{"id":2839,"date":"2020-08-18T09:42:03","date_gmt":"2020-08-18T13:42:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.puzzlemaze.org\/df\/blog\/?p=2839"},"modified":"2020-08-18T09:50:21","modified_gmt":"2020-08-18T13:50:21","slug":"another-new-toy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.puzzlemaze.org\/df\/blog\/archives\/2839","title":{"rendered":"Another New Toy"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Well, I broke down and bought another new toy, a Nox 800.\u00a0 I always planned to stick with the E-Trac, but the exact same forum member who sold me my E-Trac used 11 years ago offered a used Nox 800 up for sale, and I could not resist.<\/p>\n

They say the Nox is better, but I certainly intend to keep the E-Trac.\u00a0 I intend to compare them side by side and make up my own mind which is better.\u00a0 Always be open minded.\u00a0 And, besides, buying it used, the financial risk is low as I can always sell it used.<\/p>\n

All I have done so far is put it together, and read the manual.\u00a0 Here are my thoughts so far re the E-Trac.<\/p>\n

Negative:\u00a0 Apparently no sizing pinpointing<\/strong> or response long<\/strong> setting.\u00a0 These settings are crucial for getting the most out of the E-Trac.\u00a0 These settings allow you to run the machine hotter than you should, and still dig mostly deep coin targets and avoid alot of noise.\u00a0 Most negative, however, is the reduced TID range<\/strong>, from 50 to 40 in the conductive zone.\u00a0 It appears this would compromise the E-Trac’s ability to distinguish clad from silver, and identify wheaties with certainty.\u00a0 This is the most crucial ability of the E-Trac, as who wants to dig clad and wheaties when looking for silver?\u00a0 It is crucial for efficiency.<\/p>\n

Positive:\u00a0 Waterproof<\/strong>.\u00a0 I can’t use my E-Trac even in the lightest drizzle, as it gets weird for some reason.\u00a0 Speed<\/strong>.\u00a0 I expect the Nox to be faster, as the processor is 15 years newer technology.\u00a0 People talk about this benefit, and I’m hoping it plays out, tho the E-Trac is damn fast.\u00a0 Also, the sweep speed is recommended at 3 seconds rather than 4 seconds.\u00a0 That is a 25% improvement.\u00a0 Maybe I can gain some efficiency there.\u00a0 Difficult ground<\/strong>.\u00a0 More options for dealing with difficult ground — manual ground balancing and more noise cancel channels.\u00a0 The ground is variable around here; perhaps this will open up some sites.\u00a0 Depth?<\/strong>\u00a0 Everyone claims it is deeper than the E-Trac; I have my doubts, but we’ll see.\u00a0 Beach.<\/strong>\u00a0 I rarely go the beach, but the E-Trac isn’t that good in wet sand, is not waterproof.\u00a0 I am not an underwater detectorist, but accidents can happen in the wet sand.<\/p>\n

Well, I guess I have to reserve judgment until I do some testing.\u00a0 The putative inability to discriminate out clad and wheaties looks like the biggest show stopper.\u00a0 As I see it now, it will be a backup machine, or a specialty machine for rainy days, the beach, real trashy old sites without tons of clad (old farmhouses where you dig everything anyway), and we’ll see if we get better performance in difficult dirt.<\/p>\n

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Well, I broke down and bought another new toy, a Nox 800.\u00a0 I always planned to stick with the E-Trac, but the exact same forum member who sold me my E-Trac used 11 years ago offered a used Nox 800 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puzzlemaze.org\/df\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2839"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puzzlemaze.org\/df\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puzzlemaze.org\/df\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puzzlemaze.org\/df\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puzzlemaze.org\/df\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2839"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.puzzlemaze.org\/df\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2846,"href":"https:\/\/www.puzzlemaze.org\/df\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2839\/revisions\/2846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puzzlemaze.org\/df\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puzzlemaze.org\/df\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puzzlemaze.org\/df\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}