Analog Discrimination Vs Digital

Here I go again walking the tightrope between 'analog shill' and 'digital detector' hater, actually neither are true. But these are two terms that have been thrown my way, it doesn't bother me, the human condition is disturbed and inherently bitter from the inside out. I never thought 'detectors wars' was a thing until I started making videos and writing about the machines that I use. I understand that marketing is programming people into believing the bullshit but I had no clue just how strong that programming was. 

People can believe in whatever they want, I'm fine with that as long as you don't impose and force your beliefs on to others. Am I Forcing My Views On Others? Nope, it's your choice if you want to watch and read what I put out, I'm not forcing you into anything, I'm starting to repeat myself here and it's getting boring. This blog is going to be about discrimination between analog and digital machines. This subject can be rather controversial depending which way you look at it and I'm sure there's many self-proclaimed experts that think they know the definitive answer. My opinions are based on actually using both digital and analog machines, my view isn't from watching YouTube videos, reading forums and attending club digs and rallies whilst trying to flog mugs with my face on.

I've explained how I feel about test/demo videos, I do them to both learn and understand the potential performance, nothing more and nothing less. Because all my machines are audio based, above ground testing helps me to learn the language of the detectors I'm using. This gives me more reliable reference points when I'm actually out hunting. This has been demonstrated in my river foreshore videos time and time again, I take what I learn in my demo videos and put it in to practice on the river. If I don't do this then the whole process is a waste of time. The "ONLY" place you truly learn about a machines performance is when you're out metal detecting. If people are pushing their views off the back of air tests, raised nail tests and depth test in their benign test garden, the views they express find themselves in the trashcan of my mind instantly. 

Tesoro Lobo Supertraq

Because I hunt on the river nearly everyday, hunting in heavy iron is something that I have a lot of experience in, so I'm not talking about hypothetical scenarios here. All my views are coming from putting the hours in, I've used the Nokta Legend and the Equinox 800 on the foreshore, I've also used my Golden Mask and Tesoro machines loads as well. This has given me a very clear perspective in regards to the discrimination abilities between both analog and digital and I have to say there's absolutely no contest between the two platforms. All of my analog machines outperform both the Equinox 800 and Legend on an iron rich environment like the river. There is literally no comparison, I'll repeat, this conclusion has come from putting the time in with all my machines on a really hard terrain that I hunt nearly every day. 

One Example Of The Iron Content On The River

The one point that has to be focused on here is the level of discrimination needed to make a machine run stable in such an iron infested environment. When running both my Golden Mask and Tesoro detectors I can keep my discrimination very close to the bare minimum and nearly all sized iron is phased out. The only iron that will break through is the big lumpy stuff and the large flat slabs, nearly all detectors are fooled on these. But it's very obvious when you're hitting on it because you can raise the coil far off the ground and it's still a banging response. Secondly when you're swinging, if you draw the coil backwards slowly, the audio will start to indicate iron because it starts to break up on the outer edge of the target. 

What Are the Advantages Of Being Able To Run Your Disc So Low? it gives the machine a higher chance at seeing non-ferrous close to iron. The higher you run it the more you're going to subtract from the detectors ability to unmask. For me to be able to run my Equinox 800 as quiet as my analog machines, I need to have the iron bias set to it's maximum, or one below. Even at this setting the machine will false on iron, the Legend is better, I can run the iron filter at 2 or 3 but I still get falsing. Out in the fields depending on the environment you can obviously run both the Equinox 800 and Legend with lower disc and there's various little techniques that can be used to help identify iron on this type of terrain.

BUT on the river you have to throw the rule book out the window, you literally have iron on top of iron and non-ferrous on top of non-ferrous, it's all a series of extremes. There is no "text book" good signal in the same way there's no "text book" bad signal. You can't afford to be running any machine that's falsing like crazy because you're going to be wasting your time. You have to throw all preconceived ideas about signal/target response out the window. That's why, in one of my videos, I explain about understanding the audio of a masked target, this is a scenario you're going to come across often and if you don't know what to listen for you're going to be leaving good targets in the ground. Below is a video explaining the above point.

On the river, due to the sheer amount of signals in close proximity to each other and the overall "noise" of the environment, you don't want to be using fancy tone options. I've experimented with this on both the Legend and Equinox, tones on the river are a gimmick and add no advantage at all. You have to keep it as simple as possible. This is where the Tesoro machines excel, you're running them in silent search so you're only going to get a response when you swing over a non-ferrous target. Due to the effectiveness of the disc settings, you're going to get the odd clipping and stuttering. The communication from machine to user is very stripped down and direct, there's very little guessing.

Even if I run both my digital units in two tone, they just don't run as efficiently as my analog machines and despite what the experts say. You don't get a detailed nuanced audio on the digital detectors "That I've Used" in the same way you do with both my Golden Mask and Tesoro machines. It's in these hunting environments where you realise that all the 'amazing features' on both the Equinox and Legend do nothing to improve performance. Now don't get me wrong here, I've praised both these machines very highly on the river but that was before I used my analog detectors. After doing this my view of overall performance expanded because I'd used more detectors on the same hunting environment. It was from this point that strengths and weaknesses of each machine became apparent. 

To sum things up, as advanced as the new wave of detectors might seem, I feel that their discrimination is a weak point. I understand that they have greater depth than a number of the Tesoro machines I'm using but I don't need depth on the river. I need good reliable discrimination which is exactly what I'm getting, it's all about using the right tool for the job, it's all very well having a "Swiss army knife" style machine but I'd much rather use individual detectors that excel in one specific area than use a set of machines that are average across the board. Due to the acute disc settings that good analog machines have it's a no brainer that they're my primary option when hunting in the kind of heavy iron environments that I come across on the river.