All across the UK and Europe metal detectorists gather for rallies. Permission to detect hundreds (sometimes thousands) of acres of historic land is obtained by the event coordinators and groves of eager treasure hunters gather for a chance to make the find of a lifetime. England’s very own “Detectival” is among the largest detecting rallies in the world. This year Detectival was held in the quaint country setting of Oxfordshire between the medieval market towns of Burford and Charlbury. Seemingly overnight the countryside morphed into a buzzing (and beeping) tent city of more than 1500 attendees accompanied by every vendor under the sun. Knowing that Detectival would be the year’s biggest metal detecting event, Minelab took full advantage of the stage and literally dropped the world’s newest, lightest, fastest, waterproof, wireless multi-frequency metal detector onto the world... “Behold… The EQUINOX!!!”
The parachute wasn’t the only thing that hit the ground that day. When Minelab announced the price of the new EQUINOX series, there were more than a few jaws that hit the floor too! Is it too good to be true? How could Minelab possibly put all of those features into something that light? Furthermore, how could they get away with an expected retail price point of USD 899 for the flagship EQUINOX 800? Minelab has been saying they are going to “obsolete” all other single frequency VLF detectors, but if the EQUINOX actually does what it claims, it really WILL!
Even though, as I write this, the EQUINOX is still in the final stages of refining and tweaking, the performance is astonishing. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that a multi-frequency detector could be so fast without losing depth and stability?
The hunting conditions were tough. The finds seemed to be very random until a small Roman villa site was discovered that afternoon. A feeding frenzy of detectorists converged on the site and a few hours later, close to 100 Roman coins had been unearthed. The finds slowed to a crawl and when the crowd finally cleared, I saw an opportunity to put this new detector to the test in “hunted out ground”. To this day I know there’s more in there, but with my time at Detectival coming to an end, I knew I’d have to makedo with a few short hours of hunting. Luckily for me, that’s all I needed. The EQUINOX continues to impress with each refinement and I’m truly excited to see what the future holds with this amazing machine.
Written by: Brandon Neice
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