Today I had a 6 hour hunt at the beach with my Equinox 600 (about 10 hours total so far since buying it) and I must say it was the least fun and most frustrating experience I've ever had with a detector.
First of all, the pinpointing was atrocious. Trying to get the lines to meet at the top -- with the sound going up and down, annoyingly -- is like trying to nail a piece of Jello to a tree. Maybe I'm just not used to it yet, but it's bad so far.
I did the 90-degree angle technique exactly as stated in the manual and there were some targets that were slightly off-center, causing me to dig a huge hole unnecessarily.
The next thing that bugged me was how low and faint the tones sound. Everything sounds like an iffy, garbage target unless it's ringing in 30+, even with max tone volume. I guess I was used to the bell sounds on my Garrett, but my god...the targets just don't sound crisp. On my old ACE, you'd swipe the coil over and it would make a loud BING, and then go silent off to the side of the target. It was unmistakable where the target was located. Right under the coil. With the Equinox, it makes these wimpy tones and often there is some ambiguity as to where the target is located. It's like in some cases you can only narrow it down to a zone around the coil.
Finally, I dug an insane amount of
deep trash today. Giant holes that were exhausting to dig. My pockets were full of pull tabs, beaver tails, ring pulls, and about $3 in clad. Digging mid-tone trash doesn't bother me, but these targets were crazy deep. One target I remember: I dug a giant crater between 12"-15" deep chasing a 30 signal, and I reached a point in the sand that felt like rock and couldn't keep digging further. Lifted the coil up and it appeared to be a small target, but the pinpointer kept saying it was in the center of the crater. Since I didn't have a pickaxe, I had to leave the target in the ground and move on.
Just really weird stuff like that. I've detected over 100 hours during the last couple of months, and have probably dug up 3,000+ targets in that time, but finding targets and digging them felt harder than ever today. Like doing hard labor at a prison camp kind of hard.