EQUINOX for beach and water hunting

Now that EQUINOX pre-orders are starting to get to their owners, here are a few beach and water hunting tips to help you hit the sand running! The basics are covered by the Getting Started Guide and the online Instruction Manual, so I’ll just cut to the chase by sharing a few of my experiences using the EQUINOX 800 on the beach and in the water. I will start by saying this detector has a little of everything that I like about my favorite Minelab metal detectors. It’s waterproof, lightweight, easy-to-use, and most importantly, the Beach Mode and Multi-IQ technology works exceptionally well at salt-water beaches. 

On my travels, I have really put the EQUINOX to the test at a wide variety of sites and in a variety of conditions; from white sandy beaches with calm seas, to storm ravaged beaches with black sand and rough surf. Get used to looking at these conditions as Beach 1 and Beach 2 conditions, because the two pre-set Beach Modes are all you really need to use. That’s a testament to the EQUINOX design, as I tried my hardest to come up with a better combination of Detect Modes, but the two pre-set Beach Modes work so well. They have the settings I would recommend for beach hunters; including five tones that are able to be customized and a default sensitivity setting of 20 which can be adjusted up or down to suit the beach hunting conditions. 

The first thing I noticed after following the Quick Start and noise canceling, was that ground balancing was not necessary at any beach I used the EQUINOX at! This included the eroded Florida Treasure Coast beaches with black sand. The manual recommends Beach 2 for difficult beach or water hunting conditions, but I often ran the detector in Beach 1 in calm shallow water and even on the beach, over black sand, without the Beach Overload warning occurring. It’s good to know the EQUINOX can handle those types of conditions for people who like to use higher sensitivity settings. My advice is to always run in Beach 2 on the wet sand, near the water’s edge, when you have waves washing in over your search coil. Also, use Beach 2 on beaches with large quantities of wet seaweed washed ashore. Beach 2 Multi-IQ is better in saltwater, especially if you intend to raise the sensitivity level in calm water with very little wave action.

On the beach away from the water, stay in Beach 1 and raise your sensitivity to increase target depth. I often run with my sensitivity ‘maxed out’ in the dry sand. At heavily hunted tourist beaches, with plenty of competition for finds, you can sweep your search coil a little faster and still detect targets other metal detectors would not be able to detect. The gold jewelry cache (at left) was recovered, within a couple feet of each other, on an early morning tourist beach hunt. I doubt I would have even got to that part of the towel line if I was using a different metal detector searching slow-and-low.

Sweeping your search coil brisk-and-low is something you should try with the new EQUINOX at tourist beaches. You can cover prime jewelry hunting ground faster and get to the gold before the competition. The usual suspects: lead, aluminum foil, pull-tabs and nickels all sound very similar to gold using the EQUINOX in either Beach 1 or Beach 2. A few words of caution on the discrimination scale: the -9 to 0 ferrous rejection range is more than enough. Once you start to creep into the 1-10 discrimination range, 10 -karat gold is rejected quickly, along with thin gold chains. In the US, this means potentially editing out gold class rings! I would rather live with digging a few extra bottle caps and aluminum pull-tabs from trashy beach sites, than risk missing 10-karat gold jewelry. Once you learn the Target ID numbers for clad coins, ‘cherry picking’ targets is easy; you can leave the coins and just go for the gold at tourist beaches. I always prefer to memorize the numbers of undesirable targets rather than editing them out completely. 

Use the EQUINOX target IDs and tones to your advantage.  Once you get comfortable with the number readouts and target tones of common beach finds, you can have some fun with altering tone pitches and setting tone breaks. This really enhances Beach 1 and Beach 2 when you set them up to identify the specific targets 

you are searching for. Although you can sweep the search coil at a fast pace, if you want more accurate target IDs, you should ’pump the brakes’ and sweep your search coil a little slower. I still have a hard time getting my head around being able to search a little faster than I am used to. I am also losing track of metal detecting time and staying at the beach longer because the EQUINOX weighs much less than my CTX 3030.