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PhaseTech

Phase Technical
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Keen to hear from anyone who's used the Legend. What's your thoughts? What software are you running? What coil do you like?
Any cool finds so far?
 
Also interested to hear some local opinions too - I'm almost certainly going to get one soon but haven't seen it put through its paces properly in crazily mineralised soil online. The videos coming out of the UK etc though are really encouraging, from what it seems it's almost indistinguishable in performance to the Equinox 800 which I suppose the aim was. The US detectorists seem more interested in waving it over nail boards and test gardens than actually using it I've noticed though.
 
Nenad, so far I’m enjoying what limited time I’ve had with the Legend. I love the tones and being able to customise them to suit your preferences. It is such a jump in performance over my Simplex, especially with the more stable ID’s of those deeper targets. I’m not digging the deeper iron that the Simplex would say was a high conductor. The “Ferro-check” feature seems to be very reliable with my version 1.07.
Been mainly using the 6” coil which goes surprisingly deep on coins and other solid targets and separates and pinpoints like a dream.
I haven’t been on the beach or mineralised gold bearing ground yet, so can’t wait to see it’s performance in those two modes.
So far not disappointed at all....Legend 👍
Some pics to come.....
 
So the Legend has a new software version that is currently being tested.

Here's a good video that demonstrates a few of the new features:
1. Adjustable audio Gain (controls how much volume modulation you get between shallow and deep targets)
2. Audio Mute
3. Simultaneous Audio - allows you to get audio out of the headphones and speaker at the same time

 
Looked around and could not find a list so I made one to share.

Nokta Makro Legend Australian coin VDIs

Decimal
1c = 42-44
2c = 46-47
5c = 17-19
10c =23-24
20c = 33-34
50c = 35-36
$1 = 42-43
$2 = 41-42

Pre- Decimal
1/2p = 42-43 old = 29-31
1p = 45-46 old = 41-43
3p = 33-34 pre 1946 = 43-44
6p = 39-40 pre 1946 = 46-47
Shilling = 43-44 pre 1946 = 49-50
Florin = 47-48 pre 1946 = 53-54
Crown = 58-59
One Sovereign = 37-38

Might be off a tad. Hope it helps. Sorry I do not have a half sov,

Running v1.08

Mod edit:
Have started a Legend VDI thread here
https://www.prospectingaustralia.com/threads/nokta-makro-legend-australian-vdis.39775/
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Got my Legend delivered from Nenad today, came with 1.09 on it already, cheers! Managed a cheeky hour with it today and am extremely impressed. I took it to the worst site I have, mineralised soil with burn piles all over it, where I've dug every solid target the E-TRAC has managed to show me over the last 6 months. Never had a chance to get my old Equinox 600 over the area so I've been busting to get a fast machine onto it. Put the 6" coil on, went into Field 2, but bumped the recovery to 8 and just ground discrimination.

Anyway, I had a blast. Second target I dug was a 1903 sixpence which should have been easy for any detector really, and ended up with 5 coins in total in an area from an area that's yielded 2 for me in the last 6 months. And three of those were from the one corner that I had given a light Equinoxing a long time ago.

I'll form a better post over the next few days when I've had more of a play. Initial thoughts is that it's far superior to my old 600 in performance in my use case. Only whine so far is that the minimum speaker volume setting is way louder than I like to detect at, I guess I can maybe drop the tone volumes individually to get a quieter hunt but it's a fudge and the pinpoint will still be very loud.
 
Anyway here's the finds from that initial hunt less the big iron, dug anything above about 15 that the ferro-check didn't peg as fully ferrous but started to cherry pick after about half an hour of digging valid targets flat out. The only one out of the 'good' pile that was difficult was the 1889 half penny with clipped edges, it had numbers going all over the place between something like 20 to 45 but likely being masked by iron hard as well. First stirrup I've seen in my travels too...
Screenshot 2022-07-15 212242.jpgScreenshot 2022-07-15 212210.jpgScreenshot 2022-07-15 212145.jpg
 
Had a bit longer to play with the Legend now and pretty much loving it. I've been trying to articulate my thoughts as to why you would pick a Legend over an Equinox 800, which is I suppose the only real question anyone has about the machine. I mean price-wise it's a win (let's not consider price in this), and raw performance seems to be basically equal and pushing the physical limits of VLF, so what sets it apart? I think for me it's the Ferro-check feature. When I had my Equinox 600, I knew that for most of my heavily detected sites I was limited by recovery speed, and I was starting to dig a lot of nails and iron which lead me to pick up the E-TRAC. I was done with digging nails for a while, and wanted something that could give me some better discrimination than just a single number. Knew the recovery speed I was trading for was glacial compared to the Equinox but still, just having a different detector swinging over old ground usually gets results. Dug very few 'bad' targets with the E-TRAC overall I suppose, the target information was really good and had no need to notch out anything other than the first few FE lines (I wonder how much of the above pictured targets I would have snagged with the detector running wide open?). There's a lot of information in the E-TRAC tones too over the Equinox I reckon. In my soils though, I couldn't run it over about 1/3rd power most of the time, and often saw the Auto sensitivity hanging out around 3-5/30. It's just not a contender in the really mineralised environments versus the more modern detectors, the Legend is an absolute laser compared to it, and I reckon the Equinox 800 would be too.

In the 5/30 E-TRAC soils, the Legend will sit on 20-23 sensitivity fairly happily, maybe a little mild chatter to it in some spots. I reckon if I set the Equinox 600 to the same the chatter would be more obnoxious, mostly due to not being able to drop the volume on that first/second tone break. Anyway, that's what I felt was missing from the Equinox, additional target information. No doubt Minelab can chuck that in, but I guess they want you to buy a CTX 4040 when they come out... If the Equinox had something like Ferro-check or the Fe:Co target ID then I probably would have picked up the 800 and resolved my recovery issue instead of the E-TRAC. It's nice with the Legend when you have something like three almost identical sounding targets in a swing that throw up a 30-ish ID in a pile of nails, and only one of them pegs the Ferro-check to the good side, gives you a good feeling that you're working with some useful information to prioritise your digging. And I think the tones of the Legend give you a bit more info than the Equinox, but I can't quantify that. Of course it's not perfect by a long shot, had some iffy Ferro-checks that have resulted in big iron, and conversely some good copper targets. I think in closing you can utilise it to make a detecting session fun, where working with less info with the Equinox it could turn into a slog.


Other early impressions - like the vibrate feature, still wish the global volume went lower, need to order a spare arm cuff as I reckon I'll bust it at some stage (it's better than the Nox's but I went through like 3 of those), and there's a slight creak as I swing sometimes that I haven't tracked down yet but I imagine should be an easy fix, still feels more solid than the Equinox though. Spent more time over ground I did with the Equinox today, some pretty obvious targets jumped out of the ground but quite at the comical rate they did vs the E-TRAC...
 
Fantastic feedback, thanks for taking the time to write all that!
I recently did a beach hunt with 1.09. Targets were pretty few and far between. Being the middle of winter the shallow soft sand drops have either been detected already or are too deep, and it was a crappy low tide so couldn't get in any of the good gutters. Still, the detector ran super silent. My friends daughter was scooting around with a Go Find and I was getting horrible cross talk between the two. I pointed the Legend towards the GoFind, did an Auto Noise Cancel, and problem solved - we could now get within a few metres without any interference.

Most of the targets were in an older layer of sand. Black and smelly.

Mineralised sand.jpg
On the beach I just use the Ground disc level, and on factory settings, any iron above the disc level just gives a soft low tone grunt, which is perfect. As targets were scattered, I spent the time on each response to determine what the detector was trying to tell me. On a few deep signals I was getting the scratchy audio with intermittent high tones, and when digging a little closer, the target was now blanking more than sounding positive. This is pretty positive beer bottle cap signal in my books, but I dug them anyway, and yep they were all beer bottle caps. On the shallower ones, the Ferrocheck was bouncing all over the place, so that can be another way to help ID them.

Not much to brag about finds wise, but I did find an old Sixpence, and a toy police car from about 14" that sounded like a shallow 50c coin!!

Police Car.jpg Sixpence.jpg
 

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