Minelab Excalibur II vs Equinox 900: Diving Machine or All-Rounder?

It means every decision is made by ear. On the Equinox you hear a signal, look down, read a number in the 0 to 99 non-ferrous range, and decide. On the Excalibur you hear a signal and decide from tone and response alone. In salt water, where most of what you dig is a ring, a coin or a lump of lead, experienced hunters manage this perfectly well and some argue it is faster than looking at a screen.

The cost lands on beginners. A number gives you something to write down, dig, and check against what came out of the hole, and doing that a few hundred times is how people build a working sense of their own ground. Without it you are learning from tone alone, which is slower and more frustrating. Be honest about which of those two positions you are in before spending. The target ID chart explains the scale the Excalibur does not give you, and how to read a signal covers the audio skills it demands instead.

Same maker, two very different generations of design, and the older machine is the more expensive one.

Nine rows. The Equinox takes most of them on paper, and the Excalibur takes the one that keeps it in production.

You dive, or you hunt heavy surf, and you are already an experienced detectorist. BBS spanning 1.5 to 25.5 kHz is built for the specific problem of conductive salt water, and the receive coil boost is aimed at pulling weak deep signals out of exactly that environment. The hi-vis body, the skid plate and the optional side-mount shaft are all diving and surf features rather than land features, and they tell you plainly who this machine was designed for.

Choose it too if you want a machine with almost nothing to go wrong. No screen, no menu, no firmware, a sealed body and a rechargeable pack rated to 12 hours is a genuinely different reliability proposition in salt. The Excalibur II review covers it alone, and its settings and depth chart is where the operating detail sits.

You do anything other than dive. It is submersible to 16 feet, so it covers wading and shallow water hunting completely, and it does parks, fields, mineralised dirt and gold on the same afternoon. It costs less than the Excalibur, weighs 2.8 pounds against a heavier purpose-built water body, and ships with two coils.

Choose it too if you are still learning. The 119 target IDs and the four modes are a teaching system as much as a feature list, and the Beach mode plus Multi-IQ handles wet salt sand without the analog learning curve. Equinox 900 settings by site type covers the beach setup, and detecting in salt water covers what salt does to any machine, including rinsing the thing afterwards, which people forget until a shaft seizes.

A scoop, and not a cheap one. Wet sand is heavy and a poor scoop turns every target into a fight. CKG 304 Stainless Sand Scoop at $89.99 is the sensible starting point and CKG Titanium Sand Scoop is the lifetime version for people who are on the sand weekly. A long handle matters more than most people expect, because bending into surf is what ends sessions.

Then a mesh pouch that drains, such as Mesh Bottom Beach Finds Pouch with pinpointer holster, and headphones that survive water. Wireless does not work under water at all, which catches people out: Minelab Equinox Waterproof Headphones is the wired submersible option for the Equinox. The beach guide covers tides, cuts and where targets concentrate, which is worth more than any of this hardware.