A Few Notes on the Nokta / Makro Legend
by Clive James Clynick
The first thing I noticed about the Legend was it’s processing. Like the Anfibio—this processing makes for super clean audio in iron or dense trash. With the Legend however, this processing is fast and detailed enough to mediate multiple frequencies at once. This means that both the audio and meter information is more accurate as these frequencies cross confirm. As with any multi frequenciy machine, these frequencies examine the ground in different ways—making detection very thorough and deep. The Legend’s processing does two things:
1/ I immediately noticed how well this machine “pulls” up responses in dense trash or iron. Particularly in the multi-tone modes (6 and 60) these signals are reported very cleanly.
2/ This accurate processing reports the quality of responses well. What I mean by this is that targets that are rusted, made of diverse alloys or odd shaped such as “can slaw” sound rough whereas something made of fewer metals or a round object will give a cleaner, more solid tone. This is a great operationg characeristic–especially for beginners–helping you to focus on good qualtiy signals.
Also, weak conductors such as thin foils sound weak—that is, they don’t sound more solid than they are. This is especially important when searching for small gold.
This strong multi-frequency processing also means that simple target testing is very effective. So when you want to know what size or shape a target is—or how consistent it is—tests like using varied sweep speeds and directions will give you a lot of audio and meter information. Also, where you see big meter jumps—these are highly meaningful—indicating a poor quality signal or something odd-shaped. Pinpoint mode also gives good information on whether something has the sharp, narrow tone of a non-ferrous target—or the wide, drawn-out tone of iron. This effectiveness comes from the Legend’s high “resolution”–that is—the accurate processing of the multiple frequencies gives a lot of detail on what is under the coil.
This is also a detector with a lot of fidelity. You have the option of running multi frequency—or any of the single ones to bring up specific target ranges and examine the ground from a number of standpoints. The machine can be run fast or slow with high or low Iron Bias. This adjustable iron filtering is by far the most important feature of the v. 1.09 upgrade. What this means is that in dense junk or iron you have the choice of trying to speed up and bring up the “cleanest” responses–or to slow down and use the Legend’s processing to saturate what’s under the coil more and bring up tones one what you are looking for. These types of settings examine the ground in very specific ways letting you return to heavily worked prime ground with never before tried search methods. There are some remarkable videos out of the Legend’s low bias settings “seeing through” multiple spikes to bring up a tone on silver—as if the iron was not even there.
I’ve also had to opportunity to run the Legend at a tough, high-saline ocean beach. It performed well and even had great audio in nail infested sections—giving longer tones on non-ferrous targets that were mixed in. This audio processing was so accurate that the Legend even distinguished stainless steel from iron.
The Legends clean, sharp audio and tone menu choices are a great tool to help at these tough sites.
The v. 1.09 upgrade offers new audio preference choices including VCO (Pitch Audio), and Boost.
These are some of the great performance characteristics that I’ve noticed about the Legend in my first season of hunting with it.
I highly recommend this great detector for hunters at any level of the hobby.
Good Luck Detecting,
clive