Equinox Beach: Iron bias/Recovery

For those with the equinox, what iron bias and recovery settings are you using for the beach modes? I've been using default but I've been wondering if I should decrease the iron bias and recovery for deeper targets than what the default is on the 600.

*please note if you have the 600 or 800 as the numbers are different. Also defaults on both machines are different too.

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Nox600, CTX, CZ21, Excal II and White's DF with 920i stealthscoop...I live and hunt at the beach in Wilm NC

The defaults were intelligently set. On the wet sand, I've found that going lower than default on the recovery speed will cause it to get noisy, so any depth advantage will be lost with all the false signals to contend with.

I haven't tried the iron bias yet but I would assume going lower than default will make iron more difficult to ID. So if there isn't much iron around, lower the iron bias and go for it.

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Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/08/2018 11:14PM by Badger in NH.

Ran a number of tests this morning at the beach, which has very low mineralization (us east coast beach).

The air tests:

On the air tests, recovery speed definitely affected depth a lot (multiple inches from low to high). So the lower recovery speed you can get away with, the better in a clean area...but read below to see how it worked in real world setting...When I put iron nails next to my wifes wedding band, I could detect it on all recovery settings. It didn't seem to really affect it. Maybe if there was more targets it would of made a difference but I don't really detect places where there are more than 1 to 2 targets at a time.

On the air tests for the iron bias, a low iron bias definitely helped detect a small wedding band, especially when there was iron (nails) around it. In fact, the higher bias would of passed right over, especially when the ring was vertical (with no nails around it). So a lower iron bias seemed much better on the ring both with and without iron around it. Unless I start pulling out tons of rusty nails, I am keeping iron bias on 0. Oh, and zero iron bias still disc'd out the nails by themselves.

The beach tests:

As soon as I dropped recovery speed to 1 on the 600 (*2 on the 800), my machine went nuts on both the wet and dry sand. My sensitivity was on 23 at the time. I couldn't make a swing without tons of falsing or a long drawn out false. So when I put the sens down to say 18, the falsing would stop. This tells me that I can keep the low recovery but lose a significant amount of sensitivity which also effects depth. Seems like a double edge sword as you have to make a choice. Going to do some air test today to see which affects depth more - sensitivity or recovery speed. After my tests this morning I continued my hunt using default beach 1 except iron bias 0. So far it seems they really did do a good job on the default settings! However, one thing that is interesting is that the iron bias and recovery speed for the beach settings is lower on the 600 in the default settings, no clue why they did that, but out of the box the 600 would be better than the 800 on my beaches using beach setting 1 until the recovery was manually changed to match what the default is on the 600.

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Nox600, CTX, CZ21, Excal II and White's DF with 920i stealthscoop...I live and hunt at the beach in Wilm NC



Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 06/11/2018 01:54PM by adamBomb.

OK, Just did some air tests in the 100 degree heat. Too hot out there.

On both my small womens wedding band and quarter, the depth loss from Recover Speed 1 (*2 on the 800) to 3 (*6 on the 800) was about 2-3 inches for both beach 1 and beach 2. Settings Iron bias 0 and Sens 20. I also tested this on sens 15 and sens 25 with similar results. This seems inline with the 4-5 inch difference I am seeing on videos of the 800 when they go from 1-8.

On the small womens ring, for both beach 1 and 2, on sens 20, rec speed 2 (*4 on 800), iron bias 0, there was a 4-5 inch drop in depth from sensitivity 25 down to 15.

So what did I learn? The depth loss from going from recovery speed 1->2 (*2->4 on 800) is about 1-2 inches. Some of my tests showed the same depth and some showed 2 inches. So if recovery speed 2 (*4 on 800) keeps me from falsing I am not loosing much depth, especially if I can keep my sens up to 23+ which I can on my beaches. Its better than going to a lower recovery speed and lowering my sensitivity. This will be a game of cat and mouse for each environment - How low can you get the recovery speed while keeping the sens up

My final test was to air test the recovery speeds and iron bias when the ring was held sideways (thin side to the detector coil) to see how it affected thin gold. I did find a 2-3 inch difference when the iron bias jumped from 0-3 (*0-6 on 800). It seems that the iron bias does affect the depth on small gold. I didn't find a difference when holding the ring regular (where the coil could see the whole ring). I also did not find a difference when the recovery speed changed from iron bias 0-3 (*0-6 on 800) so it seemed the different recovery speeds didn't really affect the iron bias in any way.

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Nox600, CTX, CZ21, Excal II and White's DF with 920i stealthscoop...I live and hunt at the beach in Wilm NC



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/11/2018 05:54PM by adamBomb.

Recovery and sensitivity do seem to affect each other.... more so IN the salt water. Take the recovery up and you can increase the sensitivity. ....lower it and u need to lower the sensitivity as well. So....which is really driving the train?

dewcon4414 Wrote:
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> Recovery and sensitivity do seem to affect each ot
> her.... more so IN the salt water. Take the recov
> ery up and you can increase the sensitivity. ....l
> ower it and u need to lower the sensitivity as wel
> l. So....which is really driving the train?

Yep, its very interesting. I am going to keep doing tests but would love for someone who understands the technical side of how minelab designed the machine to chime in.

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Nox600, CTX, CZ21, Excal II and White's DF with 920i stealthscoop...I live and hunt at the beach in Wilm NC

To me sensitivity and recovery speed..... seem to be the ONLY real adjustments we can make in or near the water. Yes we can change from beach 1 to beach 2...... but even that is no more than a sensitivity adjustment. i found a couple of clicks of the sensitivity and i can get right back to the same chatter that beach 1 gives..... then what do you do..... increase the recovery to quiet it down. I think the one thing it all has is common is........ it works better with reduced chatter.... something air testing may not show. Me and a buddy tested a buried gold ring at 8" in the wet sand....... we found that i could be found just as easily with the machine running smooth. Running a lower recovery makes the targets sound longer..... so if you get into trash all those long sounding tones seem to run together........ a higher recovery sure makes it less mind numbing.