I was out with several folks digging farm fields looking for colonial items from one spot and CW items from another spot. This is what I found with a side by side with the Tesoro Tejon, XP Deus and Equinox 600.
All will find relics. We stayed close to each other and would call the other guy over to "check out this signal" before digging, to find out what the other machine would or would not do.
The Tejon is the hardest hitting, deepest machine. Excellent machine for finding the target in the hole. Deus also rocks when locating a target in the hole. The Equinox struggled to locate the target. I do not know why, but this was a repeatable effect. It's meter got "confused" and read various numbers even going into the negative range on a mid range target. Most of the targets were brass and lead. No silver coins were found on any of our sites.
Deus and Equinox were about equal in depth, again, with the Tejon going the deepest and giving the cleanest signal. On more than one occasion the Deus would just chirp, indicating it did see the target, but not enough to get the VDI to engage. On a couple targets the Equinox did not see the target at all but on a couple occasions it would also do a little chirp like the Deus to indicate it had seen the target.
Discrimination win goes to the Deus, as it had no issues telling hot rocks from aluminum from iron from good stuff. The Equinox's meter jumped around a lot. Both sites have some iron, but not a huge amount. The CW site has very little iron, compared to the colonial spot. The Tejon has a dual discrimination circuit, but takes no time to switch between them, but came in about the same as the Equinox, as it could not ID a hot rock as readily as the other machines, but it was no slouch.
With both the Equinox and the Deus, a large hand forged iron item might show as a high tone, but this is a known habit of both machines, however, we occasionally get a cannon ball on our colonial sites so you still want to dig it. Same with the Tejon.
Effective use of the coil: The Tejon with the 11 x 8 coil would yell out with a solid signal as soon as the edge of the loop passed over the target. The same thing happens with the Deus. The Equinox for unknown reasons would just chirp or squeak once the coil passed over the edge of the target, sometimes very faintly, and on occasion not at all, and only when you got within 4" of the center of the coil would you get a solid hit. Effectively, this made over half the coil useless. It also had trouble locating some of the brass targets while out of the hole! I can't figure that one out.
Now for settings. For the Deus, we used Deus Fast with the HF elliptical coil and the 31 hkz setting on version 5.2.
On the Equinox we used factory presets and used both Field 1 and Field 2.
The Tejon is an analog machine, so forget setting it like the others.
The best items were found by the Tejon, CW breastplate, minies and some others.
The Deus found a Virginia coat button, minies, buckles and buttons.
The 600 found some flat buttons, and misc lead. I think the finds were mostly a matter of which machine got over them first.
Just an observation.
All will find relics. We stayed close to each other and would call the other guy over to "check out this signal" before digging, to find out what the other machine would or would not do.
The Tejon is the hardest hitting, deepest machine. Excellent machine for finding the target in the hole. Deus also rocks when locating a target in the hole. The Equinox struggled to locate the target. I do not know why, but this was a repeatable effect. It's meter got "confused" and read various numbers even going into the negative range on a mid range target. Most of the targets were brass and lead. No silver coins were found on any of our sites.
Deus and Equinox were about equal in depth, again, with the Tejon going the deepest and giving the cleanest signal. On more than one occasion the Deus would just chirp, indicating it did see the target, but not enough to get the VDI to engage. On a couple targets the Equinox did not see the target at all but on a couple occasions it would also do a little chirp like the Deus to indicate it had seen the target.
Discrimination win goes to the Deus, as it had no issues telling hot rocks from aluminum from iron from good stuff. The Equinox's meter jumped around a lot. Both sites have some iron, but not a huge amount. The CW site has very little iron, compared to the colonial spot. The Tejon has a dual discrimination circuit, but takes no time to switch between them, but came in about the same as the Equinox, as it could not ID a hot rock as readily as the other machines, but it was no slouch.
With both the Equinox and the Deus, a large hand forged iron item might show as a high tone, but this is a known habit of both machines, however, we occasionally get a cannon ball on our colonial sites so you still want to dig it. Same with the Tejon.
Effective use of the coil: The Tejon with the 11 x 8 coil would yell out with a solid signal as soon as the edge of the loop passed over the target. The same thing happens with the Deus. The Equinox for unknown reasons would just chirp or squeak once the coil passed over the edge of the target, sometimes very faintly, and on occasion not at all, and only when you got within 4" of the center of the coil would you get a solid hit. Effectively, this made over half the coil useless. It also had trouble locating some of the brass targets while out of the hole! I can't figure that one out.
Now for settings. For the Deus, we used Deus Fast with the HF elliptical coil and the 31 hkz setting on version 5.2.
On the Equinox we used factory presets and used both Field 1 and Field 2.
The Tejon is an analog machine, so forget setting it like the others.
The best items were found by the Tejon, CW breastplate, minies and some others.
The Deus found a Virginia coat button, minies, buckles and buttons.
The 600 found some flat buttons, and misc lead. I think the finds were mostly a matter of which machine got over them first.
Just an observation.
Last edited:
Upvote
0
