to fans of the snipers and I am the president of that club.
In a little bit I will attempt a short hunt again, this time in an area that I have been living at for the better part of 3 years.
The entrance to a park just up the road from my house...I walk through it every time I hunt this park, I have stayed there for hours trying to find more and it is my personal little laboratory, every new detector, coil or new setting gets a lot of time here and if something good ever turns up I learn and remember.
I have hit this site a million times and found a ton of great treasure but like that lawn nothing good has shown up for awhile.
I have been digging a lot of the trash signals there for a long time in an effort to clean up this place and unmask more but that is a never ending process.
Junk signals I dig have been pretty much junk so not many surprises there but I hope this new set up, and the right settings, might be able to squeeze out a few more good things without needing to dig tons of junk to unmask them.
We will see, but having just a small taste of what this combination is capable of doing fills me with hope and confidence.
I love it when a plan comes together.
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I still do not have many hours on this thing, here in the deep south I usually avoid hunting in my most common sites, public parks and lawns and curb strips though the dead heat of the summer.
I am not thrilled with the hot temps but it is more about the heat cooking the dirt into a concrete like structure and pretty much guaranteeing I will destroy any nice areas and grass digging holes.
Sometimes we get a little rain and that helps some but mostly it just stays hot and dry so I just tend to wait it out and look forward to my real hunting season that runs from actual fall to late spring.
In the three months I have owned this thing I would be surprised if I have even 10-15 hours on it so far.
That should change soon, we are still in the 90's and dry here but we will finally start to cool off a bit by the end of the month and when rain patterns normalize the dirt will become diggable again and I can really put some time on this thing and see if my investment was worth it.
With only a few hours on it so far I have been surprised, shocked and thrilled so I hope that is a trend that continues.
A little background about why I decided to get one, it wasn't the hype and I had no intentions of replacing my other detectors at all but a buddy got one and what I saw it do on a hunt shocked and surprised me.
We have really bad soil here, red dirt clay is mostly everywhere and if it is not on top it is still hiding a few inches below the black stuff.
Even in areas with deeper black soil it is all still very mineralized and causes us major problems.
On top of that there is a much bigger issue, iron...and ridiculous amounts of it infesting most every site I hunt especially if those sites are anywhere in or around the city, even the lawns and curb strips.
This is due to the geographical area we live in, the elements that exist in our dirt that enabled us to become huge in the iron and steel industry for over 100 years plus the history of the city and how most areas are built on sites where there older neighborhoods and buildings that were knocked down.
If you ever hunted in old home sites where you had to battle iron from large to small to to tiny to microscopic well, that is what we are up against here in close to 100% of our sites both public and private.
Depth is pitiful using most any detector of any brand, even if we can get deeper most targets past 5" or so have such skewed screwed up signals that it is hard to make sense of most of them.
We are used to that here, depth is what it is and we still manage to find a ton of great things limited as we might be but a much worse problem is the masking issues...it is very hard to explain how bad it is here.
For those of us that have learned to deal with the masking the rewards can be great and I have succeeded doing that somewhat using several of my detectors, specifically a couple of Tesoros and my F70.
Am I perfect at it...not on your life, it is an ongoing process and every little thing I learn is another tiny piece of the puzzle that has helped me be more successful here than I ever thought possible.
Still, there is so much more hiding here begging to be found and a lot of it can be way more shallow than you might believe especially if you are lucky enough to only have hunted in much more normal dirt.
We are always on the lookout for that one special tool, detector, coil, or setting that can make things easier around here for us to locate and notice good targets.
Do I believe there is a "magic" detector that can see all, find all, go super deep and identify all trash and iron while defeating all the masking issues and do everything perfectly in this strange place...no, but there sure could be something out there that might make our job easier and excel in one or more of those categories.
This thing could be the best at doing all this so far from what I have seen with just a limited time spent with it.
The jury is still out, I have yet to learn to understand it well, play with the bulk of the settings, put more than just a few hours on both coils especially that sniper but again, what I have seen and experienced so far has kinda shocked me.
Hype means nothing to me, what I see with my own eyes and experience with all the rest of my senses is everything to me.
I now am in a group of 3 of us that own these now, we might be seeing a couple more friends getting one eventually.
Between all of us we have seen what other detectors can do here, a couple of different Fishers, 4 different Tesoros, several Whites, a Deus, an E Trac, Xterras, a few AT Pros, an AT Max and a few others.
Most times after experiencing what it can do here for a short time it is the Equinox getting the call to duty now, I just can't believe this is hype because we ain't stupid or gullible.
We just all want to use the best possible tools that work for us.
It all started when a hunting buddy surprised me and got his hands on a Nox 800 and I went hunting with him at a public park site we had both hit so many times before along with uncounted others for many decades.
I was curious but still skeptical...what I saw on that hunt shocked and awed me and started me on this journey and this is where I am so far.
When things get back to normal around here, temps and soil conditions, I will continue on this journey and will probably share all my experiences here...it's kinda what I love to do.
Can't wait!
All of this was on another forum and you can't link to them here so I will copy and paste it all here to start.
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Buddy got a Nox 800...
PanheadDan got a new Equinox 800 yesterday.
He took it out in his backyard that he hit 100 times before and found a wheatie he missed fairly easily he says.
He sent me a small vid that he took of another really sweet sounding signal that he didn't dig but he will soon.
All the hype is just that to me...hype.
Now we will see if this thing will actually have any advantage in OUR location.
This mineralized red clay trash and massive iron infested place that has what we call devil dirt for a bunch of very good reasons.
Later today we are meeting at one of the oldest parks in the city we know with a huge amount of history and where we both have found some great treasure in the past.
Great targets are few and far between but a few are still there.
We will hit several areas we know of that still might have some good targets we missed and see if this thing can live up to that hype.
I will watch him closely an we will compare some signals with my F70 which seems to do pretty good around here.
If it does seem to work well I will wait till he is intently concentrating on a signal and sneak up behind him with a big rock.
If my plan goes well tomorrow I will be starting a new log about future hunts with MY new Equinox 800.
Stay tuned.
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In an area we have both hunted hard almost immediately after walking into this site and within 10-15 minutes he found not one but 2 silver Roosevelt dimes.
Nothing super deep but one was in a coin spill with a wheat and a memorial.
Like everything here there was some heavy masking going on or we probably would have found them before with the F70, an AT Pro and an AT Max.
My F70 could hit them easily but the signals were both jumpy.
I had the big Cors Cannon coil mounted and I changed it to the Sharpshooter right after because of the jumping and I discovered the coil was a bit loose attaching to the head unit.
Not saying this affected the signal but maybe, with the small Nel coil I still was getting jumpy behavior which is normal around here but the Nox seemed to zero in way better and the numbers seemed more stable.
I mean dead on if you hit the target just right.
He got a high tone nice warbling both along with a little lower tones but by circling he was able to get that constant highest tone to repeat consistently but from one direction only...but it was enough to decide to dig.
I don't know how this all works but I think he said he was in either 5 or 7 tones, or something like that.
It also seemed to deal with our intense iron problem very well which is huge.
I picked it up and swung it for a couple of minutes myself.
I like the tones, it is pretty light but not exactly the most ergonomic and balanced rig but not all that bad.
I could deal with it easily.
A smaller coil might even things out.
Pretty cool, maybe this thing can deal with our locations better than all the others we have used before.
More hunts and testing to do.
One of these might be in my future.
Not only does it work well but there about a million different settings and adjustments you can play with and I love the chance to do that kind of stuff most of all.
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First Nox hunt...this is crazy!
Haven't been out nearly enough this year, something always distracts me, I really don't like hunting in the heat much at all anymore, unless it rains around here the digging is just tough plus it is not easy to avoid wrecking up the grass in drought conditions.
I was happy with my detectors but a buddy got a Nox and I saw what it could do in my challenging devil dirt with the red clay, high mineralization and massive iron masking just about everything everywhere.
The hype I didn't care about, what I saw with my eyes did so I got one.
Now I guess I have to get out there more if only to learn the thing.
I have two friends with them now and neither really knows what they are doing yet but they were both shocked at what it could do here.
I have studied the manual and watched a ton of vids and it is still confusing, I barely know how to turn the thing on...still, I went out on my first hunt today.
Short, just a few hours to start to get acclimated and the heat is a killer but it rained so the digging was fine.
Spent a little time in a local park I can walk to where I found a lonely modern memorial cent but I hit two houses on my block that I have hunted continuously and much more than just often for like over 2 years now, it has been awhile since anything decent has popped up at either so I figure a good first test.
The 1920 wheat was found first in one lawn with factory settings Park 2.
The second what was found on my way back after I changed the settings a bit to cherry pick high tones just before I found those nickels at the other house.
I believe I was in Park 1, I disced out everything but a few numbers above and below 13 and changed it all to high tones then I knocked out the rest except for the high conductive stuff.
I chose well.
Both nickels were in the same hole with some iron in there too, numbers bounced a bit from 11-14 but repeated so I dug the hole.
Honestly I never expected to dig up a nickel let alone 2 and a war nickel and a buff together blew my mind.
Any one of these older coins would have made my day, to find them all on one hunt in lawns I scoured to death...and found them fairly easily too, again, mind blown.
I am good at getting around and dealing with my masking problems but none of these older coins ever showed up on my radar once and none were particularly deep, just well hidden.
I didn't feel like digging much trash either so I will throw in a pic of all the trash I dug today, which you might not believe.
Considering I know hardly anything about this thing and I could do this in our dirt with such limited knowledge and skill bodes well.
First hunt, found my first silver for the year plus more.
Wonder what I will be able to do in the future with more hours under my belt?
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Don't have a clue about the tones yet, navigating the main and sub menus and getting them to do what I want them to do is still hit and miss but I am excited to see what happens when I can.
Yesterday I just looked for small ranges of numbers that repeated and found these very masked older coins in very small front lawns and exact areas I can guarantee you I had gotten coils over from 5 other detectors.
Don't know why I didn't get any dig me indications from any of the others but on this one there was no mistake that I should open some holes.
Just finding one of these masked coins would have been astounding, to dig all four to me is like not ever playing golf but finding a magic driver that can get you a hole in one on every swing despite any lack of skill.
Everything we use or try here is aimed to try to unmask targets as well as possible and to penetrate deep as we can because it ain't normal in this place and both of those things are not easy to do...with any detector.
The massive iron we have hides so much and digging it all just to try to unmask the good stuff would be insane.
Depth we can get, at least up to 8 or 9 inches in some cases but almost every signal past 4-5" gets so skewed an screwed up that they are all but unrecognizable.
The one and its technology at first impression seems to handle the mineralization and masking problems and appears to be...different.
There are tons of great targets here that aren't real deep but have been missed by many for so many decades due to masking so this one may make that task easier.
Now we have to figure out how to penetrate a bit deeper than we ever could before if we can and see what else is hiding down there.
Even an extra inch or two can make a huge difference to us and open up a whole new world, if we can get even deeper well...that would be something.
It is all about not just getting signals but UNDERSTANDING signals here...as time goes on we will see if this tool can help us do that better as it appears to be doing.
Plus I am a jewelry hunter at heart...I wonder how successful I will be standing behind this one in that area.
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Gauntlet;2963976 said:Congrats on the new detector, and the finds.
However, I'm in MS, I see you're in 'bama, we had an exceptionally cold winter, below freezing cold, and for a bit of an extended period of time. I can't help but wonder if the freeze\thaw cycle hasn't played a major role in your finds in another beat-to-death situation.
Curious if you had another detector with you, and scanned with it prior to digging? That would have told you either you never got a coil over them, the freeze/thaw theory could have in fact made the difference, or perhaps even the amount of moisture in the ground having an effect.
ETA: Also, I'm sure this was another situation where having a new detector, and you stated:
Which would also indicate you would be digging more "iffy" signals than you would with an "old reliable" you knew in and out, and could have likely passed over these targets simply because you determined them to be junk, whereas with a new MD, you thought "well, I'll dig it just to see what it is".
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DIGGER27;2964051 said:Appreciate your input, I see where you are logically coming from and it is not lost on me but in this case not much of that is actually true.
We don't freeze here...ever.
Not even down 1/2 inch, never has anyway since I got into the hobby and late fall through winter into spring is our prime hunting time around here.
It gets cold from time to time, rarely, even into the 20's or the teens but it never stays around long enough to freeze the soil here in the deep south.
I do understand what you mean, though, I broke my Lesche once trying to chop and pry my way down into some frozen soil in an old park when I lived near Kansas City.
Loved the beautiful black soil...hated the winter weather.
Scanning the exact same spot with other detectors...positive I did several times with a Compadre, an F70 and a Mojave, even my Vaq had a go in one of those lawns.
Mostly my F70.
Several different coils too and many wildly different settings using my F70.
These are homes on the street where I live and they are tiny postage stamp sized lawns.
Not only did I visit each home a few dozen times after I got permission and pretty much grinded each one and hit them from several directions, (because the iron here is insane and hides most everything), but both homes were hit either once or twice as I walked to and from a big old park that is a block away from my house and where I spent a ton of time.
So I figure I hit those lawns about 50-100 times each doing that...maybe more.
I know about percentages and how we can miss coin and ring sized objects easily but where I found these coins are spots I definitely scanned using everything from sniper coils up to big DD's including a really big DD cannon coil on the F70.
Using both DD's and concentrics in dry, moist, and wet conditions.
Our dirt here in this state isn't great because of our geographic location, here in the city it is crazy bad because of the history of how this city was built up.
I just never got a peep on any of these, using this thing they were obvious dig me signals.
As far as digging those iffy signals because I am new with this thing...nope on that, too.
I do understand why we do this and on my second hunt I definitely dug a lot more junk and I will continue to do that in the foreseeable future because I do need to get a handle on target behavior of both good and bad targets but on this hunt I did very little of that.
The picture I posted up top was of all the junk I dug while I hunted and I mean all of it.
The big can piece was too big to be anything good but I dug it anyway in case it was masking something, the other stuff fooled me.
I got a lot more signals on this hunt and most I left in the ground because they were just too jumpy, didn't sound all that great to me, (not that I know what a great target exactly sounds like yet), or I skipped them for some other reason.
On this hunt I specifically went after only the highest percentage targets I passed over, the most solid ones, the ones that didn't jump around much at all trying to see if this thing could actually zero in on any good target with obvious tones and behavior that would trigger my digging instinct.
I expected nothing but I hoped to find just one decent coin in either of these lawns that would show me this thing was a smart investment to hunt in this dirt.
Even just one wheatie, any wheat cent would have made me happy.
Finding 4 of them was shocking, and those two nickels were a spill in the same hole in one lawn next to a sidewalk, an area I know I gridded and hit every way but Sunday more than one time.
At this point I think it was this technology that did the heavy lifting.
I could have just been lucky, I have had the gods smile down on me more than one time in my career and I am ever thankful, but this was more than just luck, I believe.
I opened 10 holes on this hunt, 1 coin was in 3 holes, the nickels were in another with that small rusty piece of wire in there with them and 6 were those other pieces of trash.
That's it.
I am all about numbers and percentages in this hobby, I understand them and what they mean and how they can affect the quality and volume of finds.
These numbers were way off, 10 holes and 5 good targets in areas I hunted so many times were just not normal no matter how you slice it.
Of course I need way more hunts and hours to gather a lot more data to actually get a real world sampling of my success with this thing vs my others but seeing what happened here I think this machine is actually capable of doing what we hoped it could do in our challenging dirt.
There are definite signs this machine is just better suited to hunt here or I am truly one of the luckiest people around right now, I sure wish this stupid state had lottery tickets if that is the case.
One more thing...
You might believe this is just all bull, I am crazy, (as anally logical as I actually am), or have clouded vision and I am just just fooling myself with wishful thinking that the money I spent on this thing was worth it even if it really isn't any better than using anything else around here.
I get that, I do.
What I am posting here sounds a little crazy to me, also.
But consider this...
A hunting buddy got one of these first and went out in his backyard and proceeded to dig up a couple of old wheats, one was unusually deep for here, and he had hit this yard and those areas about 100 times with both an AT Pro and an AT Max and a few different coils.
We hunted together at an old park that had to have been hunted countless times by every hunter in this city since detectors were invented, including both of us in the past.
In a small area I know I had been over before and he said he had too he found two silver dimes within 10 minutes.
That's when I started to pay attention, before I saw that happen not so much.
Then there us another hunting buddy that has been doing this around here longer than both of us other guys put together, since the early 90's.
He hunts everywhere but for several years he has specialized in knocking on doors and he is great at it.
He is a Whites guy and uses an XLT and a few others and he is good with them...great with them, actually.
He has shoe boxes filled with silver coins he has found in countless lawns he has hunted and from other public sites too.
For all he has found over the decades he can't remember more than a few that were any deeper than 5", an experience that for most around here is normal and has been like, forever.
It's not that we cant get past 5" it's just that the ground and the masking screws everything up real bad past the 5" mark except in the rarest of the rare spots that might have more normal acting dirt...and that really is a rare thing to find any.
He only recently got one of these things for one reason only...to hunt in the water, his detectors have been doing the job for him on land forever.
The first day he got his he went to a park he knows well and decided he got a broken unit.
It was sounding off on way to many signals and a huge amount if them were pinpointing at depths he had never seen before.
He dug nothing.
He thought it was falsing on everything, like I said, broke...he got a bad one.
It wasn't until he took it out a few more times in other sites and actually started digging targets did he realize it wasn't broke, it wasn't falsing but it was actually getting signals on more targets than he ever did with his other detectors and tons of them were indeed deeper than most anything he ever dug in his life around here.
When he took it to the beach and dug a nickel at 15+ inches that impressed him, when he returned and hunted in his usual spots and found more targets deeper here too he was kinda shocked.
The unmasking abilities he thinks he us seeing is very new to him, too.
He told me he put his other detectors away and he isn't really sure he will be pulling any of them out again...ever.
All of us are new with this thing and not great with them at all, all are learning and we are trying to help each other but each has experienced some very eye opening and surprising things since we started hunting with these tools.
Coincidence, maybe, luck, could be, but tell me how three separate hunters can have these kinds of crazy but extremely positive observations that would make us put away our other previously more than able tools and have such high hopes for the future with so little actual swing time?
Time will tell if we are just wishful thinkers, actually nuts or really on to something new and exciting here.
Sorry this got so long, just trying to put into words my current thinking.
I appear to be getting a lot more passionate about this tool a lot more quickly than I ever imagined.
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Originally Posted by WildDigger
Congrats! The Nox has impressed me as well. I just knew I had to get one and see for myself. It was so impressive 2 of my buddies that are die hard Garrett guys both got a Nox. LOL And both have been pleased by what it has shown them. GL&HH.
I am really enjoying it, the few hours I have swung it, anyway.
Is it perfect, no, but what detector is?
Way too many targets come in at that short range of mid level numbers.
I love the full 99 number range of my F70 so this is hard to get used to.
There might be a way to differentiate between good and bad targets in that mid range with some accuracy even if the signal isn't great but I have no idea how to do that yet if it is even possible.
It seems to deal with my widespread iron problem pretty well but I have not used it in a ton of different places so far.
There could be conditions where it will cause this thing to totally lie to me, miss or ignore great targets or make it go schizophrenic but that remains to be seen on future hunts in a myriad of different sites.
How is it on jewelry, gold of different shapes and sizes, broken rings or other open loop jewelry and especially chains?
Great I hope, or at least pretty well.
All kinds of other questions too but it is fun learning the answers.
I know it seems to like nickels and high conductive coins and seems to lock on pretty good to them in some challenging conditions.
How bad does it need to get to defeat this thing I don't know but the areas I searched so far are pretty normal and common around here and it seemed to do well.
If all I ever use this for is to cherry pick the high conductive non ferrous targets in sites I guess I could deal with that as long as I can bring other tools along to do the other tasks but I am thinking this won't be the case.
If it can't do it all it can probably do most of what I need it to do...and then there is that go into the water thing which none of my other detectors can deal with.
It is cool, it is different, it is finding me neat stuff pretty easily and others that hunt around here seem impressed with it too.
Tomorrow is hunt number three, I wonder what I will learn on that one?
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Bucket lister...been looking for this thing for over 6.5 years!
I should have found one of these long ago but for some reason I never did.
I found a seated dime, plenty of mercs and silver rosies, even a Barber quarter but a Barber dime always eluded me for some reason.
Until today.
Second hunt with the Nox, second silver for the year, second surprise on consecutive hunts...this coin triggered a big smile.
I am happy.
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Originally Posted by NCtoad
Congrats on the new NOX and the barber!! What I know about you from all your posts is that you'll love the nox...just so many tweaks!
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Ahh...a tweakers dream!
Way different than using my other detectors that I understand so well, I am still a little lost on understanding everything and all the settings but I am getting there.
My first hunt yesterday I messed with a few and found silver.
Today I was able to learn a few more, raised the disc, adjusted the tones and volume and eventually tried 50 tones which really sounded great to me and that's when the Barber popped up.
Those settings went into my user profile to use on the next hunt.
I can't say for sure because I never experienced it before but I think I heard that flutey silver sound all the Minelab guys always talk about.
More settings to play with and understand but two hunts, several masked coins and two silvers total for just a few hours swinging so far.
I am not doing bad at all.
Now I need to graduate from kindergarten on my learning curve, get through elementary, junior and high school and get into college.
What I understand now I will hopefully laugh at in a few weeks.
Can't wait but all in good time, I am not in a hurry.
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Nox 6" coil...the bomb!
I haven't been out for awhile because of the dry conditions but we got a little rain recently and yesterday I got my 6" Nox coil in the mail.
My back is wrenched and screwed up but I had to get out and try the thing for as long as I could last.
I am impressed.
In a small lawn I have been hitting over and over for over a year, where targets have become sparse and few and far between I came up with these coins.
This is a huge deal, they were all easy to find even though severely masked as are most targets around here.
I reset the Nox to factory specs out of my custom settings, Park 2, multi freak for awhile and it worked.
Eventually changed to 5 kHz and it worked.
Hunted in two tones for awhile and it worked well...the high tones stood out and the good ones really stood out from the false ones.
I dug mostly the more solid signals that didn't jump up and down a lot, I had several that were high numbers but dropped down to low a few times and these were iron, even in the lawns around here I have nails and bits and pieces of old iron pipes galore.
Eventually I switched to the horse shoe to check things and the false high tones switched over to just iron so I did that on most and quit digging iron.
The zincolns were pretty stable and ranged from the high teens to the low 20's, I dug a few 15's but they were old, smashed crown caps and I just avoided most of them after that.
The copper cents and the dime were a bit jumpy but if I moved the coil just right they stayed high in a pretty tight coin range and repeated from a 90 degree direction so they got dug.
Every coin was a surprise and a welcome sight when they popped up.
None were super deep but even shallow targets here can be masked completely so this coil is doing exactly what I hoped it would do, every site I go to can open up more because of this coil or has the possibility of doing that, anyway.
Coming from an F70, one of the most ergonomic detector on the planet, the rig with the big coil always felt a little out of balance to me, a little off and uncomfortable...I think shortening the rod a bit will help with that but I hadn't done that yet.
With this coil all became right with the world again, swinging was effortless, like there was no coil on the end of my rod at all.
This is the one for me, the right coil on the right tool that just might be the best so far for hunting in this strange place.
I don't know about depth yet but I assume it will get as deep as I need.
Because of the clay layer here not many targets hang out much further than 4-6" deep but there are a few areas with still mineralized but more of the better black dirt where I have found a few good targets past that up to the 7-8" level.
I have confidence I can probably hit that with this coil, maybe even deeper but time will tell.
I am much more concerned with unmasking abilities and that seems to be the big headline here, several times better than the standard coil, (it seems), but that is probably no surprise to fans of the snipers and I am the president of that club.
In a little bit I will attempt a short hunt again, this time in an area that I have been living at for the better part of 3 years.
The entrance to a park just up the road from my house...I walk through it every time I hunt this park, I have stayed there for hours trying to find more and it is my personal little laboratory, every new detector, coil or new setting gets a lot of time here and if something good ever turns up I learn and remember.
I have hit this site a million times and found a ton of great treasure but like that lawn nothing good has shown up for awhile.
I have been digging a lot of the trash signals there for a long time in an effort to clean up this place and unmask more but that is a never ending process.
Junk signals I dig have been pretty much junk so not many surprises there but I hope this new set up, and the right settings, might be able to squeeze out a few more good things without needing to dig tons of junk to unmask them.
We will see, but having just a small taste of what this combination is capable of doing fills me with hope and confidence.
I love it when a plan comes together.
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