RavRad
Active member
PART 1:
So, I’ve hit about 50 hours in with the Legend, and thought I’d document my thoughts on the detector. I haven’t detected before getting the Legend since May of 2021 due to my heart exploding and surgery, so I’ll try to separate the romance of having a detector in my hand again from the reality of the machine’s performance. For context, I’ve used most new machines the past 10 years for at least 50 hours except for the Nokta Makro line, and dedicated gold PI machines. I had a Simplex that my brother bought me for some odd reason right after it was released that I didn’t like at all, used once and sold it. I’ve got about an hour to two on a brackish water beach with the Legend, so I’ll talk about that briefly but don’t feel like I have enough time to make an educated opinion on beach performance. I went into this Legend purchase thinking I wouldn’t like it, as I had some mental block against Nokta Makro because of some other forum drama when they first released the Racer, and I guess I just had some negative cloud in my mind when it came to Nokta Makro products.
Unboxing: Packaging was great, arrived intact even though the shipper looked like they played street hockey with the shipment. Always nice to have swag in the box, so was nice to see the hat. I also appreciated the large well laid out manual. I know updatable metal detectors will often find the initial manual out of date, but still a nice gesture.
Legend Hardware: Initial impression was that the Legend is very well built, solid, and just instills confidence. For contrast, when I unboxed and assembled my Equinox, I remember thinking “What the hell Bobby?” as it creaked and groaned and noodled around swinging it. The Legend had none of that except when I extended everything out since I’m 6’4”. At that point, it had a tiny bit of popping feeling in the middle shaft area, but I’ve since got a long middle rod that fixed that and let me through the coil way out there. Overall, I was surprised about how well it felt swinging it. I recall that I didn’t like swinging the Simplex, it felt heavier than its weight and the balance point felt wonky for me, but I had none of that with the Legend. Overall, it feels great in the hand, the build feels great, and I’m just very impressed overall with the fit and finish at the price point. I do dislike that the buttons don’t have any visual indicators of what they are that you can see from a distance, but I’ll be fixing that this weekend. I’m going to paint the lines on each button, and then seal them with some UV resin. I only used the stock headphones once, they were nice but I’m an earbud guy and have a couple different pairs of APTX-LL earbuds. I switched over to them, they paired no problem.
Legend Software: I figured I’d have a section about the software. Even at 50 hours it still hasn’t become second nature for me. One thing I encounter every time out is that when you change settings, it doesn’t time out back to the main detecting screen, and I’m a hard head I guess in that I always forget to manually back out of the settings screen. I wish and suggested to Dilek that they make some kind of time-out, where after 5-10 seconds of not touching anything it goes back to the detecting menu. Other than that no real issues beyond learning a new layout, everything seems to be logically laid out. Beyond the time out feature, I wish they’d add a feature where audio would pump out both the detectors speaker and the headphones. I film every single hunt and every single dig as a live dig, sometimes to post videos and mostly to go back and look at my own digs and take notes on how the detector responded, track VDIs of targets into spreadsheets, etc. So it would be nice to have that feature if they could do it. I do like that you don’t have to put the detector in bluetooth pairing mode to grab a headset, which I’m not sure how they’re doing it and none of my other devices can do it. It even instantly connected to a pair of APTX-LL earbuds that I could never get the Equinox to pair to, so that was nice. Updating to firmware 1.05 was easy, the only issue I ran into was I initially couldn't get the detector to update. Turns out, after installing the update utility, even though it doesn't prompt you like some software you have to restart your computer. After the restart it was easy.
Test Garden: Some background on the test garden. Over the past 8 years since buying my house in 2014, my test garden has grown to take over my ¾ acre back yard. I’m up to 43 different tests that try to replicate either things I’ve seen in the wild, or from live digs I’ve seen on video on YouTube. I had to print and laminate a Google Earth printout of my backyard to keep track of them all, and so I can use white board markers to easily mark when I drop a new one. If you’re in Maryland and have a new detector you want to run through the paces, please stop by and have at it.
I ran the Legend through the garden, basically comparing it to the Equinox which is my highest performing detector in the garden with a VDI. The Legend was able to hit every target the Equinox could hit but 2, and these were silver dimes next to square nails. After watching some videos, I decided to drop the iron break point to 7, and the Legend was hitting both of the two it initially missed, so it’s severely down averaging those small silvers next to iron. In the depth department it did great, matched the Equinox target for target. It also missed all the deep targets that the Equinox also missed, and so far only one detector has hit. I have some really deep silver dive and silver quarter targets that only the DeepTech Vista X can hit, but that machine can hit a BB down 10”, it’s freakishly deep. The F75+ in boost mode can just barely hit my super deep silver quarter, but it’s flaky and I never use boost mode in the wild and don’t really count it.
One area where the Legend excelled in over the Equinox was ID’ing junk and not falsing. I have the right corner of my backyard set up with a ton of square nails, and I use that to run detectors through to check falsing. With the Equinox in F2, I could adjust most of the falsing out at the expense of sacrificing some really hard 3d iron test targets. The Legend in its current state cruises through that section with nothing but iron grunts. A large portion of my detecting time in some of the sites I’ve hunted is spent investigating false signals, so I appreciated that.
Another area the Legend impressed me was with the ferrous/non-ferrous meter thingy, so far in my tests if that thing even registers a bar toward ferrous it’s junk. Both in the garden and it real hunts, that has proven itself over and over. I made it a point to dig everything until at least 50 hours, but now I’m pretty confident in skipping anything that at least throws a bar towards the ferrous. Who knows though, I’m always tempted to dig solid repeatable signals that don’t feel big, so I’ll probably keep digging anything solid and repeatable. More exercise to keep my butt looking sexy for the Mrs. RavRad.
I did have one issue I’ll point out, which is I found sometimes changing through modes that when I came back a target that was ringing up as a certain VDI was now ringing up as a totally different VDI. The only way I found to fix it was to restart the detector. I’m guessing it’s a bug, I haven’t seen anyone else talking about it so maybe it was some user error or menu screw up I did without realizing it, but it happened to me a couple times. Now I keep a silver quarter in my pouch to check when out in the field, so that I can check and if it happens to reset. I’ll keep an eye on this one, and will probably go back to the garden and catch it on video to send to Nokta Makro to see what they think.
So, I’ve hit about 50 hours in with the Legend, and thought I’d document my thoughts on the detector. I haven’t detected before getting the Legend since May of 2021 due to my heart exploding and surgery, so I’ll try to separate the romance of having a detector in my hand again from the reality of the machine’s performance. For context, I’ve used most new machines the past 10 years for at least 50 hours except for the Nokta Makro line, and dedicated gold PI machines. I had a Simplex that my brother bought me for some odd reason right after it was released that I didn’t like at all, used once and sold it. I’ve got about an hour to two on a brackish water beach with the Legend, so I’ll talk about that briefly but don’t feel like I have enough time to make an educated opinion on beach performance. I went into this Legend purchase thinking I wouldn’t like it, as I had some mental block against Nokta Makro because of some other forum drama when they first released the Racer, and I guess I just had some negative cloud in my mind when it came to Nokta Makro products.
Unboxing: Packaging was great, arrived intact even though the shipper looked like they played street hockey with the shipment. Always nice to have swag in the box, so was nice to see the hat. I also appreciated the large well laid out manual. I know updatable metal detectors will often find the initial manual out of date, but still a nice gesture.
Legend Hardware: Initial impression was that the Legend is very well built, solid, and just instills confidence. For contrast, when I unboxed and assembled my Equinox, I remember thinking “What the hell Bobby?” as it creaked and groaned and noodled around swinging it. The Legend had none of that except when I extended everything out since I’m 6’4”. At that point, it had a tiny bit of popping feeling in the middle shaft area, but I’ve since got a long middle rod that fixed that and let me through the coil way out there. Overall, I was surprised about how well it felt swinging it. I recall that I didn’t like swinging the Simplex, it felt heavier than its weight and the balance point felt wonky for me, but I had none of that with the Legend. Overall, it feels great in the hand, the build feels great, and I’m just very impressed overall with the fit and finish at the price point. I do dislike that the buttons don’t have any visual indicators of what they are that you can see from a distance, but I’ll be fixing that this weekend. I’m going to paint the lines on each button, and then seal them with some UV resin. I only used the stock headphones once, they were nice but I’m an earbud guy and have a couple different pairs of APTX-LL earbuds. I switched over to them, they paired no problem.
Legend Software: I figured I’d have a section about the software. Even at 50 hours it still hasn’t become second nature for me. One thing I encounter every time out is that when you change settings, it doesn’t time out back to the main detecting screen, and I’m a hard head I guess in that I always forget to manually back out of the settings screen. I wish and suggested to Dilek that they make some kind of time-out, where after 5-10 seconds of not touching anything it goes back to the detecting menu. Other than that no real issues beyond learning a new layout, everything seems to be logically laid out. Beyond the time out feature, I wish they’d add a feature where audio would pump out both the detectors speaker and the headphones. I film every single hunt and every single dig as a live dig, sometimes to post videos and mostly to go back and look at my own digs and take notes on how the detector responded, track VDIs of targets into spreadsheets, etc. So it would be nice to have that feature if they could do it. I do like that you don’t have to put the detector in bluetooth pairing mode to grab a headset, which I’m not sure how they’re doing it and none of my other devices can do it. It even instantly connected to a pair of APTX-LL earbuds that I could never get the Equinox to pair to, so that was nice. Updating to firmware 1.05 was easy, the only issue I ran into was I initially couldn't get the detector to update. Turns out, after installing the update utility, even though it doesn't prompt you like some software you have to restart your computer. After the restart it was easy.
Test Garden: Some background on the test garden. Over the past 8 years since buying my house in 2014, my test garden has grown to take over my ¾ acre back yard. I’m up to 43 different tests that try to replicate either things I’ve seen in the wild, or from live digs I’ve seen on video on YouTube. I had to print and laminate a Google Earth printout of my backyard to keep track of them all, and so I can use white board markers to easily mark when I drop a new one. If you’re in Maryland and have a new detector you want to run through the paces, please stop by and have at it.
I ran the Legend through the garden, basically comparing it to the Equinox which is my highest performing detector in the garden with a VDI. The Legend was able to hit every target the Equinox could hit but 2, and these were silver dimes next to square nails. After watching some videos, I decided to drop the iron break point to 7, and the Legend was hitting both of the two it initially missed, so it’s severely down averaging those small silvers next to iron. In the depth department it did great, matched the Equinox target for target. It also missed all the deep targets that the Equinox also missed, and so far only one detector has hit. I have some really deep silver dive and silver quarter targets that only the DeepTech Vista X can hit, but that machine can hit a BB down 10”, it’s freakishly deep. The F75+ in boost mode can just barely hit my super deep silver quarter, but it’s flaky and I never use boost mode in the wild and don’t really count it.
One area where the Legend excelled in over the Equinox was ID’ing junk and not falsing. I have the right corner of my backyard set up with a ton of square nails, and I use that to run detectors through to check falsing. With the Equinox in F2, I could adjust most of the falsing out at the expense of sacrificing some really hard 3d iron test targets. The Legend in its current state cruises through that section with nothing but iron grunts. A large portion of my detecting time in some of the sites I’ve hunted is spent investigating false signals, so I appreciated that.
Another area the Legend impressed me was with the ferrous/non-ferrous meter thingy, so far in my tests if that thing even registers a bar toward ferrous it’s junk. Both in the garden and it real hunts, that has proven itself over and over. I made it a point to dig everything until at least 50 hours, but now I’m pretty confident in skipping anything that at least throws a bar towards the ferrous. Who knows though, I’m always tempted to dig solid repeatable signals that don’t feel big, so I’ll probably keep digging anything solid and repeatable. More exercise to keep my butt looking sexy for the Mrs. RavRad.
I did have one issue I’ll point out, which is I found sometimes changing through modes that when I came back a target that was ringing up as a certain VDI was now ringing up as a totally different VDI. The only way I found to fix it was to restart the detector. I’m guessing it’s a bug, I haven’t seen anyone else talking about it so maybe it was some user error or menu screw up I did without realizing it, but it happened to me a couple times. Now I keep a silver quarter in my pouch to check when out in the field, so that I can check and if it happens to reset. I’ll keep an eye on this one, and will probably go back to the garden and catch it on video to send to Nokta Makro to see what they think.
