It was another nice weekend here in Utah, 44 sunny and no wind. So Saturday I headed out to one of my favorite 1850's Military sites with the Equinox 800 11" coil and the Vanquish 540 V12 coil. Find highlights were 2 carbine sling hooks, 2 kepi hat buttons, Eagle I coat button, Eagle A cuff button and a Great Coat cuff button. There's other stuff in the picture if you're interested.

I spent about 7 hours in the field and 3 of those were comparing the Vanquish and Equinox on various signals. I stated in one of my earlier posts that the Equinox was a good 3 inches deeper than the Vanquish. That of course is going to depend on the size of the target. The larger the target the greater the spread. But after this latest round of comparisons I though I better define the depth difference better. Let me first state that this is in Utah soil which for the most part is mineralized and has a high alkaline content. So mild soil may be different. First observation is that if you buy the Equinox and never leave the stock programs, you just as well save your money and stick with the Vanquish. Unless you need waterproof. Stock Park 1 on the Equinox and Coin mode on the Vanquish are almost identical in performance. Second observation is that if you can get away with reckless digging like at a beach, farmers field or construction site. You can also probably just stick with the Vanquish. But if you are a park or manicured lawn digger you would be better off with the Equinox.

Now let me explain. I like to change the stock programs on the Equinox and was switching stuff up the day I got it. Basically I push it to the limits by adjusting recovery speed, sensitivity, iron bias, etc. When you do this with the Equinox you can and do get better performance over the Vanquish. So with the Equinox adjusted and ground balanced for optimal performance at the site, this is what I noticed. Horse shoe was on with both machines. The Equinox and Vanquish give rock solid ID down to about the 6" level on small low conductors like small pewter buttons. After that the Vanquish target ID and signal get choppy and/or you get a lot of negative numbers, which makes it hard to tell deep iron from a good target. This is also true on bigger targets like bullets although they are neck in neck down to about 8". Example: on one bullet that ended up being 11" deep and was initially located with the Equinox.. Target ID was solid on the Equinox at 19-20 no negative numbers. The Vanquish on the other hand had to be directly centered over the target to even get it in the first place. Took me about 6 sweeps just to get centered. Once I was center the Vanquish was mostly showing negative numbers with an 19 or 20 every third sweep. Hence why I say if you can afford reckless digging you can still dig iffy signals and even if it is iron it's no loss. But if you're digging in a park for deep silver. I would want to be more sure of what I was digging and you can't do that with the Vanquish.

Another observation in iron. I got into an area that had quite a bit of iron. The Equinox got 2 good signals close together in this iron patch. One read at 9 the other at 12. With the Vanquish I couldn't separate the targets from the iron, it was just a jumble of positive and negative numbers. The targets both turned out to be small pieces of camp lead.

So anyway I'm really impressed with the Vanquish, It's a great backup detector or loaner for friends and family. I fell like I could take it on all but my most challenging sites and do pretty good with it.

Andrew

XP Deus 2-Minelab Manticore, Minelab GPX 6000