Is it just my EQUINOX? Or does everyone else’s......

....love rusty bottle caps?
Hey the more I use this machine the more I love it! However I’m getting fooled BAD by those rusty suckers! I’ve never had a machine before that at least didn’t bounce from high to low or give a scratchy tone. Now granted some bounce, but this evening when I was out for a hour I got fooled 3xs. I had 2 that bounced between 13-15, another was a solid hit on 13, thought for sure it was a nickel. Most of the time I’m running in multi frequency, park mode.

Thanks!



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/25/2019 01:30AM by Aaron.

I always run my Equinox in multifrequency. I've had the machine since February of last year, and have never had a problem with bottle caps.

Aaron Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> ....love rusty bottle caps?
> Hey the more I use this machine the more I love it
> ! However I’m getting fooled BAD by those rusty su
> ckers! I’ve never had a machine before that at lea
> st didn’t bounce from high to low or give a scratc
> hy tone. Now granted some bounce, but this evening
> when I was out for a hour I got fooled 3xs. I had
> 2 that bounced between 13-15, another was a solid
> hit on 13, thought for sure it was a nickel. What
> am I not doing right?
>
> Thanks!


Well,
Bottlecaps do give tone. A bit compromised though, some sound nicer than others,

A few tips.
Move coil back and move coil forward. Does target drop out or tone get more compromised.
Depth, bottlecaps maybe more shallow excluding site with fill dirt. Or dirt moved around npby heavy equipment.
One can toggle to 5 kHz on the 12-17 reading targets (where a lot of bottlecaps come in) and if the ID shoots up into high 20s or 30s ID good chance of bottlecap.
I should warn you though there are some modern trash masking scenarios where the above could happen.
There are a few videos out there showing some tips for identying bottlecaps.

Now the above as far as switching freq can be done hunting soil not salt beach since you are stuck in mulit freq.
Here’s a good video by member Abenson here using beach mode (multi freq only) detect mode in showing how to distinguish bottlecaps.
[m.youtube.com]



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/25/2019 01:42AM by tnsharpshooter.

BOTTLE CAPS - AKA - Crown Corks (in the UK) are the Devil’s work. Their combination of complex alloyed steel, corrosion and a lovely round shape call a seductive song to ID systems in metal detectors. Every device’s secret code for ID’ing them is different.

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold

Thanks guys.

Tnsharpshooter, nice video thanks. Only thing is though he’s talking about beach hunting, there’s no minerals just sand. However I will give his advice a try....

TARSACCI - “Digging deeper, BEHIND the competition!”
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The Nox's love rusty bottle caps and rusty flat washers. I no longer have a Nox due to that. I tried all the tips and tricks on You Tube and none seemed to help me. I just couldn't not dig them due to being afraid of passing up a good target.

Machines using a DD coil will be tricked by bottle caps, some more than others.

Here's some of what I found and wrote about in a Review of the Equinox 600 on this forum last year:

Part 3

Recognising iron

As alluded to above the Equinox isn’t totally accurate about discovering the ferrous nature of ferrous targets. Having said that, it is adept on short or no grass farm fields where it does ‘null and blip’ on a lot of old nails and other smaller than finger size very rusted pieces of metal. It’s almost ‘E Trac like’ here in the manner of how it does this. Often, it will register ‘a hit’ and by the time you re-sweep no signal ensues. But, many ferrous hits will register with an audio - high and/or low tones and then blank out. This facet of its operation is therefore good and easy to understand. Completely rusted iron is quite different from only partially rusted iron, because the former does not conduct electricity, so it does not behave like a ferrous metal. It is more like highly mineralised rocks (hot rocks)

So, depending on how you have set up the first quarter of left hand side of the Target ID scale can determine how much iron will sound off without ever making any adjustments to Iron Bias. Setting a high Iron Bias will quieten most iron sounds but then many of us do actually ‘like to’ hear the ferrous reporting as we can ‘gauge’ the site’s potential by the amount of ferrous heard.
So what happens when the Equinox 600 meets an iron target that it can’t correctly classify? Quite a few things occur actually. The Target ID’s will show ‘positive’ e.g. 15/16 for a beer bottle top, or even higher for large round ‘cigar’ shape pieces.

The first thing that should be done is to switch to All Metal, scan and listen and watch for jumping target ID numbers. If a target still ‘sounds & looks good’, then next thing is to swivel your feet and come at it from another direction. It might ‘null out’ or blank momentarily? It might not? You can also ‘manipulate’ the coil around the target and hope for a nulling at some stage.
The AT Max is very good at this.
The audio can sound ‘broad’ and wider than coin size and more often than not will drop down in tone on a Right to Left sweep. This is quite dramatic. You don’t have to be a trained musician to be able to hear this nuance. It can sound like ‘a bong’ (think Garrett’s bell tone here but not quite so dramatic) and is often a longer detection with a long decay time.
This is perhaps the best give away of an iron target. If you change to a single frequency to double check the target as some have said checking in 10kHz will cause the TID’s to increase in an erratic fashion?
It’s true that will happen but it won’t happen all the time due to the many different types of bottle caps out there on the thousands of different products available all around the world and how decomposed they are? In 5kHz in particular what you might hear is a type of ‘sonar’ sound (think submarine here) and this sounds high in pitch, slightly extended with an echo in the tail off. It’s very distinctive and in my opinion is the best assist.
However, the overload function will not kick in or be of any use here unless you happen to be working in Beach Modes inland which is perfectly feasible. Even then I don’t know if it would trigger the Overload on large metal? Another option is to change Tones: 1 or 2 Tones might be best at determining whether its iron or not? In my opinion, they missed another trick here and instead of having 1, 2 and 5 tones, it would have been a better detector had they set 3 and 4 tone options as per X-Terra and dispensed with the excessive 5 tones: we’ve seen X-Terra is better at recognising difficult ferrous pieces.

The Equinox has a hard time with bottle caps. No doubt about it. So terrible at it that I will not take the Equinox into the dry sand of a beach. I don't want to spend time anylizing targets by switching frequencies and circling. Hell...I could just scoop the sucker up faster than that.. The Sovereign can blow through a bottle cap infestation and I might scoop one.

Wet sand is another story. Way less trash and the Equinox shines brightly.

I like taking one detector to a beach and hunt where conditions demand. Water....Wet....or Dry. Still waiting on that detector. The Excal is probably the closest, but way too heavy, fragile, and quite frankly just a pain the butt with hard wired headphones that suck and a hard wired coil that can't be changed.


Bottle caps and pinpointing are definitely two things where the Equinox gets left behind.

You have to remember when comparing it to other machines that these fast machines are using quick recovery compared to those other slow machine that ID better.
You will always give or take depending on machine used you need to just find the one that works in your situation.

Some of those caps are rough but I don't ever dig them on land, and I have been in some places with my Nox where the OLD crown style caps are thrown on top of the ground by the dozens. An F75 or T2 is worthless at those places and I didn't dig a single one with the Nox. Just coins. At the beach, the newer style caps seem to give the most trouble. I think because they are a different alloy than the older ones.

As for pinpointing...the only time I had trouble with that, was when using the wireless headphones. When using wired headphones, it is spot on. I was surprised at how much off it actually is...I had used the Nox to mark my test garden spots with golf tees with the wireless headphones. Then came outside with it unplugged several weeks later (using just the speaker) and was like...man, I was way off when I marked these things. When out in the field with wired headphones, I have no trouble pinpointing. When I would use the wireless headphones, it was guaranteed that I'd miss the target by just enough for it to be in the sidewall of my small holes that I dig. If I dug a bigger hole, it was no problem, but with the normal size hole that I dig...almost every time, it would be in the sidewall with the wireless phones. I don't even use them for detecting anymore but they are great for syncing to your phone and watching YouTube vids at work on break.

That surprised Me as Explorer/Etrac hate 'Steel crown' bottlecaps.
As a matter of fact Minelab seems to be only DD coiled machines that don't love them?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/25/2019 02:31PM by Harold,ILL..

My White's V3i easily IDs bottle caps. In 3 frequency pinpoint mode, if the dominant frequency is 22.5, then it's a bottlecap. This method is fast and reliable. One of the main reasons I sold my Equinox and went back to the V3i.

"X-Terra" terrific ID'ing bottle tops and the "Equinox" is a derivative of that so that's why I can't understand why the Nox is so poor at ID'ing BT's.

Aaron.... sometimes the key is you see the digit 15 pop up and a lot of bounce in the high digits. Sometimes you can use the heal of the coil to make it give you Meg digits....but really it don’t take long to learn um. Notice on most of the forums that’s not a question much any more. Also....corona and bud is putting copper in theirs....ugh

Daniel, I didn’t bring up the issue of pinpointing however you’ve got me thinking. I’ve only used the Bluetooth phones w the Equinox since I got it and my pinpointing has really been off,,, especially in the water! Hmm,,,, time to switch back to the regular phones. Thx

Dew, yes I realize the rusty caps bounce, ALOT. Note what I said in my post, I’m getting a lot of these suckers that don’t bounce, AT ALL. I’m getting some that hit dead nuts on 13, that’s supposed to be a nickel!

I can even take the rusty crown cap and wave it in front of the coil, IT STILL READS AND SOUNDS GOOD.

Usually once you can rusty stuff out of the ground it either sounds like junk or doesn’t sound at all.

IDK man, I find this very interesting we have Equinox guys like me who definitely have a problem rusty crowns and those who definitely don’t.....

MINELAB you listening???

TARSACCI - “Digging deeper, BEHIND the competition!”
[forums.tarsaccisales.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/26/2019 12:24AM by Aaron.

Aaron...…… continue to keep Iron Bias on '0'; yet, try the 'wrist-snap' (rapid velocity/coil whip) over the target...…. and see if it THEN ID-splatters.

NASA-Tom Wrote:
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>
> try the 'wrist-snap' (rapid velocity/coil whip) ov
> er the target...…. and see if it THEN ID-splatters
> .

Yes. For any detectors that have a weakness for bottle caps (more-pronounced in certain soil types and moistures) : A temporary momentary faster swing clip, over the suspected target, will often time give it away. If it's a conductive target, the tone will stay the same or improve. If it's a cap, it starts to break up. This was expecially pronounce phenomenon with the early 6000d and 6db.

Of course this assumes you're not dealing with close-by-targets that might mask it, with a faster clip. But with some practice, and criss-crossing, the varying of the speed swing does start to give a tell-tale difference when dealing with crown-caps.

Yes, agreed. I recall using the method of the wrist snap and quite effectively w the CZ’s.

However, again as I stated earlier I’m not getting even the slightest clue when it hits on 13 that it’s iron.

I’ll give the wrist snap method a chance though.

Thanks guys

TARSACCI - “Digging deeper, BEHIND the competition!”
[forums.tarsaccisales.com]

Not only the wrist snap but the iron bias at 0. I think running it at or near 0 helps me to hear more nuances. Especially combined with 50 tones. If you run it with less tones and higher iron bias, then I think the Equinox "sees" more of the non steel material of the caps while knocking out the steel part...thus giving a more confident lock on them. With iron bias filter off, then it reports both steel and the non steel, and smears/spatters the signal...in which 50 tones helps to hear.

Daniel Tn Wrote:
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> Not only the wrist snap but the iron bias at 0....

Not sure about the nox 800, but for other machines I've had, I do not trust their settings that would help alleviate this. For example, the XLT had a "bottle cap reject" setting. To make bottle caps more tell-tale to be able to reject them. But in my opinion, that "dumbed down" the machine. And muffled other-wise crisp sounds, in the effort to make caps more pronounced.

Instead, I would rely on playing with swing speed over suspected caps.

Tom in CA -- It's not a setting to alleviate bottlecaps. The iron bias setting is turned off when set at 0...meaning at 0 is without that filter applied. When it is turned on and then the number bumped up, I find that it makes the copper and zinc stand out that is in the bottlecap. One thing I do is to run it without any disc and then run 50 tone...that may be what is letting me hear the splatter/spatter of both the steel and copper/zinc. I don't really know but those are some common things I notice I do differently than the people that seem to struggle with digging the caps and iron.

I think the way Iron wraps to the second bin really threw people. We have been spoiled in a way with most machine wrapping them to the higher digits making them easier to id. like you Daniel.... i found 50 tones AM and 2 IB makes the shallow ones stand out. Its the deep ones that hit a good 10 and seem to have NO iron tendency that can throw me. BUT there is a good chance id be digging those on the beach anyway no matter the machine. Now..... in the water things change..... sensitivity is reduced with beach 2 and the salt water... i rarely dig a bottle cap out there.

As far as 'Coin hunting' why not just use a Etrac or CZ that will ignore them or break them up own their own without any tricks or special set-up?
Because if You get in a trashy 'old' park those 'steel crown' ones will drive You nuts. Relic hunters don't realise it. Now if You need a beach machine I could see dealing with it if You don't want to pay out the cash for a CTX, CZ21, or don't like the weight balance of them.
Heck even My Golden uMax is great at breaking them up even in 0 disc.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/26/2019 03:17PM by Harold,ILL..